{"id":55742,"date":"2020-11-25T07:52:19","date_gmt":"2020-11-25T12:52:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=55742"},"modified":"2020-11-25T07:52:19","modified_gmt":"2020-11-25T12:52:19","slug":"the-big-banks-green-bafflegab","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=55742","title":{"rendered":"The Big Banks\u2019 Green Bafflegab"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Big Banks\u2019 Green Bafflegab<\/a><\/h3>\n

Look behind their pro-climate ads and do what they do. Follow the money.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n

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Greenwash gulch? Toronto\u2019s financial district.\u00a0Photo: Wikimedia.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n
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There must be a basement somewhere on Bay Street full of English majors. Every day they churn out great reams of verbiage about \u201cenvironmental, social and governance strategy\u201d and fill annual reports with a dozen different ways to say that the big five Canadian banks care about the environment.<\/p>\n

Except the numbers tell a different story, and if you want to know the truth, then the old adage \u201cfollow the money\u201d will steer you in the right direction, passing quickly through all the green bafflegab and arriving at the conclusion that the banks are sacrificing our climate to make a profit.<\/p>\n

The latest news is a recent\u00a0pledge<\/a>\u00a0by TD to achieve a \u201ctarget of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions associated with our operations and financing activities by 2050,\u201d trumpeting that it\u2019s the first Canadian bank to do so. Sounds good, yes?<\/p>\n

But dig deeper and there\u2019s no mention that since the Paris Agreement TD has\u00a0financed<\/a> more than C$135 billion in fossil fuel projects, the eighth largest amount out of all the banks on the planet. What will TD\u2019s net-zero pledge do to alter this climate-killing practice? It doesn\u2019t say. But judging from the collective shrug from the oil patch, probably not much.<\/p>\n

What TD does say is that it will \u201cwork closely with clients\u201d rather than decide that certain clients probably shouldn\u2019t be clients. Notably, Suncor, Cenovus and Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. all also have 2050 net-zero pledges, so presumably TD will continue to finance them, whose products rapidly fill our atmosphere with \u201cgreen\u201d carbon while our life-support systems fail.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Big Banks\u2019 Green Bafflegab Look behind their pro-climate ads and do what they do. Follow the money. Greenwash gulch? Toronto\u2019s financial district.\u00a0Photo: Wikimedia. There must be a basement somewhere on Bay Street full of English majors. Every day they churn out great reams of verbiage about \u201cenvironmental, social and governance strategy\u201d and fill annual […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[61,5270,103,12193,328,25462,5499],"class_list":["post-55742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-environment","tag-banking","tag-big-banks","tag-canada","tag-finance-industry","tag-fossil-fuels","tag-matt-price","tag-the-tyee"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=55742"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55742\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55743,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55742\/revisions\/55743"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}