Sunday, December 04, 2011
Many of the world’s top banks have been labeled “climate killers” by a consortium of environmental organizations that studied the financial industry’s investments in coal.
“We chose to look into coal financing as coal-fired power plants are the biggest source of man-made CO2 emissions and the major culprit in the drama of climate change,” Heffa Schuecking of urgewald said. “In spite of the fact that climate change is already having severe impacts on the most vulnerable societies, there is an abundance of plans to build new coal-fired power plants. If banks provide money for these projects, they will wreck all attempts to limit global warming to 2° Celsius.”
The top four “climate killers” are all U.S. banks: JPMorgan Chase ($22.1 billion in coal loans since 2005), Citigroup ($18.4 billion), Bank of America ($16.8 billion) and Morgan Stanley ($16.2 billion).
Rounding out the top 10 coal industry lenders are Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland, BNP Paribus, Credit Suisse and UBS.
A typical 600 megawatt coal plant costs about $2 billion to build.
-Noel Brinkerhoff
Bankrolling Climate Change (Bank Track) (urgewald, groundWork, Earthlife Africa Johannesburg and BankTrack) (pdf)
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