Illustration by Stefan Lorant

As an ode to the  “rank ‘em and spank ‘em” strategy coined by our outgoing Executive Director Mike Brune, we proudly present the following roster of international banks backing expansion in the tar sands.

The table below is based on credit extended underwritten by each bank to companies operating in the tar sands since 2007 according to Bloomberg. Restrictions at Bloomberg now prevent us from publishing deal-by-deal details to the web, but are available upon request if you leave your email in the comments.

Each of these banks received letters from RAN, IEN and BankTrack late last year requesting information about how they are addressing the damage caused by tar sands development. Responses (or lack thereof) will help us identify which banks are serious about responsible banking, and which may need more convincing. Responses received to date are also linked in the table after the jump.

UPDATE: There’s been some questions about how these numbers are derived.  We have answers, following the table. More »

Our friends at Bank of America, Citigroup, and other major banks are in the news this week:
- Yesterday, Treasury Secretary Geithner unveiled the Obama administration’s bailout plan to spend up to 2 TRILLION dollars to revive the economy, including details for how the government will spend the second half of the TARP bailout funds.
- Today, Representative Barney Frank called the CEO’s of 8 of the bailed-out banks to a hearing before the House Committee on Financial Services to account for how they’ve spent the first half of those bailout funds.

We here at RAN are hoping that you can help us capitalize (no pun intended!) on the public focus on the banks this week to raise questions about another important and relevant consideration that hasn’t gotten much airtime in the current debate: What other risky behavior are the banks involved in, that threatens further economic calamity?

Many of the bailed-out banks are engaging in very risky investments, sinking billions of dollars in support of fossil-fuel intensive industries, such as coal and oil. Unlike Treasury Secretary Geithner, who reportedly resisted calls for more conditions on how banks spend the taxpayers’ money, we think that the release of additional public funds to these institutions should come with more strings attached. Or, at the very least, it should invite more public scrutiny of the banks’ other toxic investments.

The banks don’t really want to talk about their deep involvement in the climate crisis. But those risky and toxic investments (a) will undoubtedly face additional costs and regulation in the near future; and (b) are locking in an unsustainable infrastructure that will undermine the efforts to bring greenhouse gas emissions in line with scientific necessity. Furthermore, the banks, even while receiving a government hand-out, are taking actions that undermine the goals of a ‘green’ economic stimulus package. If Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, or any of these other banks provide financial support to mountain top removal coal companies, new coal-fired power plants, and tar sands pipelines, they are helping to lock in long-term dirty energy infrastructure, undermining other efforts to address the other pressing issue of our day: runaway greenhouse gas emissions and the threats to the global climate.

That’s why RAN’s Global Finance Campaign continues to press these banks to take responsibility for their role in fueling climate change, and to redirect their resources away from dirty energy sources and towards support for energy efficiency and clean, renewable energy resources such as solar and wind. It is unconscionable that wind and solar are taking a hit from the credit crisis, at precisely the time when we need to ramp up our national capacity to harness clean energy. We believe that the banks must account for and commit to reducing the carbon emissions that are embedded in their financial services portfolios, and help fund the future.

-Dana

It wasn’t that long ago (I think we can count it in months actually) that the terms ‘nationalize’ and ‘banks’ just wouldn’t ever have been found in the same sentence. Ever. Check out this whole article in the NY Times entitled: “Nationalization Gets a New, Serious Look”. One small excerpt:

“In an interview Sunday on “This Week” on ABC, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, alluded to internal debate when she was asked whether nationalization, or partial nationalization, of the largest banks was a good idea. “Well, whatever you want to call it,” said Ms. Pelosi, Democrat of California. “If we are strengthening them, then the American people should get some of the upside of that strengthening. Some people call that nationalization.”

Yes, some people do. Namely, most of the other people in the world when faced with the government owning the majority share in a company. What does this mean for the banks? Citi and Bank of America lead the pack as poster children for the declining financial sector. Ken Lewis has some serious egg on his face as the train-wreck that is Merrill Lynch pulls up to the station, and Citi is hiving itself off into smaller and smaller chunks to keep it’s head above water. Both are desperately in need of more government intervention to avoid collapse. Whatever we call it, let’s spend some serious time thinking about what kind of conditions should be placed on any public money for the private banks.

