‘Go after the money’: Goldman environmental prize winner honoured for urging banks to divest from coal

Goldman Environmental Prize winner Julien Vincent pressures financial institutions and their shareholders and customers to get out of fossil fuels. Photograph: Goldman Environmental Prize

The laptop was second-hand, but Julien Vincent had a spare room and a very, very big idea: could he start a movement to convince Australia’s biggest financial institutions to stop investing the billions of dollars that sustained the fossil fuel industry?

“There wasn’t much to lose really,” says Vincent. “But yes, I was nervous early on because of the significance of the people we were taking on. The banks and the fossil fuel industry … they’ll be as cold and ruthless as they can be.”