August, 30 2023, 08:43am EDT
New Report: Major Global Banks Are Financing Deadly US Coal Plants Thanks to Loopholes in Their Climate Commitments
Sierra Club analysis reveals banks continue to provide funding to coal utility parent companies, despite policies to restrict project-level loans to coal plants.
New York
A new report by the Sierra Club’s Fossil-Free Finance campaign reveals that major global banks are propping up deadly coal plants across the US by financing the parent companies that own them. This financing comes despite the fact that many banks have climate commitments that restrict them from providing project-level loans to coal plants. The analysis reveals a massive loophole in the banks’ climate commitments through their continued lending and underwriting for companies operating deadly coal-fired power plants in the United States.
- Read the report: Lethal Investments: The Health Consequences of Cash Flows into Coal
The analysis follows the release of the Sierra Club’s Out of Control report, which revealed there are approximately 3,800 premature deaths annually from soot released by US coal plants with no firm retirement plans prior to the end of the decade. By financing the parent companies of these coal utilities, major global banks are channeling billions of dollars into the very companies responsible for keeping these deadly coal plants operational and poisoning nearby communities with toxic air pollution.
“Despite their high-profile climate pledges, major banks like Barclays and Citi are continuing to funnel billions of dollars into deadly coal plants. With their flimsy financing policies and half-finished net zero targets, these banks have left billions of dollars on the table for major polluters to continue to operate and even expand the coal plants killing thousands of people in the United States every year,” said Adele Shraiman, Senior Campaign Strategist, Fossil-Free Finance, Sierra Club. “Experts have repeatedly warned that fossil fuel expansion will make it impossible to meet our global climate goals, and coal power is the worst of the bunch. By continuing to pour money into coal, these banks are telling their shareholders, clients, and regulators they aren’t serious about meeting their own climate commitments.”
TOPLINES FROM THE REPORT
The report reveals that since 2016, major global banks have poured $166 billion into 10 of the most deadly publicly traded and federally owned coal utility parent companies in the US: Tennessee Valley Authority, PPL Corporation, Berkshire Hathaway Energy, Ameren Corporation, Vistra Corporation, FirstEnergy Corporation, Duke Energy Corporation, NRG Energy Inc, American Electric Power, and The Southern Company. These 10 coal utility parent companies operate coal plants in 16 states with no firm plans to close by 2030. Each year, the coal plants owned by these 10 companies cause an additional 1,719 premature deaths from air pollution exposure.
Six major banks — Barclays, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citi, Wells Fargo, and Mitsubishi UFJ (MUFG) — make up 50%, or $83.8 billion, of the total financing provided to these 10 coal utility parent companies since 2016. Other banks that round out the top 10 include Mizuho, Goldman Sachs, RBC, and Credit Suisse.
Barclays and the five US banks are all signatories of banking industry pledges to reach net zero by 2050 by reducing their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from their financing activities. When it comes to providing financing to the coal sector, most banks won’t directly offer funds specifically for coal plants (project-level financing). However, banks freely lend to the coal utility parent companies (corporate-level financing), which allows them to operate those coal plants. Of the top 6 banks in the report, only Barclays has a policy that prohibits corporate-level financing to some companies operating coal plants, either through general purpose loans or underwriting the sale of bonds or shares. However, even Barclays’ policy makes several exceptions, which still allow financing for companies developing coal power.
The Sierra Club is calling on banks to expand their climate commitments to include additional restrictions on corporate-level lending and underwriting services to utility companies prolonging the use of coal in the power sector.
QUOTES FROM STATES
“Our planet can’t afford the billions of dollars funneled into dirty, deadly fossil fuels. Berkshire Hathaway Energy continues to poison and pollute our communities with their burning of fossil fuels. MidAmerican Energy, one of its subsidiaries, is the largest carbon polluter in Iowa. When clean energy alternatives are more affordable and reliable than ever, there’s simply no excuse to finance coal plants that play a significant role in serious public health issues,” said Emma Colman, Organizing Representative, Iowa Sierra Club.
"Bank financing enables monopoly utilities like Ameren to pursue climate-wrecking projects that pollute our air and water — all while insurance companies quietly retreat from covering homeowners in coastal areas because of a quickly changing climate. We need investments in renewable energy, efficiency, and storage, not new investments to prop up coal plants or build new gas power plants," said Jenn DeRose, Campaign Representative, Missouri Sierra Club.