On Nov 14, 2008, activists from the Coal River Valley, an area hard-hit by mountaintop removal coal extraction, took action against Citi in Beckley, WV.  They distributed fliers outside a Citi Financial office, informed Citi employees that their employer had a major role in destroying their communities, and handed fliers to customers entering the office.  Then they headed off to a meeting with an Appalachian region-wide effort to stop mountaintop removal.

Vernon Haltom, Coal River Mountain Watch

Last Friday, members of Rising Tide Boston set up “Green Coal” marketing tables outside branches of Bank of America and Citibank to highlight these banks’ high-risk investments in coal power and mining.

Emulating the coal industry’s marketing pitch of “clean coal”, activists handed out samples of “green coal” while informing fellow citizens not to expect green coal to be clean, safe, or affordable.

“Although we’ve spent a lot of time and resources researching ways to make coal environmentally friendly, or ‘clean and green’, the best way we found to do it is to paint it green,” said Chris Santorum, one of the Green Coal Salespeople.

To watch a video of this event: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doWqvWDRDGM

Rising Tide Boston has been working with local housing and poverty advocacy groups to demand that the big banks stop gambling with the future of people and planet. Real solutions to the climate crisis, that are market-ready and viable, would both address economic equity for local communities and directly reduce the disproportionate burden of impacts that working class communities around the world face from fossil fuel industries such as coal.

Despite the coal lobby’s desperate schemes to sell the “clean coal” concept, coal power generation remains dirty, unsafe and unaffordable as the following facts confirm.

• The coal industry is responsible for nearly 40% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions
• Toxic emissions from coal power plants cause over 26 000 deaths per year in the US alone
• An average coal plant is responsible for externalized environmental and public health costs of over 300 million dollars per year.
• There are currently 110 coal power plants slated for development in the U.S. none of which have the ability to capture the carbon they would emit.

“Without the financial backing of big banks like Citi and Bank of America, the coal industry wouldn’t be able to build over 100 new coal plants. We need real solutions to the climate crisis, not more coal industry greenwash,” said Lulu Debarca of Rising Tide Boston.

At noon today, activists affiliated with the New York Action Network convened in midtown dressed in their finest business wear to apologize to the public on behalf of Citi for the bank’s role in the funding of coal, the climate crisis and the financial turmoil worldwide.  Citi recently received 25 billion dollars of US taxpayer money; we thought it was an appropriate moment to thank taxpayers and to apologize for not taking their future into consideration while we were carelessly making all those dirty investments.

Donning laminated name-tags signaling our official status as Citi representatives – Veronica Huffinpuff, Sally Smokestack, Nomar Mountains, Anita Inhaler, Ivanna Bailout, Seymour Solar, Vin Turbine and others- one team of activists entered through the building’s side door looking for Mr. Vikram Pandit to sign a pledge which read: Dear Taxpayer, Thanks for the 700 billion dollars. We apologize for our history of irresponsible investment and promise to do better. We pledge to immediately cease all investment in coal and declare a moratorium on home foreclosures. It’s time to change, the buck stops here!”

Unfortunately, Mr. Pandit was unavailable so we gathered at the front of the building where we apologized  for “the mess we made!” to as many pedestrians as we could engage, handing them an open letter from the Citi family that outlined in detail the company’s new commitments to a more sustainable and just future.  We also had placards that read, “Sorry About Climate Change – Our Bad”, “Sorry about those foreclosures”, “We promise – no more dirty investments”.

It was certainly a lighthearted and humorous approach to protest, with the public and the media reactions being incredibly positive; people were laughing and listening – not something one encounters every day on the sidewalks of New York City.

But here’s the thing; the reason we were there in the first place, why twenty five of us committed our Friday afternoon to standing in the drizzle in suits, are incredibly serious.  Our country is experiencing an economic crisis that is being compared to the 1920’s; thousands of families are losing their homes while taxpayer money is being poured into financial institutions that refuse to acknowledge the error of their ways.  The only thing this does is to avoid the more salient issue – a climate crisis whose risk involves the lives and communities of a billion displaced peoples. We have yet to see significant action that begins to remedy these issues in any real way. We are burning more coal than ever.

