This afternoon, Extinction Rebellion activists protested against ING's sponsorship of the Amsterdam Pride. They hung several banners on bridges across Amsterdam's canals, right when ING's promotional boat sailed by, with slogans such as: Paying for Pride, Polluting the Planet and: WTF is ING doing here?

As a member of the Pride Business Club, ING sails with the Canal Parade every year. According to protesters, ING is thereby trying to polish its image while it has the most polluting financing policy of any bank in the Netherlands. The bank currently has almost USD 30 billion in outstanding loans for coal, oil and gas companies. It also has huge direct financial interests in companies that are still starting new fossil projects.

“ING’s participation is a stain on an event that should be a celebration,” said Goofy (she/they), spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion. "As a contributor to the climate crisis, ING is partly responsible for the hardship affecting LGBTQI+ people worldwide. After all, queer people are persecuted, oppressed or even murdered in many countries, so where climate disasters occur, they are more at risk than others. They often cannot count on emergency relief or shelter. We demand that ING stop supporting dirty companies, halve its emissions by 2030, and respect human rights."

According to Greenpeace International, the queer movement and the climate movement are strongly interconnected, with climate change having a disproportionate impact on marginalised groups, including the LGBTQI+ community, exacerbating the pre-existing inequalities found in society, such as housing and medical care.

Extinction Rebellion emphatically supports the goals and meaning of Pride: celebrating queer rights, the right to be who you are. However, the activists do demand that Pride’s organisation becomes more critical of their sponsors' policies or revenue models. Besides ING, Pride sponsors include Booking.com and KLM, also guilty of fuelling the climate crisis. They make profits at the expense of our planet and try to launder that by sponsoring Pride.

This action by Extinction Rebellion is supported by BankTrack (the international tracking, campaigning and civil society support organisation targeting private sector commercial banks and the activities they finance) and Milieudefensie Amsterdam. The partners see this as a warm-up for 2026, when World Pride will take place in Amsterdam.