Barclays: Sustainability ??????????????????????
Soo Chapman
Dear Mark Walker,
Barclays has financed $5.6bn in new fossil fuel projects since January
Financing in lead up to Cop26 largest of all major UK banks, finds campaigners
Barclays has financed more in fossil fuel projects than any of the UK’s largest banks in the months leading up to the Cop26 climate talks in Glasgow, according to a report by climate finance campaigners.
The bank financed $5.6bn (£4.1bn) for new fossil fuel projects from January 2021 to the eve of the UN climate summit, Market Forces found, despite growing international warnings that any new fossil developments would destroy any chance of avoiding a catastrophic climate breakdown.
Barclays’ multibillion pound support for fossil fuel projects was ranked ahead of that of HSBC, which financed $5.3bn this year, and Standard Chartered, which made $4.3bn available.
The report found Barclays financed a $194m bond to the Canada-headquartered pipeline company Enbridge, which part-owns the controversial Dakota access pipeline which is expected to carry enough crude oil to produce the emissions of 30 coal plants every year. It also said the bank provided $200m to MEG Energy, which extracts Canadian tar sands oil, one of the most polluting fuels on the planet.
The report also revealed how HSBC and Standard Chartered participated in a $6bn bond issuance to Saudi Aramco, the world’s most polluting company, and that HSBC financed a $1.5bn bond to Qatar Petroleum, which owns the world’s biggest gas field.
The three banks have extended financing to fossil fuel companies despite committing to net zero carbon emissions from financing activity by 2050 and issuing warnings that no new fossil fuel projects are compatible with keeping global heating in check.
The report’s findings came ahead of a series of Cop26 events scheduled for Wednesday that are intended to mobilise public and private finance to help tackle the climate emergency.
Mia Watanabe, a campaigner at Market Forces, said: “Despite their warm words, these banks continue to finance fossil fuel companies and projects that are destroying the world’s hopes of meeting climate targets.”
In a stunt to mark the latest report, Market Forces held a Formula One-style “prize giving” for the banks’ “race to disaster” outside Barclays’ Glasgow offices, which is a stone’s throw from the Cop26 venue.
A previous annual report by the group that tracked global fossil fuel financing found that in the five years after the signing of the Paris agreement, the three banks combined financed more than $257bn in the coal, oil and gas sectors.
That report found Barclays was the world’s seventh-biggest fossil fuel funder, and the biggest in Europe, while HSBC was ranked 13th in the world. Although Standard Chartered trailed at 34 globally, it is also the top UK financier of new coal plants in Asia, according to Market Forces.
The latest report follow news that Jes Staley has stepped down as the chief executive of Barclays after an investigation by City regulators into how he described his relationship with the billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Standard Chartered said last week that it would set “ambitious new targets” to reach net zero from financed activity by 2050, including interim 2030 targets for the most carbon-intensive sectors, that were aligned with the International Energy Agency’s scenario for a net zero energy system by 2050.
The global energy watchdog said in May that there could be no new oil, gas or coal development if the world was to reach net zero by 2050. Only days later a UN report warned that fossil fuel production planned by the world’s governments “vastly” exceeded the limit needed to keep the rise in global heating to 1.5C and avoid the worst impacts of the climate crisis.
“The science is clear – banks that keep funding fossil fuels can’t be climate leaders,” Watanabe added.
An HSBC spokesperson said the bank was “firmly committed” to aligning its provision of finance to net zero by 2050 or sooner. “We have committed to phase out thermal coal financing by 2030 in EU and OECD markets and by 2040 globally and to set out short and medium-term transition targets for the oil and gas and power and utilities sector. We expect to provide between $750bn and $1trn towards the net zero-transition by 2030,” the spokesperson added.
A Barclays spokesperson said: “We are aligning our entire financing portfolio to support the goals of the Paris agreement – significantly scaling up green financing, directly investing in new green technologies and helping clients in key sectors change their business models to reduce their climate change impact. By 2025, we will reduce the emissions intensity of our power portfolio by 30%, and reduce absolute emissions of our energy portfolio by 15%.”
