Business as Usual

Green Group to Target Banks Financing Coal Projects
US Moving BackwardsBy Stephen LeahyInter Press Service
Brooklin, Canada - As global warming melts the Arctic, the United States' biggest banks are investing billions of dollars in as many as 150 new coal-fired power plants around the country.
The obvious climatic and fiscal stupidity of such investments is staggering, say environmentalists.
"What are they (the banks) thinking?" asked Leslie Lowe, energy and environment programme director at the Interfaith Centre on Corporate Responsibility.
Carbon regulations are coming, and profiting from the destruction of nature and communities is immoral in any case, Lowe told IPS at a press conference.
"It is folly to build new coal-fired plants," she said.
And yet that is just what Bank of America and Citi (formerly Citigroup) are doing, according to the new report "Banks, Climate Change & the New Coal Rush" by the Rainforest Action Network (RAN).
Electricity generation from coal is the biggest source of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in the world - larger than deforestation or the transportation sector, says Rebecca Tarbotton, director of RAN's Global Finance Campaign
The 150 proposed new plants would add 600 million to 1.1 billion tonnes of carbon annually into the atmosphere, Tarbotton said in an interview. Total global emissions of carbon are currently about 8 billion tonnes.
"There is no hope of averting climate catastrophe if a significant number of those plants are built," said Bill McKibben, author and founder of Step It Up, the largest demonstration against global warming in history.
"Climate change is already happening much faster than anyone expected," McKibben told IPS.
In the past two weeks, reports that the Arctic ice cap shrank dramatically this summer have left scientists shocked at the speed and extent of the melting. The Arctic Ocean may well go from white to blue in less than a decade, some believe. The ramifications of an ice-free Arctic on the world's weather system and the local ecology have yet to be determined.
Coal currently supplies approximately half of the U.S.'s electricity and produces 80 percent of the sector's CO2 emissions. Building new coal-fired plants - which have projected lifespans of 50 years - would undo virtually any and all domestic efforts to reduce carbon emissions, notes McKibben.
RAN and the coalition of environmental and faith-based groups, as well as Al Gore, Senators John Edwards and John Kerry, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, are calling for a moratorium on all new coal-fired plants.
"I can't understand why there aren't rings of young people blocking bulldozers and preventing them from constructing coal-fired power plants," former U.S. vice president and prominent global warming campaigner Al Gore was reported as saying by the New York Times last August.
"It's (also) financially ludicrous to be backing a 19th century technology rather than 21st century technologies," McKibben said.
Instead of investing the estimated 140 billion dollars in coal, financial institutions should be investing in clean energy options like solar, wind and energy efficiency, says RAN's Tarbotton.
"Investing that amount in energy efficiency improvements could reduce U.S. electricity demands by 19 percent by 2025, eliminating the need for new coal power plants," she said.
It should not be forgotten that digging coal out of the ground involves mountaintop removal, enormous strip mines and millions of tonnes of toxic waste that have devastated many parts of the country, she says.
"It's a war zone in southern West Virginia, three and half million pounds of explosives go off every day," said Julia "Judy" Bonds, founder of Coal River Mountain Watch.
"They are poisoning our water and our air. I want Citi and Bank of America to realise that when they fund coal companies, they are ruining lives and killing communities," Bonds said.
Citi is a leading financier of fossil fuel energy and the world's top financier of coal. According to Forbes, Citi's assets of 2.2 trillion dollars make it not just the world's largest bank, but the biggest company, the report found. Citi is also the top source of investment for the coal sector, providing more than 4 billion dollars in financing to Peabody Energy, the world's largest coal mining company.
Citi has financed billions of dollars to coal mining companies that practice mountaintop removal (MTR), including Massey Energy, Arch Coal, Alpha Natural Resources and others. These companies are responsible for the loss of more than a million acres of Appalachian forests and mountains, the report notes.
In 2006, Citi underwrote more than 38 billion dollars for the energy industry while financing just one transaction for alternative energy - 200 times more money for "dirty energy" - despite claims of being the United States's "greenest" bank, said Tarbotton.
