Every gallon. Every kilowatt-hour. Every dollar to a bank that finances the wells.
Climate is not a future problem. It is already on the receipt. The money trail from your pocket to the well does not take a complicated investigation. It takes a credit card statement, a utility bill, and a savings account. Every transaction is already a vote being cast for or against the system warming the planet. You have not been asked to choose. The choice is being made for you.
Total fossil fuel financing by the world’s 60 largest banks between 2016 and 2024 — the years after every major economy signed an agreement to phase the industry down.
The deposits funding those loans came from chequing accounts, savings accounts, mortgages, and retirement contributions. Most depositors did not know. None were asked.
Scope 3 emissions — the carbon embedded in a company’s supply chain — account for roughly three-quarters of the total footprint of an average product. Companies report them. Buyers cannot read them.
The disclosures exist. They are written for regulators and rating agencies, in formats designed to be skimmed by analysts at quarterly meetings. They are not designed to be a tool for the person paying the bill.
Annual global cost of weather and climate disasters as of 2024, on a curve that has tripled in two decades. The cost is paid through insurance premiums, taxes, rebuilding, and lost work.
The polluter does not pay. The buyer does. Twice. Once at the pump, once at the premium.
A free app on every phone, capable of writing climate terms into every transaction it can read, qualifying suppliers that meet them, and disqualifying the ones that do not. The same disclosures companies already file, processed against a standard buyers actually wrote. Aggregated across millions of buyers. Auditable. Enforceable.
Politics did not fix it. Buyers can.