Full Title: Banking On Climate Change
Author(s): Alison Kirsch, Jason Opeña Disterhoft, Grant Marr, Greig Aitken, Claire Hamlett, Yann Louvel, Lise Masson, Alberto Saldamando, Lorne Stockman, Ben Cushing, Tara Houska
Publisher(s): Rainforest Action Network (RAN), BankTrack, Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN), Sierra Club, Oil Change International, and Honor the Earth
Publication Date: March 1, 2019
Full Text: Download Resource
Description (excerpt):
In October 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a sobering report on the devastating impacts our world will face with 1.5° Celsius of warming — let alone 2°C — while setting out the emissions trajectory the nations of the world need to take if we are to have any shot at keeping to that 1.5°C limit. This 10th edition of the annual fossil fuel finance report card, greatly expanded in scope, reveals the paths banks
have taken in the past three years since the Paris Agreement was adopted, and finds that overall bank financing continues to be aligned with climate disaster.
For the first time, this report adds up lending and underwriting from 33 global banks to the fossil fuel industry as a whole. The findings are stark: these Canadian, Chinese, European, Japanese, and U.S. banks have financed fossil fuels with $1.9 trillion since the Paris Agreement was adopted (2016–2018), with financing on the rise each year. This report finds that fossil fuel financing is dominated by the big U.S. banks, with JPMorgan Chase as the world’s top funder of fossil fuels by a wide margin. In other regions, the top bankers of fossil fuels are Royal Bank of Canada in Canada, Barclays in Europe, MUFG in Japan, and Bank of China in China.