There are plenty of alternative energy projects that need financing, and the coalition's hope is that the banks would no longer fund coal and pull their existing financing.
As for the much hyped "clean coal" technology, environmentalists say there isn't any practical way to capture and store carbon emissions currently, and even if the problem can be solved, solutions are one to two decades in the future.
"There's nothing clean about coal mining," says Bonds. "It's a real insult to the people who have to live in coal mining communities."
"The only clean coal is the coal that's left in the ground," concludes Tarbotton.
Neither Citi nor Bank of America could be reached for comment.
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Clinton bucks the trend and rakes in cash from the US weapons industry
By Leonard Doyle in Washington
Published: 19 October 2007
The US arms industry is backing Hillary Clinton for President and has all but abandoned its traditional allies in the Republican party. Mrs Clinton has also emerged as Wall Street's favourite. Investment bankers have opened their wallets in unprecedented numbers for the New York senator over the past three months and, in the process, dumped their earlier favourite, Barack Obama.
Mrs Clinton's wooing of the defence industry is all the more remarkable given the frosty relations between Bill Clinton and the military during his presidency. An analysis of campaign contributions shows senior defence industry employees are pouring money into her war chest in the belief that their generosity will be repaid many times over with future defence contracts.
Employees of the top five US arms manufacturers – Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop-Grumman, General Dynamics and Raytheon – gave Democratic presidential candidates $103,900, with only $86,800 going to the Republicans. "The contributions clearly suggest the arms industry has reached the conclusion that Democratic prospects for 2008 are very good indeed," said Thomas Edsall, an academic at Columbia University in New York.
Republican administrations are by tradition much stronger supporters of US armaments programmes and Pentagon spending plans than Democratic governments. Relations between the arms industry and Bill Clinton soured when he slimmed down the military after the end of the Cold War. His wife, however, has been careful not to make the same mistake.
After her election to the Senate, she became the first New York senator on the armed services committee, where she revealed her hawkish tendencies by supporting the invasion of Iraq. Although she now favours a withdrawal of US troops, her position on Iran is among the most warlike of all the candidates – Democrat or Republican.
This week, she said that, if elected president, she would not rule out military strikes to destroy Tehran's nuclear weapons facilities. While on the armed services committee, Mrs Clinton has befriended key generals and has won the endorsement of General Wesley Clarke, who ran Nato's war in Kosovo. A former presidential candidate himself, he is spoken of as a potential vice-presidential running mate.
Mrs Clinton has been a regular visitor to Iraq and Afghanistan and is careful to focus her criticisms of the Iraq war on President Bush, rather than the military. The arms industry has duly taken note.
So far, Mrs Clinton has received $52,600 in contributions from individual arms industry employees. That is more than half the sum given to all Democrats and 60 per cent of the total going to Republican candidates. Election fundraising laws ban individuals from donating more than $4,600 but contributions are often "bundled" to obtain influence over a candidate.
The arms industry has even deserted the biggest supporter of the Iraq war, Senator John McCain, who is also a member of the armed services committee and a decorated Vietnam War veteran. He has been only $19,200. Weapons-makers are equally unimpressed by the former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Despite a campaign built largely around the need for an aggressive US military and a determination to stay the course in Iraq, he is behind Mrs Clinton in the affections of arms executives. Mr Giuliani may be suffering because of his strong association with the failed policies of President Bush and the fact he is he is known as a social liberal.
Mrs Clinton's closest competitor in raising cash from the arms industry is the former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who raised just $32,000.
"Arms industry profits are so heavily dependent on government contracts that companies in this field want to be sure they do not have hostile relations with the White House," added Mr Edsall.
The industry's strong support for Mrs Clinton indicates that she is their firm favourite to win the Democratic nomination in the spring and the presidential election in November 2008. In the last presidential race, George Bush raised more than $800,000 – twice the sum collected by his Democratic rival John Kerry.
Mr Edsall's analysis of the figures reveals that, over the past 10 years, the defence industry has favoured Republicans over Democrats by a 3-2 margin, making Mrs Clinton's position even more remarkable.