It’s way past time for the world’s banks to stop funding the wholesale destruction of Appalachia’s ecosystems.
Rainforest Action Network and the Sierra Club released the 2011 Mountaintop Removal Report Card today. The report card exposes relationships between 10 of the biggest banks in the world and the top companies practicing mountaintop removal mining in central Appalachia.
Some of the findings:
- Since January 2010, Bank of America, Citi, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, GE Capital, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, PNC, UBS and Wells Fargo together provided more than $2.5 billion in loans and bonds to MTR companies.
- The top three financiers of MTR are PNC, Citi and UBS.
- Of the 10 banks in the report, Wells Fargo and Credit Suisse have the strongest MTR policies.
Since 2010’s MTR report card was released last spring, five banks released policies addressing mountaintop removal: JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, PNC, UBS and Credit Suisse. The MTR report card has served as an excellent tool for RAN to engage with executives at the biggest banks and help them move away from financing the devastating practice of mountaintop removal.
We hope that this year’s report will continue to pressure the biggest financiers of mountaintop removal to develop meaningful policies limiting their exposure to MTR mining companies, and to push banks with existing policies to make them stronger. You can send a wake-up call to banks and call on them to stop funding the horrendously destructive practice of mountaintop removal by sending them our new video, “Mountaintop Removal: An American Tragedy,” which shows exactly what they’re bankrolling.