"A new report finds that climate-friendly financial institutions have been funding fossil fuel projects to the tune of $38 billion."
"As world leaders settled into their digs in Glasgow, Scotland, last October for the climate conference known as COP26, Bank of England head turned sustainable investment guru Mark Carney had a stern warning for his friends in the financial sector. “In the months and years ahead,” he wrote, “judge all financial institutions not by what they say but by their numbers: the total dollars of transition financing, the amount of polluting, the stranded assets retired, the emissions eliminated, and the timelines to get to net zero.” In April, Carney and State Department climate envoy John Kerry had launched the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, or NZBA, an “industry-led, U.N.-convened” group of 43 banks from 23 countries committed to achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. By the time of COP26, the NZBA had more than doubled its membership, which is now said to represent $68 trillion in banking assets—44 percent of the world total. These members claim they are “using robust, ambitious, science-based targets to decarbonise their lending and investment portfolios on a 1.5 degree climate trajectory.”
A new report from the U.K.-based charity ShareAction, however, now finds that 25 European NZBA members have provided at least $38 billion in financing to 50 of the most expansionary upstream oil and gas companies on earth. Half of that financing was provided by four of the founding signatories of the Alliance: Barclays, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank, and HSBC. Since the Paris Agreement was brokered in 2016, the European banks analyzed have furnished upstream oil and gas expanders with $400 billion, and they “show no signs of stopping,” the report writes. The global banking sector has provided $3.6 trillion in bonds and loans to the fossil fuel industry over the same time period. The International Energy Agency, by contrast, reported last year that capping warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) would mean no new oil and gas development beyond what had already been committed to in 2021.
“I don’t think the people at NZBA are in favor of fossil fuel expansion or delaying climate action,” report co-author Kelly Shields, ShareAction’s senior officer for banking standards, told me over Zoom, “but when people see the contrast, it gives the impression that membership in the alliance is being used to greenwash.” The group hopes to push bank shareholders to back shareholder resolutions in the upcoming Annual General Meeting season to implement more stringent phaseout timelines that treat the IEA’s net-zero scenario, or NZE, as a floor rather than a ceiling for ambition."
Kate Aronoff reports for the New Republic February 15, 2022.
Advertisement 
