Climate Protesters Get in Fed’s Face as Policy Clash Grows Louder

A video of security officers wrestling a protester to the floor in the lobby of the Jackson Lake Lodge in Wyoming, outside the Federal Reserve’s most closely watched annual conference, clocked more than a million views.

A protest that disrupted a speech by Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, at the Economic Club of New York this fall generated extensive coverage. And when the activists showed up again at Mr. Powell’s speech at the International Monetary Fund in early November, they seemed to get under his skin: The central bank’s usually staid leader was caught on a hot mic using a profanity as he told someone to close the door.

All three upheavals were caused by the same group, Climate Defiance, which a now-30-year-old activist named Michael Greenberg founded in the spring. Mr. Greenberg had long worked in traditional climate advocacy, but he decided that something louder was needed to spur change at institutions like the Fed.

“I realized there was a big need for disruptive direct action,” he explained in an interview. “It just gets so, so, so, so, so much more attention.”

The small but noisy band of protesters dogging the Fed chair is also spotlighting a problem that the central bank has long grappled with: precisely what role it should play in the world’s transition to green energy.

Climate-focused groups often argue that as a regulator of the nation’s largest banks, the Fed should play a major role in preparing the financial system for the damaging effects of climate change. Some want it to more overtly discourage bank lending to fossil fuel companies. Mr. Greenberg, for instance, said he would like the Fed to use regulation to make lending to oil and gas companies essentially cost-prohibitive.