Source: https://www.desmog.com/topic/finance/
Four-Fifths of Board Members at America’s Top Six Banks are Climate Conflicted
While fossil fuel companies reported record profits of $4 trillion in 2022, the top 60 banks still shelled out more than half a trillion dollars to the sector.
COS AND BANKS’ BREACHES OF THEIR DUTY OF VIGILANCE + BREACH OF THE PARIS AGREEMENT
French environmental organizations Notre Affaire à Tous, Friends of the Earth France, and Oxfam France last week filed what they say is the world’s first climate lawsuit against a commercial bank, suing BNP Paribas over its continued funding of fossil fuels…Filed in the Paris Judicial Court, claims that the French bank is in breach of France’s “duty of vigilance” law, which requires large companies to assess risks and impacts of their business activities on human rights and the environment and develop plans to identify and mitigate those risks. The law has been invoked in other lawsuits against corporate polluters including French oil major TotalEnergies and most recently against French food company Danone over its contribution to plastic waste.
BNP Paribas Europe’s largest funder of fossil fuel expansion.
Lucie Pinson, director of the research and campaigning organization Reclaim Finance, explained that loopholes in BNP Paribas’ fossil fuel financing policy allow it to still offer financial services to oil and gas clients.
BNP Paribas says it has not financed any new oil projects since 2016 and is aiming to stop all its financing to the oil sector, but it still issues bonds for oil and gas companies
prior to this claim, there had only been complaints against banks brought under the OECD Guidelines for multinational enterprises.
the vast majority of financial institutions have no restrictions in place to limit oil and gas expansion.
Campaigns such as Stop the Money Pipeline and Reclaim Finance are working to pressure the financial sector to abandon climate-wrecking fossil fuels, eg by calling on wealthy individuals and institutions to end their relationships with big banks that fund ongoing fossil fuel expansion.
Investments in fossil fuel companies must be conditional on the company having a sound transition plan to renewables
The research used investment websites Morning Star and Trustnet, to identify funds with environmentally friendly terms in their branding, such as “sustainable”, “climate”, and “ethical”…Each fund was then cross-referenced with the Carbon Underground 200, a list of the largest fossil fuel companies in the world, Macroclimate 30, a list of the 30 largest coal-fired power plant owners, and a list of leading oil industry service providers.
Major investment funds available to UK consumers are marketing themselves as “sustainable” and “ethical” ‘green’, while financing fossil fuel companies, research has found….
the Ethical Consumer magazine:
HSBC recently having a series of adverts banned for misleading customers about the bank’s environmental efforts.
The fund with the most fossil fuel-linked holdings in its portfolio was iShares Dow Jones Global Sustainability Screened. The fund, managed by BlackRock, the world’s biggest investment company, says it is composed of “leaders in the sustainability field”. Despite this, it owns stakes in 17 companies on the Carbon Underground 200, including Royal Dutch Shell, TotalEnergies and ConocoPhillips.
Report from the Big Shift Global, [a coalition of NGOs] on The World Bank:
Continues Financing Fossil Fuels Despite Climate Crisis: while the multilateral development bank tries to position itself as a climate leader, it still supports gas pipelines, refineries, and gas export terminals.
The World Bank Group has funneled $14.8 billion into fossil fuel projects around the world since the Paris Climate Agreement was signed in 2015
the funded list’s number-one, is the Trans-Anatolian Pipeline (TANAP), a long-distance gas pipeline that runs from Azerbaijan through Turkey, moving gas from the Caspian Sea throughout southern Europe.
The Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA), a member of the World Bank Group, gave the project $1.1 billion in loan guarantees to protect investors in 2018, helping to push TANAP forward, a move that will triple Azerbaijan’s gas exports. The loan guarantee protects a long list of banks — AKA Bank, Citi, Credit Agricole CIB, ING, LBBW, Santander, and Societe Generale — for 15 years.
Another example is the $288 million loan issued in 2019 by the International Finance Corporation (IFC), which is another entity within the World Bank Group, for a gas-fired power plant and LNG import terminal at the Port of Açu, Brazil.
The World Bank’s mission is to end extreme poverty and promote broad prosperity in developing countries, by offering loans and investment guarantees. Last year, the World Bank announced that it would make 35 percent of its total financing “climate finance.”
For instance, in 2018 and 2019 the World Bank offered Guyana a total of $55 million to help the government put in place legal and institutional frameworks for the oil and gas sector. That ultimately meant smoothing the path for ExxonMobil, Hess, and China’s Cnooc to ramp up offshore oil production. Indeed, Exxon is spending billions of dollars to aggressively grow oil production in guyana. Exxon and its partners produced 360,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day (boe/d) as of July, and aim to dramatically scale that up to 1.2 million boe/d by 2027.
another example is the world bank’s $135 million loan to Pan American Energy in 2019, an oil company partly owned by BP, to expand an oil refinery outside of Buenos Aires, Argentina. IFC trumpeted the transaction, arguing that it would help Pan American produce “cleaner fuels,” which meant diesel with a lower sulfur content.
A gas storage facility in Turkey to which the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (another World Bank Group entity) is loaning $600 million for an expansion. The IBRD will disburse money for the project through October 2024.
The “no new fossil fuel financing” assurances from the spokesperson also omits the “development policy finance,” [ support for policy or institutional changes to transition from fossil fuel to sustainable]
In a separate report [by Recourse, Friends of the Earth U.S., and Asian Peoples Movement for Debt and Development], blasted the World Bank for saddling Vietnam with new LNG infrastructure. “The World Bank and its private sector arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), are continuing to massively support fossil gas and liquefied natural gas (LNG) build out in Vietnam,” “Not only is it locking Vietnam into an energy system with high carbon greenhouse gas emissions and toxic pollution, but is also diverting vitally needed public funding away from the sustainable renewable alternatives that are urgently needed.”
“The World Bank Group still funds more fossil fuels than any other [multilateral development bank], and they continue to lock Global South countries into expensive and volatile fossil fuel contracts through their heavy-handed policy lending programs,”
Oil and Gas Watch ngo:
Spike in German Finance For Gas Export Projects Harms U.S. Gulf Coast Communities…Campaigners urge lenders to follow the example of French banks that pulled support for new terminals….. the planned $21 billion Plaquemines LNG Terminal, a 630-acre site on the Mississippi River, part financed by German banks…..Deutsche Bank lent around 910 million euros for the Plaquemines project . State-owned Landesbank Baden-Württemberg followed closely with 820 million euros in financing for the new terminal. Bank of America, Bank of China, JP Morgan Chase and other German banks also backed the project, developed by Virginia-based Venture Global.
Experts have warned of the potentially lethal consequences of a climate-fuelled hurricane hitting the terminal and leaking methane into nearby homes and wetlands…threaten more than 21,000 acres of wetlands, an area about 1.5 times the size of Manhattan.
LNG import projects undermine Europe’s long-term plans to reduce its reliance on natural gas to hit climate goals, and could leave the continent saddled with billions of euros in stranded assets. In 2022, the EU reduced gas consumption by 12 percent, and fully implementing 2030 climate targets would lower the bloc’s gas consumption by 30 percent according to the European Commission.
German state-backed KfW IPEX-Bank has loaned 91 million euros to the Plaquemines LNG project, and a further 91 million euros to the Corpus Christi LNG expansion since the start of last year. And the German government is considering funding “at least ten large fossil fuel projects” worth approximately one billion euros, in Brazil, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Iraq and Uzbekistan