Wall Street's Oil Stain

Banks and investment firms have made a host of "net-zero" pledges in recent years. But their heavy dependence on revenue from fossil fuel projects shows how hard it will be to keep those promises.

-  Jeffrey Rothfeder and Christopher Maag

THE PROTESTS STARTED in the chill of winter and got bigger as the weather got warmer. At one gathering place outside rural Clearbrook, Minn., the demonstrators often outnumbered the town's 500 or so residents, as activists, farmers, and citizens of nearby Native American reservations turned out to resist a catastrophe in the making.

The protesters were there to stop the building of Enbridge Energy Line 3, a 1,000-mile-plus oil pipeline that would connect the Alberta tar sands in Canada to refineries in the U.S. Its foes believed the pipeline, if breached, could foul rivers and aquifers that they counted on for their livelihoods; more broadly, the flow of hydrocarbons it enabled would aggravate the global climate crisis.

The protests were mostly peaceful, but as the crowds grew, authorities made it clear that the law was on the pipeline's side. On one tense day in June 2021, a Customs and Border Protection helicopter suddenly swooped in low, at about 20 feet above the crowd. The pilot positioned the aircraft to hover directly over a gravel road, and its tail rotor whipped up a tornado of dust and rocks, blasting dozens of protesters. Police later swept in and made more than 100 arrests.

The show of force didn't stop the protests but the protests didn't stop the pipeline. Line 3 opened in October 2021, and since then it has pumped 760,000 barrels a day of heavy crude oil into the United States. Over the next 30 years, oil transported via Line 3 is projected to result in 5.8 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere, equal to the emissions of 50 coal-burning power plants. That figure doesn't account for the incalculable impact of the destruction of 2 million acres of carbon-absorbing forest in Albertadenuded to access the oil in the ground-or the energy-intensive process of extracting oil from tar sands.