{"id":1863,"date":"2008-11-20T22:21:00","date_gmt":"2008-11-21T05:21:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/azaroff.com\/?p=1863"},"modified":"2023-03-26T10:40:03","modified_gmt":"2023-03-26T17:40:03","slug":"climate-friendly-banking-shows-how-your-money-can-make-an-impact-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/azaroff.com\/?p=1863","title":{"rendered":"Climate Friendly Banking shows how your money can make an impact."},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"float:right; margin:0 10px 0px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.azaroff.com\/blog\/uploaded_images\/ClimateFriendlyBanking-739249.jpg?ssl=1\" class=\"Imgbord\" alt=\"Climate Friendly Banking\" \/>One of the advantages of getting <a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/alerts\" title=\"Google Alerts\">Google Alerts<\/a> for your company is that you find nuggets like this.<\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ran.org\" title=\"Rainforest Action Network\">Rainforest Action Network<\/a> has investigated the contribution that Canada&#8217;s big FIs make to climate change. Their site, Climate Friendly Banking, goes beyond the actual greenhouse gas emissions from the FIs&#8217; operations to quantifying the lending and financing they provide to the fossil fuel industry, which in Alberta is particularly polluting.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The enormous financial commitments made by Canada&#8217;s five biggest banks &#8211; RBC, TD Bank, Scotiabank, CIBC and BMO &#8211; to fossil fuel production, namely oil and coal operations, inextricably links them to the fueling of global climate change. Banks are the lifeblood of the fossil fuel industry&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Financing Global Warming: Canadian Banks and Fossil Fuels&#8221; is the first report to analyze and quantify the greenhouse gas emissions of seven leading Canadian banks &#8211; the aforementioned banks as well as Desjardins and Vancity &#8211; based on their financing of fossil fuels&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Canada&#8217;s top banks provided more than $155 billion in total corporate financing for fossil fuel extraction in Canada and internationally in 2007.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>It&#8217;s a very intriguing way to look at this issue. I&#8217;ve said repeatedly that one of the main reasons I love working at Vancity is when you get to how financing affects the community, you get to the root cause of a lot of issues and can be an instrumental force for progress. Here&#8217;s one conclusion they draw.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Moving $10,000 from Scotiabank, the highest-carbon footprint bank, to Vancity, the low-carbon bank leader, avoids an amount of financed CO2 (1,430 kg CO2) comparable to:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>not driving a small car for five months;\n<li>replacing an average car with one that gets 33 percent better gas mileage;\n<li>eliminating seven two-hour airplane flights per year.<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>That&#8217;s powerful stuff. They have a calculator to figure out how your deposits at a Canadian FI affect climate change. I truly believe that more and more consumers (though by no means most) will include factors like this into their consumer decision-making.<\/p>\n<p>The site has several versions of the report, from a one pager to the full 294 page report. Well worth checking out.<\/p>\n<p>I was particularly proud of this sentence:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8230;Vancity stands out as the only Canadian bank profiled in this study that provided no corporate loans or direct investments to fossil fuel producers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Now that&#8217;s a company I want to work for.<\/p>\n<p><small>Thanks to Dan Dickinson for sending this my way.<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the advantages of getting Google Alerts for your company is that you find nuggets like this. The Rainforest Action Network has investigated the contribution that Canada&#8217;s big FIs make to climate change. Their site, Climate Friendly Banking, goes beyond the actual greenhouse gas emissions from the FIs&#8217; operations to quantifying the lending and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[19,6,5,4],"tags":[185,112,173,172,171],"class_list":["post-1863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-banking","category-climate-change","category-environment","category-vancity","tag-banking","tag-canada","tag-climate-change","tag-environment","tag-vancity"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p37qUH-u3","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/azaroff.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1863","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/azaroff.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/azaroff.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/azaroff.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/azaroff.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1863"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/azaroff.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1863\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/azaroff.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/azaroff.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/azaroff.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}