Climate change

What do you think your annual carbon footprint might be?  Maybe around the UK average of 8-9 tonnes. But what if you took into account the emissions resulting from the investments of the bank where your money is? That would give quite a different picture...

If you’re an RBS customer it would give the picture below (we could have also done this calculation for other high street banks like HSBC, Lloyds and Barclays, who also invest heavily in fossil fuels, and probably come up with similarly striking results).

If this picture shocks you, why not have a go at our mini-quiz and see whether you can guess how many times greater the emissions resulting from RBS’s loans to fossil fuel companies are than the entire emissions of Scotland, where the bank is headquartered. 

Or come on our 'Scandalous Edinburgh plc' walking tour where we'll really be bringing our Carbon Capital campaign to life with humour, real life stories and more eye opening facts.  ...

New research has revealed that Royal Bank of Scotland’s 2012 carbon emissions could be up to 1,200 times higher than the figure reported by the bank, and 18 times the total emissions of Scotland.

The study by the World Development Movement estimates that emissions resulting from RBS’s loans to coal, oil and gas companies bring the bank’s 2012 carbon footprint to up to 911 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent. The much smaller figure of 735,000 tonnes reported by the bank includes only its direct use of fossil fuels and electricity, and business travel.

A campaigner poses as an oil-addicted banker outside RBS's AGM. Photo: Richard Scott

RBS made loans of over £45 billion to fossil fuel companies and energy finance companies between 2008 and 2012, making it one of the UK’s biggest financers of high carbon energy. At least £43 billion of these loans were still active at the end of 2012. In comparison, the bank lent just £167 million for renewable energy in the same year.

The estimated RBS carbon footprint for 2012 is 1.6 times the emissions of the whole of the UK in 2012, as well as 18...

Villagers resisting riot police during the Tobaco eviction.

 
Villagers were willing to move, but they wanted to move as a community to new land where they could carry on farming. But...

Last week I was delighted to hear that the European Development Bank is to stop financing coal fired power stations, in order to help Europe reduce pollution and meet its climate targets.  The decision followed an earlier statement from the World Bank that in the future it will fund new coal plants only “in rare circumstances”.

Concern about climate change and the need for alternative energy sources has caused these two global banking institutions to think twice about funding coal, which is the dirtiest of all the so–called ‘conventional’ fossil fuels. Could our own high street banks and pension funds follow their lead and pull out of investment in coal?

When I first joined the World Development Movement four years ago, we were campaigning to stop the ‘new coal rush’ of planned coal-fired power stations across Britain. After a gap of 20 years, the UK governments wanted to build new coal plants – and to hell with any climate targets...

This morning we descended upon the London Stock Exchange AGM to highlight the burgeoning carbon bubble that threatens both climate catastrophe and economic collapse if not promptly burst.

The ‘carbon bubble’ is the amount of CO2 that will be released into the atmosphere if all of the ‘proven reserves’ owned by the largest fossil fuel companies are extracted and burnt. The value of these companies is largely based upon these reserves yet burning them is totally incompatible with averting climate catastrophe. Since they make up such a substantial proportion of LSE shares (about 25% at £900 billion), and therefore our GDP, this disjuncture with reality could cause another economic crisis not dissimilar to the housing crash of 2008.

The amount of ‘unburned carbon’ held on the LSE is immense: 472 times larger than the annual emissions of the UK and more than the entire world has burned for the past six years. Clearly burning this mass of fossil fuel would constitute an unmitigated disaster when there is a desperate need to transition to clean energy. We therefore set out to bring our concerns to the attention of the LSE AGM attendees.

We handed out bottles of blowing...

Coal mining in Indonesia is having a huge impact on local and indigenous populations. Alex Scrivener and Andrew Taylor from WDM recently visited Central Kalimantan on the island of Borneo and this is what they saw at the Borneo Lumbung Mine near Maruwei:

Things have been a struggle for local people since the mining companies moved in. A woman called Erly Aisha told Alex and Andrew how things have changed. "Fifteen years ago before the mining companies, we could use the river water to cook, shower and wash. Now it is polluted and we can only use it for having a shower and for the toilet." 

BHP Billiton, a UK financed mining company, is planning extensive mining projects in the Murung Raya district of Central Kalimantan. HSBC and Standard Chartered Bank are both linked to financing BHP Billiton. WDM is campaigning for these banks and other parts of the financial sector to be ...

Here are the reports and briefings produced for the Carbon Capital campaign:

Web of Power

Carbon Capital handbook

Cerrejón mine briefing

Mandatory carbon reporting briefing

Carbon...

The 'Carbon Bubbles champagne bar' tour continued this morning as we brought the taste of destruction back to the city once again. This time it was outside HSBC’s AGM at the Barbican Centre. We served up the finest quality oil from the Canadian Tar Sands, financed by HSBC, to passing shareholders so that they could sample the destruction that their shares cause. Many shareholders didn’t bat an eye lid at the reality that their shares were contributing to bankrolling climate change. Additionally causing the displacement of local communities in the global south to make way for fossil fuel extraction. One older gentleman literally guzzled down the oil we were offering shareholders in champagne glasses (in reality molasses disguised as oil). Clearly displaying that those involved in the fossil fuel web of power do actually love the taste of oil, I never knew. We also had samples of coal from the Cerrejón mine in Colombia as a visual display of what shareholder money is invested in.

