Environmental activists have chained themselves to the front doors of an investment bank that’s financing the construction of a hotly contested oil pipeline in North Dakota.
The demonstrators tethered themselves to the TD Bank in Center City Philadelphia Monday morning in hopes of forcing the bank to immediately divest from and disassociate itself from the hotly contested oil line.
Several environmental activists tweeted photos of the Philadelphia group’s demonstration — actor Mark Ruffalo, for example, told his Twitter followers that “women shut down” bank in “solidarity” with one of the American Indian groups protesting the pipeline.
Women shut down @TDBank_US in Philadelphia, PA in solidarity with #StandingRock, demanding they #DivestFromDAPL #NoDAPL #bankexit
— Mark Ruffalo (@MarkRuffalo) November 21, 2016
Opponents of the so-called DAPL have worked night and day to stymie the pipeline’s construction and claim the line would harm an American Indian tribe’s only source of drinking water and potentially desecrate the tribe’s sacred sites.
Two separate federal courts reviewed the tribe’s concerns, and both determined the pipeline could move forward.
Many of the same environmentalist groups that opposed the Keystone XL pipeline have joined the fight against the DAPL, which would bring 470,000 barrels of Bakken crude oil per day from western North Dakota to southern Illinois.
Activists have made targeting the DAPL’s financial tools a major component of their mission to stymie the pipeline.
Banks such as Citi Group, Wells Fargo, and TD Bank of Canada, among others, are being pressured by anti-fracking activists and members of the Standing Rock Sioux to halt any and all monetary backing of the company responsible for constructing the DAPL.
A letter from BankTrack signed by environmental groups such as the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, and Greenpeace, was sent to the banks to browbeat them into stopping the money pipeline to Energy Transfer Partners, the company behind the multi-state project.
President Barack Obama temporarily halted the project earlier in November, and the Army Corps of Engineers is determining whether there are any conceivable ways to reroute the Dakota oil pipeline.
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