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European Bank For Reconstruction And Development Ends All Upstream Oil Financing
European Bank For Reconstruction And Development Ends All Upstream Oil Financing
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) will no longer invest in oil and gas exploration and production, the bank’s Managing Director Harry Boyd-Carpenter told Reuters as the institution pledged to align all its activities to the Paris Agreement goals from the end of next year.
“We will no longer invest in upstream oil and gas projects,” Boyd-Carpenter told Reuters on Thursday.
On the same day, the bank announced that its Board of Governors decided at the Annual Meeting 2021 to accelerate decarbonization across the regions it operates, supporting them to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.
The EBRD invests in projects in central and eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean.
The EBRD, however, will continue to invest in selected oil and gas projects in the downstream and midstream that are aligned to or contribute to the Paris Agreement goals, EBRD’s Boyd-Carpenter told Reuters.
“The low carbon transition requires the world economy to move in less than 30 years from a more than 80 per cent reliance on fossil fuels to a net-zero model. This is a challenge that is unprecedented in economic history. Similarly, the associated opportunity is enormous,” the EBRD’s First Vice-President Jürgen Rigterink said in a statement.
The EBRD is the latest bank to announce it would halt financing for one or other form of oil and gas.
Last year, Deutsche Bank ended financing for new oil and gas projects in the oil sands and the Arctic region effective immediately.
In the United States, Goldman Sachs said in December 2019 that it would decline to finance new Arctic oil exploration and production and new thermal coal mine development or strip mining. Wells Fargo and JPMorgan have also said they would stop financing new oil and gas projects in the Arctic.
Earlier this year, UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ said that banks should finance low-carbon climate-resilient projects, not big fossil fuel infrastructure that is not even cost-effective anymore.
The ‘Greek Debt Deal’ Is Already Starting To Fall Apart
The ‘Greek Debt Deal’ Is Already Starting To Fall Apart
The “deal that was designed to fail” has already begun to unravel. The IMF, which was expected to provide a big chunk of the financing, has indicated that it may walk away from the deal unless Greece is granted extensive debt relief. This is something that the Germans and their allies have resolutely refused to do. Meanwhile, outrage is pouring in from all over Europe regarding what the Greek government is being forced to do to their own people. Most of this anger is being directed at the Germans, but the truth is that without German money the Greek banking system and the Greek economy will completely and utterly collapse. So even though Greek Prime Minister Alex Tsipras admits that this is a deal that he does not believe in, he is attempting to get it pushed through the Greek parliament, and we should know on Wednesday whether he was successful or not. But even if the Greek parliament approves it, we could still see either the German or the Finnish parliaments reject it. It seems as though nobody is really happy with this deal, and these negotiations have exposed very deep divisions within Europe. Could this be the beginning of the end for the eurozone?
The Germans appear to believe that they can push the Greeks out of the eurozone and that everything will be okay somehow. This is something that I wrote about extensively yesterday, and it turns out that a lot of other prominent voices agree with me. For example, just consider what Paul Krugman of the New York Times had to say about this. I am kind of amazed that he finally got something right…
Suppose you consider Tsipras an incompetent twerp. Suppose you dearly want to see Syriza out of power. Suppose, even, that you welcome the prospect of pushing those annoying Greeks out of the euro.
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Operation Choke-Point Is Worse Than We Thought
Operation Choke-Point Is Worse Than We Thought
Operation Choke Point is an initiative of the DoJ that was announced in 2013 which investigates bank interactions with certain businesses believed to be at higher risk for fraud and money laundering. When first disclosed it was heavily criticised for bypassing due process with critics warning that “it’s a thinly veiled ideological attack on industries the Obama administration doesn’t like, such as gun sellers,” and precious metals dealers.However, as Mike Maloney explains, it is far worse than that… “it violates the most fundamental principles of the rule of law and accountable, transparent government.”
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From: Staff Report, 113th Congress, December 8, 2014
“At a minimum, Operation Choke Point is little more than government-mandated de-risking.FDIC, in cooperation with the Justice Department, made sure banks understood – or in their own language, “got the message” – that maintaining relationships with certain disfavored business lines would incur enormous regulatory risk.
The effect of this policy has been to deny countless legal and legitimate merchants access to the financial system and deprive them of their very ability to exist.
Accordingly, Operation Choke Point violates the most fundamental principles of the rule of law and accountable, transparent government.”
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We strongly suggest you are not holding anything sharp while you watch these clips….
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