On April 1, Bank of America's Ken Lewis was honored in New York, site of the bank's new LEED-certified building. He said, "Helping our nation reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as well as encourage renewable energy and low carbon technologies, is not only the right thing for our planet, but it is also smart business."
Lewis was honored for signing The Carbon Principles. In the void left by lack of federal energy policy, financial institutions have developed this set of guidelines to evaluate the growing risk of investment in coal-fired power plants and other carbon intensive areas.
Banks are rightly concerned about future regulation costs with regard to "indirect emissions," that is, emissions of companies they finance. But these principles have no performance criteria. It's akin to someone on a diet reading Nutrition Facts before tucking into fettuccini alfredo. There's no accountability.
Lewis garnered another award on April 1: 2008's Fossil Fool of the Year from Rainforest Action Network. Lewis topped such notorious polluters as GM's Rick Wagoner and ExxonMobil's Rex Tillerson. Why?
BofA is "a leading green bank," according to its 2007 Shareholder Report which touts its eco-credentials, noting its sustainable development initiative, pledge to reduce its utility portfolio's CO{-2} emissions, and $3,000 employee incentive toward a hybrid car purchase.
What the report doesn't say is that BofA's financed emissions have increased by 11 percent since 2005, or that in 2006 it invested 100 times more money in dirty energy than clean. In 2007 BofA's utility portfolio was responsible for 765 million tons of CO{-2} -- more than 10 percent of the U.S. total.
While that annual report features soothing photos of forests, it says nothing of BofA's funding of the most heinous kind of coal mining, mountaintop removal (MTR). BofA finances the top five producers of MTR coal, including Massey Energy, which faces $2.4 billion in EPA fines. MTR blows up entire mountaintops, destroys habitat and taints groundwater. At BofA's shareholder meeting, a retired coal miner told Lewis MTR was "literally destroying Appalachia."
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