One Oz Coal Mine Enough For 6% Of Carbon Needed To Leave 2C Increase Behind - Will Banks Fund It?
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Many fewer people have heard of Australia’s Galilee basin, but that’s about to change. Work is scheduled to start in January on turning this remote basin into the world’s biggest coal mine — a colliery so vast that this single mine, in a nation with 0.3% of the world’s population, would produce 6% of the carbon necessary to take the planet past a 2C temperature rise, the red line set by the world’s governments.
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In the Galilee it’s a little different. Australia’s far right government loves coal — it’s pretty much all they talk about. Its approval of the project can be taken for granted (though polling shows approval of the government itself is another issue, and that Aussies are turning restive at its fanaticism). But building out the ports and railways and giant pits will require huge sums of capital, and so it tests the resolve of the world’s financial system to come to terms with climate.
Any bank that backs this ludicrous plan is announcing, quite plainly, that it cares nothing about climate change. It’s also — probably worse for a bank — announcing that it’s stuck in the 19th century. Serious financial authorities (the governor of the Bank of England most recently) are warning that fossil fuel reserves risk becoming “stranded assets” as the world acts on climate change — investors in the tar sands, for instance, have already taken an enormous hit, and coal stocks have been tumbling for years. A British cabinet minister warned the other day that they were the “subprime assets of the future”, a sobering warning for everyone still recovering from the housing bust of 2008.
So far the financial industry is showing relative sobriety. Goldman Sachs, for instance, has announced it won’t back the Galilee mines — and if you’ve found something too dirty for Goldman Sachs, that’s saying something. Citibank too. Deutsche Bank. HSBC. Campaigners will have to head into the hinterlands of Queensland to try and block preliminary dredging in January — just as activists stand by to put their bodies in front of Keystone across Nebraska and South Dakota should Obama give in to the Republicans. They’ll also have to keep up the pressure on any institution or bank that is investing in the fossil fuel industry – an upcoming Global Day of Divestment Action next February provides just the opportunity.
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http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/dec/10/keystone-xl-and-galilee-valley-threaten-the-global-climate-talks
