The Society of Fearless Grandmothers-Santa Barbara will join youth of the Sunrise Movement for a Global Day of Action, 1 p.m. Friday, May 7. The event will open with a rally at the Santa Barbara Courthouse, followed by a march to downtown banks.

In Santa Barbara, the protest will begin with a rally at the County Courthouse, followed by a march to downtown banks that provide major funding for fossil fuel projects. The banks include Chase Bank, Wells Fargo, Union Bank, and Bank of America.

The Sunrise Movement will deliver letters to bank managers demanding an end to funding for the Line 3 project. Other groups involved in the event are 350-Santa Barbara and Women’s March-Santa Barbara.

A Global Day of Action is organized by Stop the Money Pipeline. Protests will be held at the branches, offices and headquarters of the banks funding the Enbridge Line 3 project.

Line 3 is being built to carry climate wrecking tar sands through Indigenous territory without consent. The Red Lake Nation, White Earth Nation, and the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe are all suing to stop the pipeline.

Prominent native activists have described the pipeline as “cultural genocide” and Indigenous activists in northern Minnesota are leading the direct actions on the ground.

If built, Line 3 would release as much greenhouse gas into the atmosphere as 50 new coal-fired power plants, or as much greenhouse gas as the entire rest of the state of Minnesota, activists report.

“The fight to stop this pipeline is the fight to save our planet,” they said.

To keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, humans must not exceed the carbon budget established by the 2016 Paris Agreement. The amount of fossil fuels held in existing reserves is more than enough to exceed that carbon budget.

Regardless of this reality, the world’s largest banks, led by JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Union Bank, Bank of America, and CitiBank, have poured trillions of dollars into new fossil fuel projects in the past four years.

Without funding from these banks, fossil fuel companies could not expand operations for infrastructure such as pipelines, tar sands development and fracking, all of which have disastrous consequences for the planet.