“In Utah, Berkshire Hathaway owns the Hunter and Huntington coal plants, some of the worst polluters in the West. These coal plants significantly impact public health, contributing to increased asthma attacks, hospital visits, and even premature death. Berkshire Hathaway and other major banks are financing the poisoning of our communities, and these investments are increasingly threatening our ability to breathe clean air,” said Hunter Warren, Volunteer with Sierra Club’s Utah Needs Clean Energy group.
“Just last summer, environmental advocates united in Jackson Hole for its annual banking conference to call on the Federal Reserve to shift away from fossil fuels, and to stop the destructive funding that keep coal plants like the Berkshire Hathaway-owned Jim Bridger coal plant — the nation's third largest source of haze pollution that continues to be able to side-step pollution reduction measures — in operation. The investments made to utilities that prolong the livelihoods of dirty coal plants carry significant public health concerns that make all the difference in whether our communities can enjoy the outdoors safely," said Anna Kerr, member, Sunrise Movement Jackson Hole.
The Sierra Club is the most enduring and influential grassroots environmental organization in the United States. We amplify the power of our 3.8 million members and supporters to defend everyone's right to a healthy world.
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Did Plutocrats Like Mark Cuban and Tony West Help Sink Harris?
"We could see it happening in real-time, right after the convention, when the party consultants and the big donors got their hooks in," said one critic. "They'll be fine though."
Nov 07, 2024
While much ink has been spilled on U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's relationship with the world's richest person, tech billionaire Elon Musk, the Republican's electoral victory this week has also provoked conversations about how the very wealthy plutocrats behind Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris may have contributed to her loss.
After Trump's win, The Atlantic's Franklin Foer reached out to folks in the inner cycle of President Joe Biden—who passed the torch to Harris after a disastrous debate this summer—for their postmortem. The staff writer reported Thursday that although Biden advisers "were reluctant to say anything negative about Harris as a candidate, they did level critiques of her campaign."
According to Foer:
One critique holds that Harris lost because she abandoned her most potent attack. Harris began the campaign portraying Trump as a stooge of corporate interests—and touted herself as a relentless scourge of Big Business. During the Democratic National Convention, speaker after speaker inveighed against Trump's oligarchical allegiances. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York bellowed, "We have to help her win, because we know that Donald Trump would sell this country for a dollar if it meant lining his own pockets and greasing the palms of his Wall Street friends."
While Harris was stuck defending the Biden economy, and hobbled by lingering anger over inflation, attacking Big Business allowed her to go on the offense. Then, quite suddenly, this strain of populism disappeared. One Biden aide told me that Harris steered away from such hard-edged messaging at the urging of her brother-in-law, Tony West, Uber's chief legal officer. (West did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) To win the support of CEOs, Harris jettisoned a strong argument that deflected attention from one of her weakest issues. Instead, the campaign elevated Mark Cuban as one of its chief surrogates, the very sort of rich guy she had recently attacked.
Responding on social media, Drop Site News' Ryan Grim said: "Reporters always heard that Tony West was functionally one of Kamala's most important advisers. Still galling to read this. I wonder who West even voted for."
Matt Duss, executive vice president of the Center for International Policy, declared that "we could see it happening in real-time, right after the convention, when the party consultants and the big donors got their hooks in. They'll be fine though. They're already onto their next contracts, or their next vacation home. And that should piss you off."
Progressive organizer Aaron Regunberg argued that "if we want to get out of this wilderness we need to purge every one of the Tony West crony corporatists in this party. Democrats need to be able to point to and talk about villains. Tony West is one of those villains."
Revolving Door Project founder and executive director Jeff Hauser put out a lengthy statement in response to the reporting that, as he summarized, "West convinced Vice President Harris to ratchet down her populist messaging lest it upset the Silicon Valley and Wall Street elites he was courting on her behalf."
Hauser highlighted that Foer's article also came after Cuban last month "bragged about his role in exiling a Harris surrogate" and former staffer of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) "for the sin of supporting a wealth tax during a television appearance."
Harris on Tuesday "ran far stronger in the states that she saturated with television ads than the ones she did not. Those TV ads were, as Semafor's David Weigel observed, 'grinding on this economic message (anti-price gouging, Medicare covering home care, etc),'" he noted. "It's impossible to know whether the additional two points or less needed by Harris in the pivotal states would have been secured by basing her public 'earned media' and social media messaging on the same populist economic platform which informed her television ads."
