Banktrack Blog

Bank financing of staggering Polish coal development plans continues to run deep

Feb 252016

By Kuba Gogolewski, Development YES Open-Pit Mines NO, 25th February 2016.

In spite of the Paris Agreement and the European Union’s 2030 greenhouse gas emissions reduction target, Polish state-owned and private companies are pushing on with plans to develop a string of new open-pit lignite mines.

And while local communities on the front line of these potentially destructive projects continue to resist them, many well-known banking names – including some which have recently made encouraging, if belated, moves towards the coal finance exit doors – remain anchored in the Polish coal sector, and appear more than willing to prop up an industry which now appears to be on its last legs. Continue reading »

Post-Paris, and the dodgy coal deals are already sprouting up in 2016

Feb 022016

Bangladesh’s Rampal moves forward, as bank interest in the Dominican Republic’s Punta Catalina plant and Indonesia’s Tanjong Jati B raises concerns over the strength of their climate commitments

By Greig Aitken and Yann Louvel, BankTrack, 4 February 2016

As we’ve been settling into the new year and wondering how visible and – crucially – rapid any genuine follow through from the words of the Paris climate summit would be, there’s been a nagging concern at the back of our minds: in what’s supposed to be these new, ambitious ‘1.5 degree Celsius limit’ times, what’s going to be the first major new coal installation investment of 2016, and who’s going to be bankrolling it?

Ukrainian coal giant DTEK’s assets becoming increasingly stranded

Dec 222015

By Oleg Savitsky (NECU) and Greig Aitken (BankTrack), 22 December 2015

Almost two months ago, NECU and BankTrack issued an Investor Alert describing the circumstances which had forced Ukraine’s biggest coal company, DTEK, to seek a debt restructuring agreement with a host of European banks, including Dutch ING, Italy’s UniCredit and Austria’s Erste Bank. The troubled coal giant has been seeking a delay in the payment of most of its $3 billion debt. Continue reading »

Five reasons why the banking sector’s new climate principles are mainstreaming climate inaction

Dec 122015

By Yann Louvel, BankTrack, 12 December 2015

Earlier this week I was able to participate and ask a question at one of the many Paris COP21 side events: the launch of the ‘Five Voluntary Principles for Mainstreaming Climate Action within Financial Institutions’, convened by a group of public ‘development’ banks including the World Bank, the European Investment Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. The new principles so far have 26 banks from the public and private sectors on board, and appear set to be touted for further signatories in the coming months.

These are the latest in a series of voluntary principles on climate by global banks which have gone nowhere over the past decade – see the Carbon Principles and Climate Principles, launched in 2008, which subsequently disappeared without a trace. My general impression is that these principles won’t go far either. They appear, though, to have served another purpose for the financial sector, providing PR greenwashing at the most important climate gathering of the decade. Continue reading »

21 days to COP21, 21 days left for banks to do the Paris Pledge

Nov 092015

By Johan Frijns, BankTrack Director, 9 November 2015

With just 21 days left until the start of the Paris Climate Summit (COP21), there is still time for banks to make a strong commitment to do their part in stopping climate change; by publicly pledging before ‘Paris’ to stop financing the coal industry.

Banks that make this ‘Paris Pledge’ to abandon coal will help ensure that ‘Paris’ will indeed be the watershed event we need it to be in the global fight to combat climate change. After all, while the negotiations in Paris will focus solely on reaching emission reduction targets, the tailpipe approach, the real challenge is at the wellhead; how do we keep at least 80 percent of all currently known fossil fuel reserves in the ground, starting with coal?

Climate hype grips Wall Street – and why no one’s falling for it

Oct 022015

By Greig Aitken, BankTrack, 2 October 2015

With just two months to go now before the United Nations climate summit in Paris, the warnings about the consequences of climate inaction are coming thick and fast.

Stepping up this week has been Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, with tough talk on how climate change will lead to financial crises and falling living standards – that is “unless the world’s leading countries do more to ensure that their companies come clean about their current and future carbon emissions.”

What almost every major country has been doing in the run-up to Paris is submitting their pledges to reduce carbon emissions, the so-called ‘intended nationally determined contributions’. As the Climate Progress website has reported this week, the pledged CO2 reductions – including from the US, the European Union and China – have delivered something on paper at least. Growing realism, however, about where even a ‘successful’ Paris agreement will likely leave us is summed up thus by Climate Progress:

As RBS comes clean about its finance for coal mining, the UK’s top banks can now seize the chance to clean up their acts

Sep 092015

By Yann Louvel and Greig Aitken, BankTrack, 9 September 2015

We’ve just published the latest additions to our series of coal bank briefings, and it’s a triple whammy of information assessing the coal finance and associated policies of the UK’s three biggest banks: Barclays, HSBC and RBS.

The three also happen to be the UK’s top three coal banks, having coughed up a combined total of more than £30 billion for the most climate-damaging fossil fuel sector between 2005 and April 2014. The new briefings focus on each bank’s policy approach to coal mining and coal power finance, and describe a variety of legacy investments to the coal industry that are still looming large with damaging impacts for the environment, the climate and local communities. Continue reading »

Stopping the coal monster in its tracks – BankTrack’s report back from the breakthrough Ende Gelände action

Aug 252015

By Catalina von Hildebrand and Christine Voet, 25 August 2015

Last weekend two of us from the BankTrack team participated at Ende Gelände, a mass civil disobedience action in Germany’s Rhineland at the RWE-owned Garzweiler open cast lignite mine, and joined with activists from across Europe and beyond. We set out to promote our Paris Pledge campaign aimed at getting the world’s banks to end their financing of the coal industry, and learned a whole lot more in the process. Continue reading »

Even Deutsche Bank can show it’s committed to a low carbon ‘paradigm shift’ – by signing the Paris Pledge to quit coal

Jul 212015

By Catalina von Hildebrand, 21 July 2015

Two weeks ago BankTrack launched its Paris Pledge campaign, aimed at getting the world’s banks to end their multi-billion dollar financing of the coal industry – and many thanks to all those people and organisations from around the world who have already supported the call (if you haven’t already, you can do so here).

After Slovenia’s Sostanj coal power plant debacle, is any bank going to finance Croatia’s Plomin C?

Jun 122015

By Pippa Gallop (Bankwatch) and Yann Louvel (BankTrack), 12 June 2015

This blog post is published jointly with Bankwatch.

Slovenia’s newly built Sostanj 6 power plant is expected to generate losses of around EUR 200 million over the next 3-4 years. This was the view put forward at a recent panel discussion in Zagreb by Blaz Kosorok, General Director of Holding Slovenske Elektrarne (HSE), Slovenia’s state-owned power generation company and the country’s largest company.

Given that Croatia’s Plomin C project shares some of Sostanj 6’s features – failure to really consider alternatives, a lack of transparency about costs, and failure to properly include the public in decision-making – could Croatia be about to repeat its neighbour’s mistakes? And how is the only major international financier involved in Plomin C to date – Crédit Agricole – viewing its own future in another looming Balkan coal power debacle? Continue reading »

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