Urge President Biden: Replace Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell

President Biden,

The Federal Reserve has a critical role to play in protecting the financial system, the economy, and the public from financial risks, including those from climate change. We urgently need strong financial regulatory responses to the climate crisis, and current chair Jerome Powell has demonstrated that he will not take the necessary action to protect the American people and the U.S. economy.

You must nominate a Fed Chair who will use the full range of the Fed’s authorities quickly and forcefully to respond to current climate impacts and mitigate future harms, especially those that disproportionately affect BIPOC and low-income communities.

The window for preventing extraordinarily catastrophic climate outcomes closes this decade. Under Chair Powell, the Federal Reserve and the financial system are pushing in the wrong direction, actively fueling the climate crisis rather than helping with solutions. To protect our economic health and meet your climate goals, you need financial regulators who will ensure that finance does not stand in the way of meeting science-based climate targets, and who will assist a rapid, orderly phaseout of fossil fuel finance.

You cannot achieve your climate agenda and protect Americans from consequences of climate change—current and future—without strong climate leadership at the Federal Reserve. We urge you to nominate a chair who takes the Federal Reserve’s climate obligations seriously and will act with the urgency and at the scale the climate crisis requires.