Eye to Eye with Brian Moynihan

VIDEO: To watch more of what happened yesterday at the Bank of America shareholder meeting in Charlotte, watch the clip at the bottom of this blog post. As I stood eye-to-eye with Bank of America (BofA) CEO, Brian Moynihan, a large stop-watch projected onto the wall of the conference room started to count down. I [...]

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Charlotte Teach-In: “We can no longer afford to stand still like we’re not a part of this planet.”

Last night, Saint Matthew’s Catholic Church in Charlotte graciously hosted a panel discussion on “Communities and Coal.” We were lucky to hear from panelists from communities impacted by coal in Appalachia and the Pacific Northwest, as well as from experts on the health consequences of climate change and the growing impacts of coal on communities [...]

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Gearing Up for Bank of America’s Shareholder Meeting

I’m in Charlotte this week to talk to Bank of America’s annual shareholder meeting. For the past two years, RAN has been calling on the bank to get serious about addressing climate change.This is a bank that declares a “commitment to positive environmental change” proudly on its website and a bank that has fanfared multi-billion [...]

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Extreme Investments: 2013 Coal Finance Report Card

Today, RAN, Sierra Club, and BankTrack launched our 2013 Coal Finance Report Card. This year’s report, entitled “Extreme Investments: U.S. Banks and the Coal Industry” evaluates the largest U.S. banks in terms of their financing of companies engaged in coal extraction, transport, and combustion. As our title indicates, coal has become an extreme investment. Long [...]

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Seven of Bloomberg’s Top Ten “Greenest Banks” Are Climate Killers

A Guest blog-post by Yann Louvel, BankTrack‘s Climate and Energy Campaign Coordinator This week, Bloomberg published the results of its third annual ranking of the “world’s greenest banks”: Citi was ranked first, followed by Santander and JPMorgan. The study assesses banks based on their lending to clean-energy projects and reduction in their own power consumption [...]

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Need Not Twist Boston Arms to Pressure Bank of America

Perhaps it’s the weather or our coastal position, the intellectual attitudes or revolutionary roots–this much is clear: there is no shortage of enthusiasm in Boston to expose Bank of America (BofA) as the #1 financier of U.S. coal and climate change. We are responding to the climate emergency and we are illuminating its economic, social [...]

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“It’s Easier to Mine Coal Without People Around.”

RAN’s latest Coal Risk Update highlights the potential human rights impacts of a planned mountaintop removal mine in Blair, West Virginia. Blair Mountain is a national treasure: The mountain is the site of arguably the most important post-Civil War battlefield in the US. Currently, Arch Coal plans to build a mine that would destroy the [...]

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Bank of America’s Recruiters Not Welcome on Campus

This morning, Bank of America campus recruiters at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNCC) found the best and the brightest in their student interviews. Unfortunately for the bank, UNCC’s best and brightest were there to protest Bank of America and their funding for coal and climate chaos. Six activists, supported by UNCC alumni [...]

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Hurricane Sandy Haunts CEOs at Economic Outlook Conference

As Bank of America Co-Chief Operating Officer, David Darnell, and outgoing Duke Energy CEO, Jim Rogers, met behind closed doors to forecast 2013′s corporate profits—a storm was brewing in Charlotte. Immediately before the heavily guarded economic summit was set to begin, an inconvenient visitor arrived and demanded to be let into the meeting: Hurricane Sandy. Buoyed [...]

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Financed emissions: A big problem for banks, and a bigger problem for the climate

What is the total greenhouse gas footprint of Citigroup, Bank of America, or UBS? Right now, we don’t know, and that’s a major problem for both banks and the climate. Banks emit greenhouse gases to power their offices and branches, but they also finance the emissions of other companies through their loans, investments, and other [...]

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