Activists Target Wells Fargo for Dropping its Climate Commitments

Outside the opulent, 73-story Hudson Yards tower in Midtown Manhattan, a group of climate activists gathered at the building’s northwest entrance at 33rd Street and 10th Avenue.

Inside the skyscraper, Wells Fargo, the activists’ target, occupied nine separate floors. As Reb Spring, the spokesperson for Debt for Climate, unfurled a banner that read “End Financial Colonialism,” the activists began voicing their demands.

Wells Fargo became the first major financial corporation to abandon key climate commitments after President Donald Trump’s inauguration. The July 23 protest in the heart of Midtown launched a major civil disobedience campaign against the bank, one of the world’s top financiers of fossil fuels. It reflects a broader turn toward disruptive tactics that, according to a recent study by environmental psychologist Jarren Nylund, can both raise climate concern and risk public backlash.

Gathering around the large banner the climate activists chanted, gave speeches and urged nine-to-fivers entering the building to quit their jobs and join the movement, as they picketed outside the tower for about an hour. The coalition, led by Planet Over Profit, included activists from Debt for Climate and Stop The Money Pipeline. 

Through this campaign the group is pressuring Wells Fargo to reinstate its climate commitments, stop “union busting” and abandon its investments in companies that the activists see as killing people and the planet. The coalition is also strongly opposed to the bank’s decision to drop DEI goals and its support for efforts to privatize the United States Postal Service. 

The two major climate commitments the bank dropped in February were its goal to achieve net-zero financed emissions by 2050 and its participation in the Net Zero Banking Alliance. 

In a statement explaining its decision to walk back climate commitments, Wells Fargo cited a lack of progress on key external factors. “When we set our financed emissions goal and targets, we said that achieving them was dependent on many factors outside our control,” the bank said, pointing to public policy, consumer behavior and technological developments. “Many of the conditions necessary to facilitate our clients’ transitions have not occurred.”

With those targets abandoned, activists expect the bank’s fossil fuel investments to grow. Since 2021, Wells Fargo has invested $143 billion in fossil fuels, according to Banking on Climate Chaos, an annual report on fossil fuel financing produced by a coalition of nonprofits, including the Rainforest Action Network, BankTrack and the Sierra Club.

Wells Fargo did not respond to requests for comment about the protest or the estimate of its fossil fuel investments in the report.

“Wells Fargo must stop capitulating to the current administration,” said Liv Senghor, an organizer with Planet Over Profit. “As dozens of teenagers die in climate-driven floods in Texas and thousands die in heat waves around the world, it’s unconscionable that a bank like Wells Fargo would just completely walk away from its climate goals.”

The action in Hudson Yards was paired with a sister action outside 333 Market Street in San Francisco, the bank’s corporate headquarters. One hundred fifty protestors gathered at the front doors to demonstrate that the campaign was national in scope. 

The Climate Activist Dilemma 

The demonstrations outside of Wells Fargo offices are part of a growing trend of direct action climate protests, according to Nylund, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Queensland.

Inspired by the public backlash climate activists faced following “soupgate”—the viral moment when Just Stop Oil activists threw tomato soup over Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers”—Nylund’s recent study, published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, examines public perception of extreme protests. 

Nylund and his co-researchers used controlled surveys, asking study participants from the University of Queensland to assess how moderate or extreme climate protests influenced their perceptions of morality, support for the movement and emotional connection. In the study extreme protests were defined as actions that caused massive disruption for over an hour. 

“Our research found that extreme climate protests can have both positive and negative effects on the public,” said Nylund. People view activists using extreme tactics as less moral and feel less connected—lowering support for those groups—but these actions also grab attention and can boost climate concern and intentions to act, according to Nylund. 

This creates a “climate activist dilemma”: Extreme protests raise awareness and spur people to act, but they risk alienating the public from the activist group behind them.

Organizations like Planet Over Profit often face public backlash, but they don’t see actions Nylund describes as extreme, like blocking access to corporate headquarters, as a hindrance to building a grassroots movement. 

