La Place de Paris, Europe's leading fossil fuel financier in 2020
The logos of Crédit Agricole, Société Générale and BNP Paribas banks in a street in Rennes, September 26, 2011. ASSOCIATED PRESS - David Vincent
Text by: Agnieszka Kumor
3 min
The Parisian financial center is the European champion of fossil fuels in 2020. This is what Reclaim Finance and several international organizations denounce in their annual report entitled Banking of Climate Chaos, published this Wednesday, March 24.
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This report, published jointly by six international NGOs including Reclaim Finance and the Rainforest Action Network, and supported by dozens of others, such as Amis de la Terre France, uncovers global trends in oil, gas and coal financing by major international banks.
Globally, the 60 largest of them granted $ 3.8 trillion to companies active in the oil, gas and coal sectors.
And French banks are at the top of this
inglorious list
at European level, even surpassing their British neighbors.
The climate lights on red
Since the adoption of
the Paris Agreement in 2015
, French banks have reportedly spent $ 295 billion to finance fossil fuels, the report reveals.
"
Paris wants to be the capital of green finance, but the figures available to us show that it is rather the capital of climate hypocrisy,
" said Lucie Pinson, director and spokesperson for Reclaim Finance.
What challenges its authors is that six years after COP21, while
the climate indicators are in the red
, the 60 largest banks in the world not only continue to bet on these polluting sources, but have also increased their funding. .
French women at the head of European banks
American banks remain the biggest financers of fossil fuels, ahead of Chinese and Japanese banks.
And in fourth place, we find the French banks: BNP Paribas, Société Générale and Crédit Agricole.
"
With, also, a large weight of Natixis
", specifies Lucie Pinson.
With nearly $ 41 billion granted to companies active in the hydrocarbons, BNP Paribas is the bank that increased its support the most between 2019 and 2020.
Good practices exist
It is a "
day of shame
" for French banks, comments Reclaim Finance.
“
There are no good or bad students.
What matters are good practices.
And French banks have also shown that they could act on the climate emergency when they stopped financing all companies that are developing new projects in the coal sector.
It is urgent to apply the same logic to oil and gas.
If new coal-fired power stations are incompatible with the climate emergency, new oil platforms or new drilling in fossil fuels are also incompatible
”, concludes Lucie Pinson.
There is still a long way to go, say the authors of the report, to respond to Bruno Le Maire, French Minister of the Economy, who demanded at the end of 2020 from the Place de Paris an exit strategy from oil and gas.
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