Bank of America has quietly made revisions to its December 2021 plan to stop funding fossil-fuel-related projects. Their new December 2023 plan has made some interesting wording changes, and the New York Times isn’t too pleased.
Bank of America won kudos from climate activists two years ago for saying it would no longer finance new coal mines, coal-burning power plants or Arctic drilling projects, citing their environmental toll. Now the bank's reneged on those commitments. https://t.co/ItEwkfhyUn
— The New York Times (@nytimes) February 3, 2024
The corporation’s 2021 Environmental and Social Risk Policy Framework (ESRP) lays out a list of operations that Bank of America is “unable to engage in.”
This list includes financing drilling in the arctic, financing coal mines, supporting coal-powered energy plants, mining in UNESCO Heritage Sites and “transactions designed to manipulate financial results”
The December 2023 ESRP contains the exact same list of activities (Yes, including the financial manipulation.) except this time, instead of being unable to engage in them, they just have to pass through an “enhanced due diligence process.”
The left won’t be happy about this. It turns out that protests like the one in the video below don’t do much to stop banks from going where the money is. One wonders if these executives actually believe all of their own commitments against climate change, or if they’ve just figured out liberals are easy to appease by slapping social justice issues into a yearly report.
Some conservatives will laud this move as a win for coal. Others will wonder if the “Senior-level Risk Committee” who decides which financial manipulation is okay is made up of the same executives who are overly concerned with ESG scores.
Make no mistake, Bank of America isn’t giving themselves a back way out of their woke nonsense with coal-dependent communities in mind. The bank wants to have its cake and eat it too— appearing environmentally-conscious to liberal customers while making profits off of conservative entrepreneurs.
In the end, it doesn’t really matter. Banks won’t give up coal; instead, they’ll keep using loopholes to maintain their profits while appearing environmentally concerned to gullible liberals. Somehow, it seems like Bank of America doesn’t expect the world to end any time soon, even if they’re willing to play along for optics.
