while we were looking elsewhere…
Five of the world’s most powerful financial institutions are actively contributing to climate change by providing debt and equity financing for crude oil extraction projects in the Amazon.
Five financial firms are funding the oil extraction business in the Amazon rainforest despite promising to act to mitigate the climate crisis. (Photo: Catedral Verde – Floresta Amazonica/Wikimedia)
by Eoin Higgins, staff writer CommonDreams.org
Thursday, March 12
A new report from the group Amazon Watch shows how five of the world’s largest financial institutions are funding the exploitation of the Amazon Rainforest for oil—even as those firms claim to be on the side of mitigating the climate crisis.
“Five of the world’s most powerful financial institutions are actively contributing to climate change by providing debt and equity financing for crude oil extraction projects in the Amazon,” reads the report.
Financiers: Your investments in #AmazonCrude and #deforestation are likely to become stranded assets and are tainted with #IndigenousRights violations across the Amazon rainforest. @Citi @GoldmanSachs @BlackRock @JPMorgan @Chase @HSBC #StopTheMoneyPipeline https://t.co/qyWJhmQG5u pic.twitter.com/v30Vh3DMqL
— Andrew E. Miller (@AmazonMiller) March 12, 2020
The five banks—Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, and BlackRock—”have made available tens of billions of dollars for oil companies operating in the Amazon, including GeoPark, Amerisur, Frontera, and Andes Petroleum,” according to the report.
Breaking! New @AmazonWatch report shows @Citi @GoldmanSachs @BlackRock @JPMorgan @Chase @HSBC oil extraction in the western Amazon:
✔ Destroys the rainforest
✔ Violates indigenous rights
✔ Escalates the climate crisis
#StopTheMoneyPipeline https://t.co/zqqSH7vsBI pic.twitter.com/SawFvUxGDj— CIEL (@ciel_tweets) March 12, 2020
The five firms have enjoyed good press recently for their stated commitment to curbing the climate crisis and making investment choices around saving the planet.
But, Amazon Watch said in an accompanying multimedia toolkit, the firms are instead “pouring money into crude oil extraction in the western Amazon, despite explicit opposition from indigenous groups on the ground and the worsening of the climate crisis that such activity promotes.”
This article first published by CommonDreams.org on Thursday, March 12, 2020 here…
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