The irony of this gap between the facts and the reality was made all the more evident to me by the police presence we experienced today. Both the police and Citi’s private security were out in full force (we locked down at the same site on Fossils Fools Day and discovered they were expecting a repeat ) and not looking to make friends with us.  One security guard aggressively asked me to step back from the side walk and told me diminutively, “I know you think this is silly”.

Actually, I don’t think anything about this is silly. At all.

What I would like to say to him is – we know the system doesn’t care about us, but the real question is, do we care about each other? He’s is in no better shape than the rest of us who make up the majority of the population. Not amongst the upper echelon trying to buy their way out of this mess.  We are out there for his future as well as our own, for his children as well as our own, and I live for the day when, instead of apologizing for standing six inches too far into their “zone”, we can interact as human beings and treat each other with the respect that we both deserve in our united struggle for justice and future.

Lauren Valle

Thanks to the good work of the Sierra Club and a large coalition of western and Utah organizations, the phrase ‘No New Coal’ may have gone WAY out of style today. The Environmental Appeals Board of the EPA just ruled that the EPA has the authority to establish a Best Available Control Technology (BACT) limit for carbon dioxide.

Up until now the EPA has gone out of it’s way to avoid, duck, shirk and otherwise weasel it’s way out of treating C02 as a pollutant and regulating it as such, but this ruling decrees that every argument it has used so far to avoid doing so is legally insufficient. The decision is binding for all EPA-issued air quality permits, so best case scenario – this could affect every single air quality permit for a new coal plant in the country.

Which means……that we may see the stalling of all coal-fired power plant permits under consideration for a year or so while the EPA figures out what ‘Best Available Control Technology’ means in this context. I repeat: no more new coal-plants. Then, the sound of scurrying feet as the coal industry scrambles to fast-track the ever-mythical Carbon Capture and Sequestration technology and finally the gradual movement of all the energy that has been built up around stopping NEW coal plants towards dealing with the 500 existing plants.

This has been a week of emails and blogs about how we can’t rest on our laurels just because Obama got elected. The same holds true for this EAB ruling — it may really stop new coal-fired power plants, and for that we can all be enormously relieved.

We won’t be moving in the wrong direction any more. Now the challenge is to start moving in the right one – towards no coal whatsoever.

UPDATE: The ruling will also cover oil refineries and other major sources of CO2 pollution. Score one for the climate!!

UPDATE:

Activists Scale Flagpole Behind Iconic Wall Street Bull, Raise 150-Square Foot American Flag with ‘Foreclosed?’ Stamped Over It

UPDATE 2: link to Flickr set

UPDATE 3: High-res photo.

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In the past few weeks, our economic system has sustained some of the most dramatic shifts of the past 50 years. Comparisons have been made to the Asian economic crisis of the nineties, the dot-com bust of the early 21st century, and even the Great Depression. Our economic and financial system is in tatters, and all of us are wondering what will come of our savings, our homes, and our future.

The news has been focused on whether and what kind of a bailout package will be handed to the very financial institutions that got us into this mess. Understandably so: $700 billion is a large sum of money, and a significant contribution from taxpayers wallets, especially when compared to other possible uses of such a cash injection—Medicare, infrastructure or renewable energy, to name just a few.

However, with the unprecedented nationalization of Freddie and Fannie, Lehman Brothers filing the largest bankruptcy filing in U.S. history, and Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley voluntarily becoming bank holdings companies, the actions taken by the Federal Reserve are themselves an admission that the institutions that makeup the U.S. financial system are broken.

It is critical that we look beyond the bailout to the underlying cracks this crisis has exposed in our financial system. We cannot allow the bailout (whatever its conditions) to further subsidize the decades of risky financial behavior that is now mortgaging our homes and our planet.

We have an unprecedented opportunity to rebuild our economy and establish a financial system that operates within ecological limits. It’s time for Americans to demand structural solutions that put families before financiers and the planet before profits.

