Oil Change International publishes upwards of 20 reports and briefings every year focused on supporting the movement for a just phase-out of fossil fuels.
This report analyzes fossil fuel financing from the world’s 60 largest commercial and investment banks — aggregating their leading roles in lending and underwriting of debt and equity issuances — and reveals that these banks poured a total of USD $3.8 trillion into fossil fuels from 2016–2020.
A new report, Banking on Climate Change 2020, reveals that 35 private-sector banks across Canada, China, Europe, Japan, and the U.S. have financed fossil fuels with USD $2.7 trillion since the Paris Agreement was adopted (2016-2019), with financing on the rise each year. The report finds that fossil fuel financing continues to be dominated by the big U.S. banks – JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citi, and Bank of America – together, these four banks account for a staggering 30% of all fossil fuel financing from the 35 major global banks since the Paris Agreement was adopted.
In the past three years, the North American and European commercial and investment banking sector has engaged in fossil fuel financing practices that are deeply at odds with the global climate agreement reached at COP 21 last December.
With Shell in the Arctic, the scale and volume of the blowback from the environmental community has clearly caught the Administration flat footed. When confronted, they usually first mumble something about highest standards (which is completely irrelevant to the climate argument) but if pressed, the Administration and its defenders invoke a sober, scolding tone to explain: 1) We need oil and we will need oil for a long time. While we’re all concerned about climate, we’re still going to need oil and gas in the future and we might as well make as much of it as possible right here at home. 2) U.S. oil production is essentially irrelevant for climate, because “more oil production in one place generally means less oil production elsewhere – that’s how markets and prices work”. Together, these two arguments form what we can think of as the Convenient Lie that we can be serious about fighting climate change and also approve virtually all new fossil fuel infrastructure in the U.S. It’s the Convenient Lie that keeps us from dealing with the Inconvenient Truth.
There is a clear logic that can be applied to the global challenge of addressing climate change: when you are in a hole, stop digging. If we are serious about tackling the global climate crisis, we need to stop exploring, expanding, and ultimately exploiting fossil fuels. This is especially true for high cost, high carbon, high risk frontier projects such as offshore Arctic oil.
This briefing examines Shell's Arctic experiences and outlines key operational and economic issues. We suggest questions investors should ask Shell, to understand whether the company has adequately assessed the various risks it faces.
Frozen Future' warns investors of the risks to shareholder value from Royal Dutch Shell’s Alaskan Arctic drilling program.
