A new report from the Rainforest Action Network, BankTrack, and the Sierra Club evaluates which of the nation’s mega-banks provide the most money to the coal industry.
Based on an analysis of the number of transactions that a bank was involved in, Bank of America (recently named the nations “greenest” bank by Bloomberg News for a single solar deal) comes out the worst with a total of 44 transactions. JP Morgan Chase is nipping at their heals with 42 transactions.
Grist in evaluating the report noted that, “These grades above are based on the banks’ stated policies and “how well they uphold these policies based on investments, transactions of coal mining and coal burning utility companies.”
For example, Bank of America has said it’s going to “phase out financing of companies whose predominant method of extracting coal is through mountaintop removal.” Since then, the report notes, the bank’s financed four of the largest mountaintop-removal projects in the country and underwritten 43 percent of mountaintop-removal mining in Appalachia.”
Find out you’re your bank is behaving at BankTrack.
Thank you for posting this. It is important that light be brought to these investment patterns that jeopardize our future. You are a powerful voice; keep talking.
Bob Ferris
Executive Director
Cascadia Wildlands
Is the problem coal or the technologies use to convert it into something else (i.e. energy)? While I certainly have an issue with the pollution that comes from coal and coke-fired generation plants, and in no way work with or for ‘big coal’, should our focus be on coal and reducing coal-fired generation, or on ambitious policies linked to emissions reduction – i.e. industry received a target and industry figures out how to do it (with or without coal)?
It will certainly take a lot of mining of minerals to develop the solar and wind capabilities we need to be carbon free (decentralized or otherwise), and burning biomass and natural gas have their own economic, social and environmental challenges, so I just wonder if we need to think ‘atributes’ rather than ‘prescriptions’.
These are great questions. Thanks. No one strategy is likely to solve our energy challenges. While I strongly believe we need to transition away from fossil fuels, the question is how. I believe we should aggressively pursue energy efficiency and renewable energy, we should remove economic incentives from the fossil fuel industry, and begin to move toward the type of full cost accounting that will place a cost on CO2 emissions as well as other pollutants that cause health issues. All of this needs to be part of a strategy that moves us toward more local, resilient energy systems.