Large-scale, detrimental fossil-fuel projects (think Adani’s Carmichael coal mine) need one key thing in order to go ahead. Funding. But where does this funding come from? Well, in a lot of cases, it comes from banks.
While some politicians - ahem, Trump! and ahem, Malcolm Turnbull are trying to prop up the fossil fuel industry, there’s been a quiet revolution happening around the world.
Commbank has today released its notice of annual general meeting. They have devoted an entire three pages out of the fifteen substantive pages of the document defending their woeful climate change policy and multi-billion-dollar support for fossil fuels.
The board of the Northern Australian Infrastructure Facility (NAIF) has been rocked by a leak of information showing “critical shortcomings” in the way it handles and secures sensitive information.
I opened up the group email from Greenpeace. It explained that the organiser of the the up-coming Greenpeace protest on the Sunshine Coast to stop The Commonwealth Bank investing in fossil fuels, had stepped down rather late in the piece.. The email asked if anyone would like to step into the role at this late stage, just a couple of weeks before the action.
The Commonwealth Bank have just announced that they have ruled out funding the Carmichael mine. They have joined 24 other banks from around the world in saying they won’t fund this dodgy, destructive, mega mine project.
Everything is connected through a malformed Political Economy
The life of our reef is intimately linked to the health of our politics and the future of our communities. Coal has no role to play.
In the same way people a century ago wanted cars instead of horses, people today don’t want coal — they want renewables. This piece was originally published on Independent Australia.