“If people saw that extreme protests are a product of all other methods failing, they might view them as more moral or justified,” said Eren Ileri, an organizer with Planet Over Profit. “These actions don’t happen in a bubble—they come as the next step in a long escalation arc.”

That’s how he saw the Wells Fargo action. While activists resorted to disruptive tactics—seven demonstrators in San Francisco were arrested after blocking entrances to Well Fargo’s headquarters—they saw them as the logical escalation of failed letter-writing campaigns and calls for meetings. 

According to Ileri, this process of escalation is rarely captured in media coverage, meaning public perception may often be shaped by headlines rather than activists’ intentions.

To address this, many nonviolent direct action (NVDA) groups say they try to take steps to reduce the perception of immorality and prevent alienation by partnering with groups viewed as more morally grounded, hosting community events, framing their actions in ethical terms and educating the public on their theory of change.

“The climate activists dilemma poses a strategic challenge for organizers, especially in campaigns like the Wells Fargo protests that are deliberately provocative,” Nylund said. “I think these protests raise legitimate and urgent concerns about corporate accountability even if some find the tactics confrontational.”

What matters, according to Ileri, is that extreme actions disrupt harmful business-as-usual practices while maintaining—or potentially increasing—public support for broader climate action, despite the risk of some alienation for NVDA groups.

“We’ll Be Back”

Many of the protesters on July 23 had previously opposed Wells Fargo’s role in fossil fuel financing. In San Francisco, members of the Standing Rock Sioux and Cheyenne River Sioux tribes joined the action, continuing years of resistance against the bank’s financing of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL).

“DAPL was built through Lakota unceded treaty territory, without proper consent,” said Trent Ouellette of Waste Wakpa Grassroots. “That land holds our history, our spirit and our ancestors. Building over it is a deep sign of disrespect. We should be protecting the Earth—not pushing more oil through it. We owe that to our people and future generations. DAPL needs to be shut down—for our land, our water and our future.”

Spring has also been protesting Wells Fargo since 2021, when she joined resistance camps in northern Minnesota to stop the expansion of the Line 3 pipeline. Now, she and others are confronting the bank for its support of another megaproject: the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), recently completed in West Virginia and Virginia.

The MVP was delayed nearly a decade, thanks in part to grassroots resistance that included a 932-day aerial blockade, with activists occupying treetops marked for clearing.

This summer’s protests build on that legacy, according to the activists. Following in the footsteps of Indigenous water protectors and frontline communities, the coalition is escalating its tactics—once again targeting the financial institutions enabling extraction and fossil fuel development.

In San Francisco, protesters painted a street mural featuring tanks, rivers and the phrase “Wells Fargo is complicit in genocide.” Organizers linked the bank’s fossil fuel funding to its investments in weapons manufacturers tied to Israel’s occupation of, and the devastation in, Gaza. 

“While Wells Fargo funds the construction of the DAPL, it also funds the total destruction of Gaza by investing billions into arms manufacturers” like Israel-based Elbit Systems and U.S.-based Raytheon Technologies, said Jackie Rafeedie, an organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement, who also participated in the San Francisco action. 

Seven protesters were arrested after blocking all entrances to the building. Some used a sleeping dragon tripod—a tactic where activists lock their arms together inside a PVC pipe to prolong disruption and ensure their demands are heard.

In New York, following their sidewalk picketing, protesters marched into 30 Hudson Yards. “Welcome to corporate America,” one activist said.

After weaving through the marble halls of the building’s ground floor mall, they reached Wells Fargo’s lobby entrance—only to be shoved back by private security. Though barred from entering, they continued chanting and calling for divestment just outside the glass doors.

As they exited the mall, Senghor turned and said, “Take a look at these faces. We’ll be back.”

And they have already promised to return. On Aug. 15, coordinated protests are planned across nine states, with activists promising continued disruption of Wells Fargo’s role in funding climate breakdown, Indigenous displacement, and violence abroad.