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Sunday, June 9, 2019

BIG BANKS STOKE THE FLAMES OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS



A “collective scream sieved through the stern, strained language of bureaucratese,” was the New Yorker’s apt description of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) special report on the impacts of heating the globe by 1.5° Celsius. The “nightmarish tale” that emerges from the 2018 report involves a double whammy: the impacts of 1.5°C will be much worse than previously predicted, and to have a reasonable chance of staying under 1.5°C we need to start immediately an unprecedented global effort to reshape our economic priorities so that we can rapidly bend down the emissions curve.

By 2030 — basically only a decade away — carbon dioxide emissions will have to be slashed by 45 percent below 2010 levels. By midcentury, net emissions must be at zero. In light of this planetary emergency, we have greatly increased the scope of this annual fossil fuel finance report card. In 2016 we expanded from a focus on coal to also analyzing bank support for some types of oil and gas. Yet given the flashing red light warning from the IPCC last year, as well as the recent deadly storms, droughts, and wildfires that are the cruelly visible signs of the 1°C of warming we have already experienced, this report now analyzes bank support for all fossil fuels.
This year we are again dissecting private bank support for the biggest companies in a number of problematic fossil fuel subsectors (this year, including fracking). But for the first time, we are also zooming out to look at financing for over 1,800 companies across the coal, oil, and fossil gas sectors globally over the past three years. These companies are active throughout the fossil fuel life cycle — exploration, extraction, transportation, storage, and the generation of fossil fuel electricity.3 In looking at lending to these companies, as well as the underwriting of stock and bond issuances, this report finds that 33 major global banks poured $1.9 trillion into fossil fuels since the Paris Agreement was adopted. Also for the first time, we are looking at bank financing for another subset of the fossil fuel universe: the top fossil fuel expansion companies. We’ve identified the 100 companies whose investments in new fossil fuel extraction, infrastructure, and power most fly in the face of the clear and urgent need to start a managed decline in the use of fossil fuels. These companies — and the banks that finance them — bear a powerful moral responsibility to stop building new coal mines and plants, and oil and gas fields and pipelines. This new infrastructure risks extending by decades the lifespan of a sector whose growth is a cancer upon our planet. The 33 banks under review in this report financed these expanders with $600 billion over the past three years.
One inescapable finding of this report is that JPMorgan Chase is very clearly the world’s worst banker of climate change. The race was not even close: the $196 billion the bank poured into fossil fuels between 2016 and 2018 is nearly a third higher than the second-worst bank, Wells Fargo. The massive economic weight of the U.S. oil and gas industry can be easily seen in the fact that the top four bankers of climate change are all headquartered in the United States — JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citi, and Bank of America. With Morgan Stanley in 11th place and Goldman Sachs in 12th, all six of the U.S. banking giants are in the top dirty dozen fossil banks; together, they account for an astonishing 37 percent of global fossil fuel financing since the Paris Agreement was adopted. The Canadian banks RBC, TD, and Scotiabank also hold top rankings, meaning only three of the top 12 fossil bankers are from outside North America (Barclays, MUFG, and Mizuho.) Though in a different order, 10 of those 12 fossil banks are also the top bankers of fossil fuel expansion. And here, JPMorgan Chase sticks out even more as the worst of the worst: the bank’s $67 billion in finance for expansion over the past three years was a stunning two-thirds higher than the second-biggest banker of fossil fuel expansion (Citi).
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