Is your money being used to finance the oil industry?
A timely study by Project Drawdown reveals that many banks use their customers’ accounts to finance the fossil fuel industry, generating a carbon footprint we could reduce by simply demanding our banks stop doing this; and if they won’t, then we can take our money elsewhere.
It’s not enough just to calculate the carbon footprint created by our personal consumption; we also need to estimate the contribution to the climate emergency our money makes when it is used to finance the investment or working capital needs of the oil industry. Demanding transparency from our banks in the management of our own money is common sense, especially if we also suspect that this money is being used to increase the impact of the climate emergency, which as we know is causing more and more extreme weather events, which in turn affect us and will affect our children.
The study shows that it is the bigger banks that finance the fossil fuel industry. But at a time like this, after a stage-managed COP28 held in a petro-state (as will next year’s), with only a passing reference to the end of fossil fuels in the final declaration, we should be lobbying for the banks where we keep our money not to use it to provide financing to those who develop these activities. Cutting funding to the oil industry would be, along with reducing indecent government…
