Photo: iStockphoto
Three major investment banks, Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley, will announce new environmental standards today that are expected to make it more difficult for large coal-fired power plants in the United States to get funding. The standards anticipate some form of cap-and-trade program becoming law in the U.S. in coming years and seek to force utilities to plan for the inevitable; coal plants seeking funding would first have to prove they can be financially viable under a cap-and-trade system. The three banks said that they would consider funding energy efficiency measures and renewable-energy projects ahead of coal plants and that when funding coal projects they'll heavily favor plants that can successfully capture and sequester their carbon emissions. The banks maintain that their primary motivation for the standards is financial; Wall Street bigwigs don't want to be stuck with debt when coal plants are forced to pay for at least a portion of their emission allowances under cap and trade. Jeffrey Holzschuh of Morgan Stanley paraphrased Melissa Etheridge, crooning, "We have to wake up some people who are asleep."
source: The Wall Street Journal
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Comments
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Delay And Deny Posted 3:10 am
04 Feb 2008
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Percival Potts Posted 3:10 am
04 Feb 2008
I suppose that Mr. Holzschuh's comment about waking up people who are asleep could have been an homage (intentional or subconscious) to Melissa Etheridge. One or both of them could have an earlier inspiration for their language, though. I'll give you a hint: he's one of America's most influential hermits and a beacon for the American environmental movement... Yep. Henry David Thoreau. Walden begins with the epigraph:
"I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up."
Ahh. Doesn't it make you want to sound your barbaric yawp?
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javaearth Posted 3:18 am
04 Feb 2008
Money is very powerful and I hope this makes a new positive change!
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birdbrain64 Posted 3:31 am
04 Feb 2008
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Tasermons Partner Posted 3:42 am
04 Feb 2008
Why do I get the feelin' that this will turn out to be a greenwash farce?
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Wolverine Posted 9:27 am
04 Feb 2008
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spaceshaper Posted 10:35 am
04 Feb 2008
And the more expensive the smokestack cleanup gets, the more the coal companies will be pressured to keep the feedstock cost low by using the cheapest, most damaging extraction methods.
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E2 Posted 5:02 am
05 Feb 2008
Yes, the advisors to the process did include some coal companies, as well as Environmental Defense and NRDC - it's called collaborative stakeholder engagement. You need to give all voices a seat at the table to reach a workable stop gap measure until the US government steps up to the plate.
and Re: Greenwashing claims
Of course this is not a cure to all coal's ills, but it's also not greenwash. It's a concrete first step, and I think we should applaud the banks for stepping up and forcing coal companies to internalize the cost of carbon, in the absence of any governmental requirement to do so.
Baby steps!
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sycamore Posted 4:48 pm
05 Feb 2008
Wolverine, lets not forget that these same banks have also funded all the good environmental projects that are making the Planet better. Money is not good or evil it just does what it is told to do. We should let our money talk for us by funding environmental organizations and not the Presidential candidates. The millions of dollars wasted on these lame candidates would really give us a voice when spent directly on environmental problems. We as environmentalists should be directly funding environmental projects and turn our backs on these imposters. Go for Results not for the Promise.
"Do not let circumstances control you. You change your circumstances."
Jackie Chan
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Wolverine Posted 8:44 am
06 Feb 2008
I agree with you about spending money, but the best thing to do is not spend it at all. The less you consume, the less harm you do. And I also agree about the presidential candidates, I don't support any of the major ones.
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Tasermons Partner Posted 8:33 am
08 Feb 2008
I'm not so sure 'bout that. Very few eco-projects I know of (unless thay also have some other use) get funded by banks. Usually donantions are how most private eco-projects get funded.
I'm only aware of a few projects that were funded by banks, and most were very massive and high-PR projects. And I imagine they got some type of tax-write-off from it.
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sycamore Posted 2:21 am
09 Feb 2008
Banks are the underlying financing for most business ventures. Environmental lending takes on many forms. Large wind turbine projects cost in the hundreds of millions of dollars and are not funded by donations. Several government agencies have grant program but most of the money comes from private funding. This is just a quick list of some of the finical institutions that are involved in financing wind generation and is by no means a complete list.
Hardin County Savings Bank, $550,000.00 - Eldora- New Providence School Dist. Iowa - 750 kw wind turbine
Farmers And Merchants Bank, 60% of project debt - Mini Wind I & II - Buffalo Ridge are of southwestern Minn. - each turbine with the capacity of 1.9 MW
AgStar Financial - a Minnesota based lender, associated with Farm Credit Administration.
GE Structured Finance
Commercial Banks "Foreign banks have financed almost all large U.S. wind powered projects."
Source for the above information from: Environmental Law and Policy Center, elpc.org, Community Wind Financing Handbook.