For the past eight years, RAN’s Global Finance Campaign has urged America’s leading financial institutions to take responsibility for the impacts of their investments and to recognize the financial and reputational risks inherent in directing vast sums of capital towards environmentally unsustainable and socially unjust projects—from rainforest destruction and oil extraction to the construction of coal-fired power plants.

Banks need to be held accountable for the impacts of their investments, whether they are subprime mortgages or new coal plants. In both cases, the impact of the financing deal is ‘externalized’ – that is, the effect on people and the environment is not considered when the loan or transaction is being approved. In the case of subprime mortgages, home foreclosures were not considered a ‘downside’ until they started happening at a rate that impacted the viability of the financial system itself. The same reasoning holds true in the financing of fossil fuel projects. The impacts of constructing coal-fired power plants on the climate and on communities have not been deemed key factors in determining whether or not to finance such projects.

There has never been a better time to hold banks accountable for the impacts of their investments and demand that they develop the necessary due diligence processes to ensure that we do not mortgage the Earth’s natural capital in the same way that we have mortgaged the futures of millions of Americans whose homes have been foreclosed on.

It is crucial to take this opportunity to shift the debate from one that dwells on the immediate need to staunch the bleeding from the subprime meltdown to one that is based on a vision for a socially just and ecologically sustainable financial system.

All eyes are on Wall Street—Now is the time.

In solidarity with Wise County residents – who shut down the construction of Dominion Resources’ Coal Power Plant in Wise County, Va this morning, activists in New York arrived at Citibank’s Manhattan doorstep to remind the bank of their ongoing financial support for Dominion and other coal utility companies.

Since their announcement of the carbon principles – new environmental standards designed to help banks assess the risk associated with investments in coal power, Citi has continued to provide financial assistance to Dominion Resources. Along with Barclays, JP Morgan Chase and Merrill Lynch, Citibank served as joint book-running managers for the sale of $ 1.2 billion of Dominion debt securities in June, 2008.

Dominion currently operates over 30 coal-fired power plants in the US and is proceeding with the construction of a 585 MW coal plant in Wise County, despite widespread opposition amongst Virginians.

I’m about to hop on a plane to Charlotte, but I wanted to capture some of the excitement from Citi’s Annual Shareholder Meeting. It was an amazing day – there were over 50 activists outside on the streets making sure that every shareholder that entered the meeting had absolutely NO doubt that Citi is funding coal and why it should stop. The New York crew were amazing – as always, creative and kick-ass every last one.

Appalachia’s own Maria Gunnoe and I went inside the meeting on proxies and spoke in support of shareholder resolution #9, calling on Citi to cease financing of coal-fired power plants and mountaintop removal coal mining. Inside, the scene was just about as raucous as on the streets! There must have been 500 shareholders at the meeting – most of whom were NOT happy. Obviously, Citi’s recent financial woes due to the credit crisis have shareholders antsy, and almost every question revolved around why Citi didn’t recognize the risk inherent in subprime loans. Why indeed? We want to know why Citi is heading directly from the credit crisis to the climate crisis, which is rife with financial risk, human risk, cultural risk and environmental risk.

Maria stood up and spoke movingly about the hypocrisy of releasing ‘Carbon Principles’ while continuing to fund the biggest proponents of mountaintop removal. Speaking directly to Citi CEO Vikram Pandit and Chairman Sir Win Bischoff, she asked: “Where is the principle in that?” No one had an answer for her. When it was my turn to speak, I reiterated our request to Citi to cease financing coal and climate change, and pointed out that it is the people and lands like those of Appalachia that are most impacted by our continued reliance on coal. These are the real victims of climate change.

Then I asked a simple question: Would Vikram Pandit please commit to accompanying me on a flight over Appalachia to witness the effects of mountaintop removal, financed by his bank?

He laughed and looked a little uncomfortable. I assured him that I would be a wonderful flying companion. What followed was a slightly awkward silence. Then, to my surprise, Sir Win Bischoff interjected and said: “I can commit that one of us will accompany you on that flight.”

And with that, I got a date with Citi.

As I left the meeting, several shareholders approached me to say they hoped I would be back next year to report on the flight.

My response? You bet I will.