What is Hell? – by Bill McKibben – The Crucial Years

Source: What is Hell? – by Bill McKibben – The Crucial Years

The head of the World Bank got a lot of attention (and rightly so) this week for refusing to answer the simple question of whether global warming was real. But that was only the second most incendiary thing a banker said in public this week; first place goes to Jamie Dimon, CEO of the vastly larger JP Morgan Chase bank (by market cap, the biggest bank that the earth has ever seen). He told a Congressional panel, with great bravado, that Chase had no plans at all to stop lending for the expansion of the oil and gas industry, and that in fact such a plan would be that would be “the road to hell for America.”

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I bring these sad stories and images up because at the same hearings where Dimon was demanding ever more oil and gas, he was also refusing to say whether or not his bank was lending to Russian oil and gas companies. Razom, the remarkable group of Ukrainian activists working to end both the climate crisis and the Russian invasion, have made clear that they indeed are:

Citi provides loans, bond issuance, and revolving credit to Russian oil and gas giants Lukoil and Gazprom and the trading company Vitol. HSBC holds shares in Lukoil, Tatneft, Novatek, Gazprom and Rosneft. JPMorgan invested billions in Putin’s oil and gas and holds high stakes in Gazprom, Lukoil, Sberbank and Rosneft.

(Dimon told Congress that Chase didn’t precisely own a share of Sberbank, but “it’s in a mutual fund somewhere.” That’s nice. California Congressman Brad Sherman made clear that the bank was continuing to fund Russian oil and gas.)

Anyway, as Razom points out, “by maintaining ties to Russian oil and gas, these banks continue the war and genocide in Ukraine, as export of oil and gas provides more than 40% of the income of the federal budget of Russia.” Razom—led by the wonderful Svitlana Romanko, who this newsletter collaborated with on the Heat Pumps for Peace campaign—asks that you sign this petition for a full Western embargo on Russian oil and gas and that you push big Western players, including BlackRock, to get the heck out of the 40 giant “carbon bomb” projects planned for Russia.

Let’s be brutally clear here, since it’s easy to get lost in a lot of obfuscation. The four big US banks—Chase, Citi, Wells-Fargo and Bank of America—are also the four biggest oil and gas lenders in the world. They—followed closely by big Canadian banks—are the money lifeline to the industry that is overheating the planet and underwriting Russian fascism.