Between 2010 and 2012 the top five UK banks raised £170 billion in bonds and shares for fossil fuel companies. HSBC outdid them all raising £74.64 billion for fossil fuel firms during this two year period. At present fossil fuel reserves on the London Stock Exchange are over 200 times the UK’...

British mining giant Anglo-American will face protests at its London AGM on Friday over controversial mining projects in Colombia and South Africa, and the climate impact of its coal extraction.

Protest: Anglo-American AGM, Friday 19 April at 1pm, Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, London SW1P 3EE

Protestors in miners’ helmets and overalls will hold placards reading ‘Anglo American: Destroying lives, Destroying the climate’.

Representatives of communities devastated by Anglo-American mines will attend the AGM to demand justice. Julio Gomez will travel from Colombia to condemn the Cerrejón open pit coal mine, in which Anglo American has a one-third share. Development of the mine has led to the eviction of indigenous and Afro-Colombian people from their ancestral territories, and the destruction of vast areas of productive land.

Following local and international outcry, the Cerrejón coal company recently shelved an expansion project which would have meant diverting the region’s only major river. All of the coal mined at Cerrejón is exported, so does not...

I have spent this week at the World Social Forum in Tunis. It’s been a slightly chaotic week of overrunning schedules, last minute room changes and broken translated equipment, but in spite of some frustrations, it is undeniably an incredible feat of organisation.

Run by a group of activists, with no office or paid staff, the World Social Forum has still succeeded in brining together thousands of activists – some reports say as many as 70,000 – together from around the world to discuss where we’re at in the quest for real solutions to the poverty, inequality and injustice we see in the world today.

The main slogan of the World Social Forum ‘Another World is Possible’ – a slogan made real by movements from the host country Tunisia who overthrew a dictatorship two years ago. People have travelled from across the world to discuss what that looks like, and how to work towards it.

One of the key questions I’ve been focusing on here is around how we should move forward in the struggle with climate justice, given the deepening...

The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) reported a £5.2 billion loss as it announced its annual results today The bank’s boss Stephen Hester is four years into his original five-year plan to bring RBS back on track – yet things don’t seem to be getting much better for the publicly owned bank. RBS blames a year of heavy fines. But let’s just remind ourselves of what these fines were:

PPI: The bank knowingly mis-sold its customers insurance which they neither needed nor could use, over a period of years. Fine: £2.2 billion

Libor: The bank illegally manipulated a crucial interest rate to benefit itself whilst negatively affecting mortgage payers in the UK (and elsewhere). Fine: £391 million

Oily bankers: Protest at RBS's 2011 AGM in Edinburgh 

Bankers this year have been rewarded for doing a ‘good job’. Bonus pot: £600,000 million

Some pretty significant figures that the bank should never have been in a position to pay.

If the RBS was really making headway to being sustainable and acting in the interest...

The 18th annual Conference of the Parties (COP 18) took place in Doha, Qatar between 26 November and 8 December. Like last year’s conference in Durban, the stakes were high, with the world coming ever closer to the point of no return on climate change and the Kyoto Protocol, the world’s only legally binding emissions reductions treaty, due to expire at the end of 2012.

In the event, despite an agreement to approve new extremely unambitious targets for a second commitment period for Kyoto running to 2020, the conference was characterised by inaction on emissions cuts on the part of the rich developed countries and increasing despair amongst poor countries.

For a start, big emitters Russia, Canada, Japan and New Zealand joined the USA in refusing to join the second commitment period for Kyoto at all, meaning that legally binding emissions targets will apply to the EU, Norway, Switzerland and Australia alone. But the target agreed (just a 20 per cent drop on 1990 levels) is nowhere near the 40-50 per cent cuts that developing countries were calling for and, once carbon offsets are factored in, translates to only a minimal reduction on current emissions. 

And while limits were placed on the carrying over of excess ‘hot air’ carbon permits from the first...

Guest blog by WDM ally Lidy Nacpil, from the Jubilee South Movement on Debt and Development Asia Pacific, writing from the UN climate talks in Doha, Qatar.

I arrived in Doha on 2 December for the second week of the UN climate negotiations, to find that no progress has been made on the critical issues that should be resolved at this meeting. I didn’t find this surprising. My direct experiences with the last five annual UN climate talks before Doha have shown a clear effort by many of the rich, industrialised countries – ‘developed countries’ in UN language – to evade compliance with their obligations under the Climate Convention and their legally binding agreements to take urgent and immediate action to address the climate crisis and prevent it from reaching catastrophic levels.

It is no wonder that some climate justice activists are now refusing to get involved in the battles taking place in the context of the international negotiations. The odds are heavily stacked against the rights and interests of the majority of people all over the world, especially those from the South - from the ‘developing and least developing countries’ - who are the most vulnerable to the devastating impacts of the crisis.

Many of us do still choose to fight in the...