This article was amended on 3 November 2021 to include a statement from Barclays that was not available at the time of publication.
Sent: 29 July 2022 14:02
To: sooch...@hotmail.co.uk <sooch...@hotmail.co.uk>
Cc: nigel...@barclays.com <nigel...@barclays.com>
Subject: Sustainability
Good afternoon Susan, I came across your email on the sustainable Dorset website. I hope you do not mind me reaching out, but myself and my colleague Nigel cc’d have been running sustainability events each month exploring different angles to sustainability. We are looking at running one at the Bournemouth University on the 15th September looking at how technology plays it’s part in giving us a better understanding of our carbon footprint and how to be more sustainable. We just need to make some amendments to the invite before we can share it.
It would be great to have a chat with you about what we are doing and whether you could share the events that we are running with the Sustainable Dorset network and beyond. One of our speakers at the event on the 15th will be demonstrating their platform climate essentials which businesses can use to understand their current and past carbon footprint and what changes they can make to reduce it.
I am on annual leave next week so would be looking at dates from 9th August onwards for an introduction. I see both Grace and Natasha are also on the website, whom myself and Nigel have spoken with, lovely ladies.
Thanks
Mark Walker
Check out our Support Hub for events, content and tools to help you navigate today’s climate.
Mark Walker | Eagle Labs Bournemouth Ecosystem Manager | Business Banking
Mob +44 (0)7500 890505 | Email mark.w...@barclays.com
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Soo Chapman
U.S. can get to 100% clean energy with wind, water, solar and zero nuclear, Stanford professor says
- Stanford professor Mark Jacobson sees a way for the U.S. to meet its energy demands by 2050 with 100% wind, water and solar.
- His models use no fossil fuels, carbon capture, direct air capture, bioenergy, blue hydrogen or nuclear power.
- Jacobson’s roadmap is different from many clean-energy proposals, which advocate using all technologies possible.
A prominent Stanford University professor has outlined a roadmap for the United States to meet its total energy needs using 100% wind, water and solar by 2050.
Mark Jacobson, a Stanford professor of civil and environmental engineering and the director of its Atmosphere/Energy Program, has been promoting the idea of all renewable energy as the best way forward for more than a decade. His latest calculations toward this ambitious goal were recently published in the scientific journal Renewable Energy.
Transitioning to a clean-energy grid should happen by 2035, the study advises, with at least 80% of that adjustment completed by 2030. For the purposes of Jacobson’s study, his team factored in presumed population growth and efficiency improvements in energy to envision what that would look like in 2050.
Jacobson first published a roadmap of renewable energy for all 50 states in 2015.
This recent update of that 2015 work has a couple of notable improvements.
First, Jacobson and his colleagues had access to more granular data for how much heat will be needed in buildings in every state for the coming two years in 30-second increments. “Before we didn’t have that type of data available,” Jacobson told CNBC.
Also, the updated data makes use of battery storage while the first set of calculations he did relied on adding turbines to hydropower plants to meet peak demand, an assumption that turned out to be impractical and without political support for that technology, Jacobson said.
Reliability of four-hour batteries
In the analysis, Jacobson and his team used battery-storage technology to compensate for the inherent intermittency of solar and wind power generation — those times when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow.
The Achilles’ heel of a completely renewable grid, many argue, is that it is not stable enough to be reliable. Blackouts have become a particular concern, notably in Texas this year and during the summer of 2020 in California.
That’s where four-hour batteries come in as a way to generate grid stability. “I discovered this all just because I have batteries in my own home,” Jacobson told CNBC. “And I figured, oh, my God, this is so basic. So obvious. I can’t believe nobody has figured this out.”
Jacobson said that he observed his batteries stayed charged if they weren’t plugged in when they are off.
