As Greenwash Flows, World's Top 60 Banks Financed $673 Billion In Fossil Fuels In 2022

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Climate advocates have been increasing the pressure on banks to change course, and many lenders have responded by adopting policies to reduce the climate pollution generated by their vast portfolios. Some have also pledged to stop financing certain types of fossil fuel extraction altogether, such as coal mining and Arctic drilling. But have those policies made any difference?

A pair of new reports provides a muddled picture. Banks lent significantly less money to fossil fuel companies last year, according to a report by a collection of environmental groups led by Rainforest Action Network. However, the decline was likely driven not by choices the banks made, the report said, but because oil companies were sitting on so much cash they didn’t need to borrow any. Many oil firms, including ExxonMobil and Chevron, earned record profits last year.

All told, the world’s top 60 banks plowed $673 billion in financing into fossil fuel companies last year, according to the report, which is the lowest amount since the groups began tracking in 2016. Despite the decline, the report’s authors said the banks’ fossil lending policies remain weak and inadequate, and that such financing is not declining nearly fast enough to curb climate pollution in line with the Paris Agreement’s more ambitious target of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit.

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The Ceres report compared the fossil lending policies of the six largest American banks—four of which also happen to be the largest lenders to the fossil fuel sector over the past seven years—and found that none of them are aligned with the goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees. Only one, Bank of America, has a policy aligned with limiting warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius, the less ambitious goal of the Paris Agreement and a level of warming that would bring more dangerous impacts from extreme weather and higher sea level rise.

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/13042023/banks-say-theyre-acting-on-climate-but-continue-to-finance-fossil-fuel-expansion/

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1. Money talks