re-post from ACF website

Banks and Climate Change

In a piece by Ian Lowe, President of the Australian Conservation Foundation, he speaks of the links the ANZ Bank has to climate change. Apparently the bank makes big loans to coal export companies.

This link between bank (and many other organisations) is explored in Guy Pearse’s book Greenwash.

The ANZ bank has declared its operations carbon neutral but excludes from that more suspect operations such as any loans it makes to some of the biggest coal produces and exporters. To quote from Ian Lowe:

The bank proudly says that its own operations have been carbon-neutral since 2010. That boast is a farce when the bank is happily supporting coal export facilities and even holding talks with companies proposing the massive Galilee Basin development, which would almost certainly lock the world into a future of disastrous climate change.

The bank’s directors were being verbally challenged by unhappy shareholders when the meeting broke up for lunch. The awful irony in all this is that ANZ proudly said that it was the least awful of the large Australian banks according to a leading international sustainability index.

See the full article online here about Banks and Climate Change – click here

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Paul Costigan, 25 January 2014