Since 2015, 33 global banks have financed $1.9 trillion in fossil fuels

A new report released this week shows that 33 global banks have provided $1.
9 trillion in funding to fossil fuel companies since the Paris climate agreement was passed in late 2015, and that fossil fuel financing has increased
in each of the past two years.

The new report, Climate Change Bank Financing 2019, is the tenth annual fossil fuel report card and the first analysis
of overall funding in the fossil fuel sector by the world's major private banks.
The report was released Wednesday by the Rainforest Action Network, BankTrack, Indigenous Environment Network, Oil Change International, Sierra Club and Honor the Earth, and has been endorsed
by more than 160 organisations worldwide.

Since the adoption of the Paris Agreement, the world's 33 top banks have supplied $1.
9 trillion to fossil fuel companies, of which $600 billion has gone to 1 billion of the world's top banks.
00 companies most active in expanding fossil fuels, highlighting conventional practice in the face of the latest scientific warning from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which warns that "limiting global warming to 1.
5°C will require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented change
from all aspects of society.
" ”

The same report not only outlines the dangers if we continue to commit to business as usual, but also highlights the fact that
we need $2.
4 trillion a year in clean energy investments by 2035 to avoid the worst climate impacts.

Alison Kirsch, lead researcher on climate and energy at the Rainforest Action Network, said: "This is a red alert
.
The enormous scale at which global banks continue to inject trillions of dollars into fossil fuels is completely incompatible
with a livable future.
It's an affront to logic, science and humanity, and financing for fossil fuels has continued to increase
since the groundbreaking Paris climate agreement.
If banks don't quickly phase out support for polluting energy sources, planetary collapse due to man-made climate change is not only possible, but imminent
.
”

In addition, the report found that the world's four largest bankers in the fossil fuel energy industry are all U.
S.
banks: JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citi and Bank
of America.
That's not to say that banks in other parts of the world aren't bothering themselves either, with Britain's Barclays, Japan's Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG) and Canada's RBC all continuing to fund the sector
substantially.

But, as the report's authors highlight, "the fact that the top four bankers of climate change are based in the U.
S.
is a good indication of the enormous economic impact of the U.
S.
oil and gas industry, and two other U.
S.
banks, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, also make it into the top 12, meaning that all six U.
S.
banking giants are at the top
of the list of fossil fuel-financed banks.
" ”