Demonizing banks is an easy way to shed responsibility for the state of the World. There is no easy fix. We are past the time that {do no harm} or a small ecological foot print is all that is required of a responsible environmentalist. You have pointed out that the Earth is being destroyed at an accelerating rate. No one knows if there will be enough time to solve some of the environmental problems that we face but we do know that if we do nothing we are condemned.
There is nothing wrong with high P.R. projects or tax write offs. Economic incentives are commonly used to stimulate development in areas that society wants to see developed. The lack of understanding of how the business world operates is one of fundamental problems with environmentalism today. Environmentalism does not operate outside the natural order of human society and weather we like it or not as environmentalists we will have to learn to use the tools of the business world to achieve our goals.
Getting results should be the goal of every environmentalist. It is time to stop nay-saying and come up with some ideas that will make a measurable difference. Hey, maybe buy a share in one of those wind turbine or solar projects.
Reduce, reuse, recycle and be pro-active (do something).
Mahatma Gandhi: "You may never know what results from your action. But, if you do nothing, there will be no results."
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amazingdrx Posted 3:21 am
09 Feb 2008
What destroys financial security? Inflation, eating away at the very vehicle, the currency, that carries our pursuit of financial happiness.
What should central bankers like the fed be most concerned with? Preventing the erosion of our wages and savings by inflation.
How can the other bankers who depend on the cental bankers to preserve wealth for their customers help out?
They should invest in renewable smart grid technology. Ever scarcer fuel drives the cost of energy inevitably upward. Manipulation of markets drives costs even higher.
Domestically produced GHG free energy independent of fuel prices protects the currency, we the people, and not only our economy, but the global economy. Peace, prosperity, and freedom benefit directly from renewable energy.
Strife follows fighting and trading for oily empire.
"Violence is a big expense", listen to your godfather, bankers of the world. Peace is more prosperous. The more prosperous you are, the better it is for you.
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GreyFlcn Posted 3:56 am
09 Feb 2008
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Tasermons Partner Posted 8:28 am
09 Feb 2008
I don't really consider those to be eco-projects. Sure, they provide clean energy, but they also provide the banks with lotsa $$, which is why they invest in it. If they thought they could get similar returns from coal power plants, I'm sure they'd fund those instead.
Try and find a bank that'll fund an eco-preserve or habitat restoration that won't give 'em million-dollar return investments. They'll just shrug it off usually, then turn around and finance a wal-mart to pave the place over. Their main concern is money. Taht's why they back wind projects.
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sycamore Posted 1:09 pm
09 Feb 2008
"Their main concern is money." It better be after all they are Banks and as corporations their responsibility is to their share holders and their depositors. If you put your savings in the Bank and they were not concerned with managing it properly and getting a good return you would, quite correctly, be upset. Banks are concerned with a barrower's ability to repay a loan. If a project can show that the barrower had a history of timely loan repayment, adequate collateral to secure the loan and had a cash flow / income stream that could repay a loan than loans are made. It is not the responsibility or right of commercial banks to make moral judgments about your project.
There are Community Resource Banks that are founded and mandated to make loans only on social and environmental projects. Below are three banks that were founded as environmental banks.
Permaculture Credit Union
http://www.pcuonline.org/
Credit Union
ShoreBank Pacific
http://www.eco-bank.com/
New Resource Bank,
http://www.newresourcebank.com
Most commercial banks have set up divisions that deal with community financing projects. These projects still must make economic sense. This is not their money it belongs to the depositors.
Profit is not a dirty word. If banks make a profit then they will lend on more projects.
I don't know what criteria you use to judge a project to be environmentally friendly if creating clean energy is not included. Perhaps you might have a constructive idea on how achieve clean energy independency and how one would finance the project.
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Tasermons Partner Posted 7:07 pm
09 Feb 2008
However, when a business or organization's main goal is to make money, and they just so happen to do that in a way that has a positive impact on the environment, then they're not eco-friendly by my definition. They're more concerned with money than with the environment.
Sure the environment still benefits...so long as they continue to make a profit. But the second they think they can make more money by screwin' the environment over, then they'll go for it, and any thought of "eco-friendliness" or "community enhancement" will fly out the window.
To be eco-friendly, ya haveta put the environment first, not put money first and then just hope the environment agrees with where the money is goin'.
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GreyFlcn Posted 7:22 pm
09 Feb 2008
The concept there being that old people with lots of money using the "You can't take it with you" principle.
Additionally, companies which are in it for the long haul, like pension funds and insurance companies find it in their best interest to be risk-adverse.
Maybe not environmental, but they do see that global warming specifically poses a gigantic threat.
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amazingdrx Posted 2:28 am
10 Feb 2008
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spaceshaper Posted 2:42 am
10 Feb 2008
Sustainability theory tells us that if it wishes to continue long-term, an organization cannot put any one element of its triple bottom line 'first'. It has to take care of its financial responsibilities, its social responsibilities and its environmental responsibilities or it will, eventually, fail.
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