The Observatory of Corporate Europe and Transparency International denounced this week the fact that some of the most important financial corporations, with heavy investments in the fossil fuel sector, will mark the United Nations environmental agenda in the coming years.
The thirty-six-page document prepared by the special adviser on climate change to the British Prime Minister and the UN Secretary General, Mark Carney, amounts to the largest “eco-laundering” of the financial sector in all history, criticizes Bud Brennan, of Transparency International. ”
For Kenneth Haar, researcher at the Corporate Europe Observatory, it is about the privatization of important elements of international climate policy ”.
Something in which he agrees with his colleague from Transparency International, who speaks of “a great bargain for the financial industry.”
According to Brennan, there is “a clear strategy of privatization of the United Nations system and of occupying positions from which to derail any attempt to divest from fossil fuels” is underway.
The vagueness of the commitments aimed at reaching the goal of zero emissions by 2050 opens the doors for many companies to use all sorts of tricks to avoid reducing their polluting emissions, criticize the two organizations.
They base their complaint above all on the fact that “self-regulation” is at the core of the proposals developed by the different alliances that represent the financial industry and that set the agenda to be followed in the coming years.
Alliances such as the so-called “Net Zero Banking Alliance”, “Investment Association”, “Task Force for Climate-Related Financial Disclosure” or “Glasgow Financial Alliance” in the international language of finance.
Practically all of them are part of large corporations in the financial sector, which should be noted for their investments in the fossil fuel sector among the main responsible for global warming.
These are, for example, the banks JP Morgan, Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Commercial Bank of China, HSBC, Bank of America, BNP Paribas or the world’s largest investment fund manager BlackRock, among others.
In order to understand what happens, the biography of the Anglo-Canadian economist Mark Carney, adviser to Boris Johnson and António Guterres, should perhaps be taken into account.
Carney began his career at Goldman Sachs before joining the Canadian Ministry of Finance and has served as Governor of the Bank of England and Chairman of the G20 Financial Stability Council.
www.informacion.es
Eddie is an Australian news reporter with over 9 years in the industry and has published on Forbes and tech crunch.