DIVEST YOUR BANK ACCOUNT

Since the Paris Agreement in 2016, investment by UK banks in fossil fuels has increased by 40%.  Check out what your bank is doing below:

• • Barclays: By far the worst offender investing $144.90 billion in fossil fuels since 2016 and rank 7th globally and the 1st in Europe for fossil fuel investments. Projects include the Line 3 pipeline proposal to transport oil from tar sands in Canada through indigenous treaty territories and pristine wetlands in Wisconsin. The project proposal includes the abandonment of the old pipeline with no plan to clean up the mess. Barclays is the 7th biggest financer of Arctic oil and gas exploration as well as funding exploration in the Barents Sea. They are also funding fracking projects in Argentinian Patagonia – a project strongly opposed by Mapuche indiginous communities.
  • HSBC: Another of the worst offenders. HSBC says they are ‘committed to a Net Zero future’ while financing fossil fuel projects totalling $110.74 billion since 2016 and emitting more Carbon Dioxide than Canada, Brazil or the UK. Deals made by the bank in the past five years will release 523 million tonnes of carbon dioxide each year. They are currently financing Arctic drilling projects, rank 5th globally for financing offshore oil and gas exploration and also finance fracking projects in Argentinian Patagonia.
  • Santander: Since 2016, Santander has continued to invest in fossil fuels to the tune of $34.04 billion including financing Arctic Drilling projects and offshore oil and gas exploration. Santander also is a key financer of PGE Polska Grupa Energetyczna, power generation company who are 96% reliant on fossil fuels and own Europe’s single biggest CO2 emitter: the Belchatów power plant.
  • Lloyds (including Bank of Scotland): Investments by Lloyds in fossil fuels totalled $11.98 billion between 2016 and 2020 and since 2019 they have increased their fossil fuel investments. Lloyds is involved in projects such as tar sands and coal mines, including the Adani Carmichael coal mega-mine in Australia. Although Lloyds appears to have a coal exclusion policy for its investments, this only applies to its Central Fund, which makes up just 3% of its entire investment portfolio. Lloyds has helped to insure some of the most polluting fossil fuels possible – tar sands and shale gas – even when many other insurers have refused.
  • Standard Chartered: Invested $31.42 billion in fossil fuel projects since 2016 and provided key finance for the Mozambique LNG project via a $500 million loan to extract natural gas off the country’s coast. Standard Chartered are also funding the Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) project to export natural gas  from the Shah Deniz II field in the Caspian Sea to western markets.
  • NatWest (includes Royal Bank of Scotland): Invested $13.39 billion in fossil fuel projects between 2016 and 2020 and increased fossil fuel funding between 2019 and 2020. NatWest are financing fossil fuel exploration in the Arctic backing developers to the tune of $539 million. NatWest is funding the Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion project in Canada. The pipeline is expected to almost triple the capacity taking an additional 590,000 barrels of crude oil from the Alberta tar sands each day to the Burnaby refinery on Vancouver Harbour. The NatWest Group also finances the Cerrejón coal mine in Colombia, one of the largest in the world. Its expansion since 1976 has led to the destruction of whole villages populated by local indigenous and Afro-Colombian people. The extracted coal is almost exclusively for export to rich countries with local people seeing few benefits.

Find out your bank’s track record at: Bank Green.
Want to dig deeper? Read the Banking on Climate Chaos 2021 Report.