To get more than four hours of charge, multiple four-hour batteries can be stacked to discharge sequentially. If a battery needs more charge output at one time than the battery can provide, then the batteries need to be used simultaneously, Jacobson told CNBC.
With this observation, Jacobson and his colleagues at Stanford produced scenarios showing it is possible to transition to a fully renewable system without any blackouts or batteries with ultra-long-duration battery technology.
That’s key because technology for ultra-long-duration batteries that would hold energy for several days have yet to be commercialized. Start-ups like Form Energy are working to bring such batteries to market.
Read more about energy from CNBC Pro
Planning, of course, is also key to keeping the grid stable. “Wind is variable, solar is variable,” Jacobson said. “But it turns out, first of all, when you interconnect wind and solar over large areas, which is currently done, you smooth out the supply quite a bit. So it’s because, you know, when the wind is not blowing in one place, it’s usually blowing somewhere else. So over a large region, you have a smoother supply of energy.”
Similarly, wind and solar power are complimentary. And hydropower “is perfect backup, because you can turn it on and off instantaneously,” he said.
Also, there needs to be changes in pricing structures to motivate customers to do high energy demand activities at off-peak times.
“Demand response is a very big component of keeping the grid stable,” Jacobson said. “It’s used some today. But a lot of places a lot of states in the US right now, the electricity price is constant all day ... and that’s a problem.”
Calculating the breakdowns
So far, Jacobson and his team have run simulations for the all renewable, four-hour battery roadmaps for six individual states – Alaska, Hawaii, California, Texas, New York and Florida, and the contiguous 48 states taken together. (For the rest of the states, Jacobson has approximate simulations, which are available here.)
According to his models, California’s energy mix would include 14.72% on-shore wind energy, 18.28% off-shore wind, 21.86% solar panels on roofs, 34.66% solar panels operated by a utility, 5.32% hydropower, 2.91% geothermal electricity and 0.25% wave energy.
Texas would be 37.66 on-shore wind, 14.77% off-shore wind, 20.87% roof solar, 23.85% solar panels operated by a utility, 0.1% hydropower and 0.19% wave energy.
Sent: 29 July 2022 22:56
To: mark.w...@barclays.com <mark.w...@barclays.com>
Cc: nigel...@barclays.com <nigel...@barclays.com>
Subject: Barclays: Sustainability ??????????????????????
Soo Chapman
Sent: 30 July 2022 12:26
Soo Chapman
Start of the article followed by a follower's comment:
Each day, retired civil servant Jon Fuller buys a copy of all the UK’s national newspapers, snaps photos of any article related to the climate crisis, and uploads them to a 100-member message thread. “It’s useful for people to see what is or isn’t being covered, and how,” he says.
What’s startling about Fuller’s archive is the range of output. The majority of articles are short and straight reports of the latest policy announcement, oil clean-up, wind farm squabble, quarterly profit. But, despite an overall trend of improvement in climate science reporting, journalists who dismiss, ridicule and/or erase the climate crisis, and who legitimise extreme views, persist.
Among those, within Britain’s most influential newspapers, remain writers and editors explicitly promoting outright climate denial.
It wasn’t until 2018 that the BBC stopped platforming climate deniers – a key juncture in public understanding of ‘the debate’, which switched from focusing not on the crisis itself but how best to respond to it.
There are facts we can, or should, agree on: the first is that man-made climate change is happening, presents a grave danger, and needs an urgent response. The second is that news’ current business model renders it incapable of reliably delivering that message.
To explore this problem, Byline Times spoke to several journalists and editors who write about climate (or, as one insisted, ‘about weather’). Each explained that, despite their awareness and that of their colleagues of the global consensus, framing the crisis as urgent remains exceptional. Several described Britain’s news culture as “entertainment”.
What emerges is three distinct faces of climate denial.
‘Climate Crisis Isn’t a Separate Issue– It Will Affect Everything’A Lack of Education is Risking Our Planet’s Future
Sent: 31 July 2022 11:43