Don Cheadle, Patton Oswalt and 50+ stars marched on Wall Street without leaving home

On February 6, 2024, a protest march stepped off down Wall Street that no police permit could stop and no plane had to fly anyone to. Anyone could join with a selfie: AI placed them in a crowd of marchers, and they posted the picture. A coalition of 55 organizations and more than 50 celebrities and influencers marched first, to get Big Oil out of America’s retirement accounts.¹

The Virtual March to Retire Big Oil was a project of the Crane Institute of Sustainability, with Sphere’s founder Alex Wright-Gladstein leading the organizing.² The idea, as Good Good Good reported on launch day, came from us: “The digital protest idea was developed by creative agency Buena, with an intention of making change without making pollution.”¹ We built the app, the brand and the march kit everyone shared.

Your 401(k) is quietly bankrolling Big Oil

Most Americans who save for retirement have no say in where the money goes. The default funds in a 401(k) hold oil, gas and coal companies, and almost no plan offers a way out. As You Sow estimates that 19% of the market value of US fossil fuel companies comes from 401(k)s and IRAs.² Social(k) found that 97% of people in employer plans can’t pick an ESG fund at all.²

That makes retirement money one of the biggest climate levers most people never touch. The people who decide what funds a plan offers are a small crowd: financial advisors, consulting firms and the lawyers who write the rules. The march was aimed straight at them.

A march with no permit, no travel and no limit

A real march on Wall Street means permits, buses, flights and a crowd that only shows up if it can afford to. We wanted a march anyone could join from a kitchen table, in any country, in a wheelchair or on a lunch break.

So we built one. Sign up, upload a selfie, and the app generated a photo of you on Wall Street among thousands of marchers, carrying a sign. Donors could unlock premium images, including the chance to march beside a celebrity. Every picture was stamped in the corner with the same line, so no one could mistake it for news: “This photo is fake, but the crisis is real.”²

This photo is fake, but the crisis is real.

“As a climate march, it’s especially nice to avoid flights or gas to rally people together,” Doug added.¹

Hollywood, Wall Street critics and climate voices fall in line

The marchers at the front of the line came from film, comedy, art, politics and the climate movement. Good Good Good named Susan Sarandon, Don Cheadle, Patton Oswalt, Adam McKay, Shepard Fairey, Elaine Hendrix, Andy Richter, Michael Ian Black, Joanne Carducci and Bill McKibben among them.¹ Former New York City mayor Bill de Blasio marched too.²

Adam McKay was the first to back the march, and he brought more than 20 Hollywood actors with him. They didn’t just lend their faces. They lent their words.

Patton Oswalt put it in plainer terms: “You busted your ass your whole life and some billionaire wants you to erase those savings to move their earnings a few more ticks into the black, all the while ignoring the oncoming climate crisis? Time to stand together, folks!”¹

Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org and Third Act, made the money case: “Fossil fuels have dramatically underperformed other asset classes for the past decade, and for an obvious reason: a new industry, renewable energy, has arisen that delivers the same product, just more cheaply and cleanly.”¹

Ten days, 25 million impressions

The march ran online from February 6 to 12.² It launched the same morning on Product Hunt, and partners posted from one shared kit of images and copy, so the march looked the same wherever it appeared.

Good Good Good covered it on launch day and sent it to its newsletter readers the next morning. 401(k) Specialist, the trade magazine read by the advisors the march was aimed at, wrote it up on February 9.² Fast Company followed, and Bill McKibben and Sphere argued the case in an op-ed for the San Francisco Chronicle.

“Yesterday morning, no one knew what Big Oil was doing to our 401(k)s and today a lot more people are telling Wall Street they hate it,” Doug wrote the day after launch.

On February 16, Sphere wrote to every marcher: 25 million impressions, with 27 celebrities and 32 nonprofits posting their march photos along the way.

What the march built

The march didn’t end on February 12. Everyone who marched had signed up first, so the people who joined could stay in the movement. They moved on to a weekly newsletter about climate-safe retirement investing.

It also built a bench. A year later, many of the same voices came back for Retire Big Oil, the campaign we made with Stand.earth asking the SAG-AFTRA pension plan to divest from fossil fuels. That campaign grew to more than 500 actors. It started here, with a crowd that never stood on Wall Street and still got its message there.