In short:
Australia’s largest mortgage lender is no longer offering money to fossil fuel companies that are not aligned with the Paris Agreement.
The bank announced the new direction in its latest climate report, published on the same day it posted close to $10 billion in full-year net profit.
What’s next?
The spotlight is now on the other big banks with a finance deal of about $750 million for oil and gas giant Santos on the table.
What is a genuine emmisions plan? Of course fossil fuel companies are opposed to the Paris Agreement. Even the ones that claim to be aligned with it. They’re structure is fundamentally against anything other than the exponential increase in oil and gas consumption.
The industry could have gotten behind clean energy decades ago. Instead they chose to continue extracting a material that - without a shadow of a doubt - we will run out of. What an insane business model.
Remember a decade ago when the US was decreed ‘the Saudi Arabia of natural gas’? They cooked up this wonderful term for the methane. Every pundit and politician from coast to coast called it a bridge fuel over and over again. Then instead of a bridge, they went and built a ramp that isn’t levelling off, never mind declining.
Imagine if a couple generations ago, Exxon decided to pivot to solar and wind. With the financial resources available to that one company, we might have had panels at 40% efficiency by now. Maybe turbines at 50-60%. Who knows, if the industry as a whole put in the leg work, we may have been off oil and gas entirely today.
The fossil fuel industry has an expiry date. If we aren’t sufficiently prepared, the impact of running out of an energy supply will be devastating.
For a fossil fuel firm, it would look like a binding commitment to leave a large chunk of their reserves in the ground and a plan to end extraction over a couple decades while returning profits to shareholders in the meantime
I agree. In the long term, it would make sense to leave as much as you can so you have it for more useful purposes in the future. Medical applications perhaps, or rocket fuel to get materials to the moon would be cool. Who wouldn’t want to see us get a moon base?