Rainforest Action Network Targets Citi and Bank of America as World's Top Financiers of Coal

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Source: Rainforest Action Network

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SAN FRANCISCO - Rainforest Action Network (RAN) unveiled research today detailing Citi (NYSE:C) and Bank of America's (NYSE:BAC) extensive investments in the coal industry and announced a new campaign to shift the financial sector's multi-billion dollar investments away from dirty energy and toward clean energy solutions. Authors, activists, coal-affected-community leaders and institutional investors joined RAN on a telephone press conference to announce the initiative and urge the banks to become a vital part of the solution. Electricity generation from coal is the leading cause of global warming in the U.S.; the largest source of toxic mercury; and a top contributor to air pollution, asthma and ecological destruction. According to Bloomberg, Citi was the coal industry's top underwriter in 2006. Bank of America is also deeply invested in the coal industry, financing companies that extract coal through the devastating practice of mountaintop removal coal mining.

Both banks are top lenders to companies proposing to build new coal-fired power plants which, if built, will emit more than 600 million tons of carbon dioxide annually and negate nearly every other effort to combat climate change. While Citi and Bank of America finance this coal rush, leading climate scientists are recommending drastic reductions in global emissions in order to prevent climate chaos. RAN's comprehensive briefing on Citi and Bank of America's dirty energy investments was released today and is available online at www.RAN.org/presskit

Since 2000, RAN's Global Finance Campaign has pushed Citi and Bank of America to address the social and environmental impacts of their lending practices. Though the campaign's efforts led to groundbreaking policies by both companies, neither has adequately addressed the effect its lending has on the urgent problem of climate change.

"Bank of America and Citi have the power and the responsibility to stop the imminent climate catastrophe," said Rebecca Tarbotton, director of RAN's Global Finance Campaign. "Rather than taking baby steps on climate change, these banks need to treat this crisis with the urgency they usually reserve for their fiscal bottom line and immediately shift their investments away from coal and toward a clean energy future."

According to Tarbotton, until Citi and Bank of America "stop financing the biggest causes of climate change, they should expect a multilateral campaign that involves international grassroots pressure, shareholder and board engagement, protests and significant negative media coverage."

SUPPORTING STATEMENTS

"Here in West Virginia, coal companies are using 3 1/2 millions pounds of explosives a day to bomb our homes and mountains," said Julia 'Judy' Bonds, founder of Coal River Mountain Watch. "They are poisoning our water and our air. I want Citi and Bank of America to realize that when they fund coal companies, they are ruining lives and killing communities."

"We need to be investing in the technologies of the 21st century, not the technologies of the 19th," said Bill McKibben, founder of Step It Up, the largest demonstration against global warming in history. "If we build more coal plants, our chances of arresting climate change short of the thresholds science now warns us not to cross will be slim indeed--this is the crucial battle for our ecological future."

"Given the severity of the climate changes that are already occurring - glacial melt, rising sea levels and extreme weather events - we question the wisdom of new investment in coal burning power plants," said Leslie Lowe, energy and environment program director at the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility. "While IGCC - integrated gasification combined cycle - plants produce 20 percent less CO2 than conventional coal plants, they still emit more than twice as much CO2 as natural gas plants and cost 30 percent more than conventional coal plants. And that is without the cost of carbon capture and storage technology, which has yet to be proven at utility scale, or the necessary infrastructure to move the carbon to the storage site and monitor it for time immemorial being factored in.

Building new coal plants in the face of impending carbon regulation without the proven ability to capture and store carbon is a high risk enterprise that investors, as well as regulators, should view with extreme caution."

For more information, visit www.DirtyMoney.org

 

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