Greenpeace Daubs Barclays Logo In Oil Sands Protest By Tsvetana...

Greenpeace Daubs Barclays Logo In Oil Sands Protest
By Tsvetana Paraskova - Jul 19, 2018, 2:00 PM CDT
Greenpeace activists staged on Thursday a protest outside the headquarters of UK bank Barclays in London, daubing the logo with a mock oil leak to protest against the lender’s funding for oil sands projects.

“We are outside the Barclays HQ in Canary Wharf to bring them a little taste of the damage their dirty funding decisions are doing to the world,” Greenpeace UK posted on Twitter, urging people to sign a petition to call on Barclays to stop funding tar sands projects.

Barclays is now the only UK bank still choosing to fund toxic tar sands pipelines, Greenpeace UK says, calling on Barclays not to fund similar projects in the future.


“By potentially pouring money into these dirty pipeline projects, Barclays are making some unsettling choices. They are choosing to profit from pipelines which will threaten Indigenous communities, accelerate climate change, and put water supplies and endangered species like the Southern Resident Orcas at a huge risk,” says Greenpeace.

The activists demand that Barclays and other banks, which they call ‘the Dirty Dozen’—including JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo, Toronto Dominion, and Royal Bank of Canada—to stop funding “these toxic tar sands pipelines.”

A Barclays spokesperson said in a statement, carried by PR Week:

“We take seriously our societal and environmental obligations and are in dialogue with Greenpeace on this issue. We will continue to carefully consider our approach, taking into consideration the views of all relevant stakeholders, as well as the world’s energy needs.”

Related: World’s Biggest Oil Trader Launches Renewables Fund

Two months ago, the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) said that it would no longer provide project-specific funding for new coal-fired power stations, thermal coal mines, oil sands projects, or Arctic oil projects, becoming the latest major bank to heed investor pressure to step up efforts to fight climate change. Another large British bank, HSBC, said in April that it would stop providing financing for new coal-fired power plants, and would not provide financial services for new offshore oil and gas projects in the Arctic, and for new greenfield oil sands projects.

In one of the strongest signals yet that financing for fossil fuels is increasingly under review among the banking industry, the World Bank said in December 2017 that it would stop financing upstream oil and gas projects after 2019 as part of its support to countries to meet their Paris Climate Agreement targets.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com