A campaign backed by an environmental group, Greenpeace and other businesses has seen UK celebrities including Emma Thompson, Stephen Fry and Aisling Bea joining and other celebrities called on five of the UK’s biggest High Street banks to stop financing new oil and gas and coal projects.
This is coming after criticism that HSBC, Barclays, Santander, NatWest and Lloyds are funding “fossil fuel expansion” despite making green pledges and HSBC and Barclays said they were helping their clients to cut emissions.
Tagged ‘The Make My Money Matter’, the campaign points to research by environmental charity Rainforest Action Network, where it was said that between 2016 and 2021, HSBC, Barclays, Santander, NatWest and Lloyds expended almost $368bn (£298bn) in the fossil fuel industry.
The same research said that the lenders financed the 50 companies in the same time period, thereby taking the biggest investments in oil and gas projects to the tune of $141bn, adding that while HSBC and Lloyds had made “welcome new announcements” on stopping direct finance for new fossil fuel expansion since then, “there is a long way to go”.
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“HSBC was this month found to have provided $340m to a company opening a new coal mine in Germany,” the campaign said.
The campaign, which is also backed by actor Mark Rylance and musician Brian Eno, urges the public to sign an open letter asking the banks to stop directly financing projects that expand fossil fuel use, or end relationships with clients that do.
The campaign’s founder, filmmaker Richard Curtis, said he wanted to put “a fire under the banks”.
“It’s clear that new oil and gas fields are not only hugely damaging to the planet, but they’re also wildly unpopular with the public,” he said.
Almost one-third of HSBC, Barclays, Santander, NatWest and Lloyds’ customers surveyed by the campaign said that they would switch banks if they discovered that theirs was financing the expansion of fossil fuel projects and over 85% of customers at the five banks surveyed said they did not think that their bank was doing enough to tackle the climate crisis.
Story was adapted from BBC.