"However, it is clear that the more successful paid media message was more populist and less informed by plutocrats like Cuban and West," Hauser continued. "Further, it seems exceedingly likely that downballot Democrats outside the swing states would have benefited from an ecosystem featuring the type of messaging we heard at the Democratic Convention."
"In a populist moment in which the candidates were battling for the mantle of change, the sitting vice president had to be identified as clearly against some powerful institutions," he added. "Her campaign showed early signs of an aggressive message, arguing that her record as California attorney general included taking on crooked big banks and shady student loan servicers."
"While VP Harris stuck to a comparably anti-plutocratic message in her television ads, she did not in her interviews and public appearances. This divergence appears to have been based on the advice of plutocrats," Hauser concluded. "Hopefully future candidates will learn from this, and oppose plutocrats consistently."
Appearing on CNN this week, Kate Bedingfield, Biden's former White House communications director, suggested the issue is not confined to Harris.
"I think Democrats across the board clearly have a challenge connecting with working-class voters. This is not unique to Vice President Harris' campaign," she said. "This is a demographic shift, a realignment in this country that's happened over the course of the last 10 years."
Meanwhile, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—who ran for president as a Democrat in 2016 and 2020 but spent this cycle campaigning for Harris—said Wednesday that "it should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them."
Sanders also asserted that "the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control" the party are unlikely to "learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign" or "understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing."
Proving his point, Jaime Harrison, a former lobbyist for giant companies who now chairs the Democratic National Committee, claimed Thursday that Sanders' analysis was "straight up BS" and listed achievements of the Biden-Harris administration's achievements.
Responding to Harrison on social media, Michael Sainato, a labor reporter with The Guardian, said that "being pro-worker means being clear about who and what is anti-worker and the Democratic Party has failed miserably at that."
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2024 'Virtually Certain' to Be Hottest Year on Record: EU Climate Agency
A new report contained "the bleakest news possible, especially with a climate denier U.S. president in office for the next four years," said one climate scientist.
Nov 07, 2024
A day after U.S. voters elected climate-denying Republican Donald Trump in the presidential race, soon ushering in an administration that is sure to expand fossil fuel drilling, the European Union's Earth observation agency announced that 2024 is "virtually certain" to be the hottest year on record and to hit a worrying temperature milestone.
The year is expected to be the first on record in which the temperature is more than 1.5°C hotter than before the Industrial Revolution, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service (CCCS). The Paris climate agreement of 2015 urged countries to curb greenhouse gas emissions with the goal of limiting planetary heating to 1.5°C by the end of the century.
Over the past 12 months, said CCCS, global temperatures were 1.6°C warmer than the yearly average from 1850-1900.
"The average temperature anomaly for the rest of 2024 would have to drop to almost zero for 2024 to not be the warmest year," said CCCS.
Last month was the second-hottest October ever recorded, with temperatures 1.65°C higher than preindustrial levels. It was the 15th month in the past 16 to be hotter than 1.5°C over preindustrial temperatures.
While a single year above the 1.5°C mark does not necessarily indicate that the Paris climate goal is out of reach, CCCS director Carlo Buontempo said the planet has "never had to cope with a climate as warm as the current one."
"This inevitably pushes our ability to respond to extreme events—and adapt to a warmer world—to the absolute limit," he told The Guardian.
Climate scientist Bill McGuire called the Copernicus report "the bleakest news possible, especially with a climate denier U.S. president in office for the next four years."
Trump has pledged to expand fossil fuel extraction and do away with climate regulations introduced by the Biden administration, telling oil executives he would do so if they contributed $1 billion to his campaign in what was described as a quid pro quo.
The CCCS—which based its analysis on billions of measurements from satellites, ships, aircraft, and weather stations—noted in its report that October saw numerous extreme weather events tied to the warming planet. Heavy rains led to severe flash flooding in Spain, killing more than 200 people. Above average precipitation was also seen in Norway, France, China, southern Brazil, and parts of Australia, while Florida faced Hurricane Milton just two weeks after Hurricane Helene killed more than 230 people.
The World Meteorological Organization last week announced that carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere are accumulating faster than at any other time in human history, rising more than 10% in the last two decades.
"The most effective solution to address the climate challenges is a global commitment on emissions," Buontempo told The Guardian.
BBC journalist Navin Singh Khadka said on the news network that if the 1.5°C breach continues "in the long term, then we are warned there will be catastrophic consequences."
"In the meantime we're told this could be a temporary overshoot because of factors like El Niño, for instance, but even then... the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report has warned us that there might be some irreversible impacts," said Khadka. "What are those irreversible impacts? Can we live with them? That's the question now."
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Crypto Industry's $40 Million Defeat of Pro-Worker Sherrod Brown Called 'Obscene'
The Ohio Democrat lost his seat because "the billionaire-backed crypto industry donated $40 million to his right-wing opponent," lamented one labor journalist.
Nov 07, 2024
The Republican Party's capture of the U.S. Senate this week was made possible in part by massive spending from the nascent but increasingly influential cryptocurrency industry, which pumped more than $40 million into a successful effort to topple pro-worker progressive Sen. Sherrod Brown in favor of luxury car dealer Bernie Moreno.
Crypto industry spending helped make Ohio's closely watched Senate race the most expensive in the state's history, with Moreno's campaign boosted by around $40.1 million from the super PAC Defend American Jobs—part of what OpenSecrets described as the "triad" of allied pro-crypto groups pouring cash into the 2024 election.
The Washington Postnoted that Moreno "founded a blockchain firm called Ownum in 2018" and "has long immersed himself in blockchain technology, a registry of ownership that essentially underpins all cryptocurrency."
A spokesman for Fairshake, another member of the crypto PAC triad, took credit for Moreno's victory in a statement after the election was called in the Republican's favor and condemned Brown's
support for regulating the industry. Fairshake received tens of millions of dollars in donations from the cryptocurrency exchange giant Coinbase—some of which may have been illegal spending, according to the watchdog group Public Citizen, given that the company is a federal contractor.
"Sherrod Brown was a top opponent of cryptocurrency and thanks to our efforts, he will be leaving the Senate," said Fairshake's Josh Vlasto. "Senator-elect Moreno's come-from-behind win shows that Ohio voters want a leader who prioritizes innovation."
Crypto executive Tyler Winklevoss boasted in a social media post, "The crypto army is striking!"
"Sherrod Brown—crypto public enemy, Elizabeth Warren co-conspirator, and Gary Gensler crony—was just ousted by Bernie Moreno for Ohio Senate," wrote Winklevoss, the co-founder of Gemini.
Labor reporter Steven Greenhouse wrote Wednesday that it is "obscene" that Brown lost his seat because "the billionaire-backed crypto industry donated $40 million to his right-wing opponent."
"Sherrod Brown is one of the most pro-worker, pro-middle-class members of the U.S. Senate," Greenhouse added. "He truly fights for workers."
"The strategy was a brazen attempt to buy influence while keeping the public unaware of what they were supporting."
While the Ohio Senate contest was "the biggest single target of crypto money this cycle," as CNBCput it, the industry spread its money widely, backing both Republicans and Democrats in races across the country—underscoring its attempt to gain influence over future regulatory fights in Congress.
Overall, crypto groups spent more than $130 million in support of candidates for federal office this cycle. A tracker created by the Stand With Crypto Alliance estimates that 263 "pro-crypto candidates" were elected to the House and 18 to the Senate in Tuesday's contest.
Former President Donald Trump's victory over Vice President Kamala Harris was also seen as a win for the industry, with Bitcoin's price
spiking to a new all-time high on Wednesday. During his campaign, Trump vowed to make the U.S. "the crypto capital of the planet."
"Tonight the crypto voter has spoken decisively—across party lines and in key races across the country," gushed Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase. "Americans disproportionately care about crypto and want clear rules of the road for digital assets. We look forward to working with the new Congress to deliver it."
But one critic, Better Markets president Dennis Kelleher, cast doubt on the industry's self-serving narrative that the 2024 results amounted to a ringing endorsement of cryptocurrency.
In an op-ed for the San Francisco Chronicle on Thursday, Kelleher pointed out that pro-crypto PACs adopted "generic anodyne names" and bankrolled ads that didn't even mention cryptocurrency.
"It's as if Ford ran an ad campaign and never mentioned its cars," Kelleher wrote. "The strategy was a brazen attempt to buy influence while keeping the public unaware of what they were supporting. This way, the industry can claim the now-elected officials they backed have a mandate from the public to support crypto interests—even though they don't."
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