Banking into the abyss
Two big news items this week about the great pumps that drive our world. RBC emerged as the planet’s pre-eminent pump for the lifeblood of fossil fuels. And that torrent of money is overwhelming the great oceanic circulatory system vital to our living Earth.
You may have heard about RBC’s rise to the pinnacle of fossil-fuelled finance, knocking JPMorgan off its perch as the biggest banker of climate breakdown. Unless you follow climate news closely, you may not have heard that the breakdown includes the deep flows and “overturnings” that drive the currents circulating from the abyssal depths back up and around the Earth’s oceans.
That may sound familiar — choking off the ocean’s currents was the premise behind the ridiculous movie The Day After Tomorrow (fun fact: the highest grossing movie ever filmed in Canada). Jake Gyllenhaal and Dennis Quaid rush into action after Antarctica’s Larsen Ice Shelf breaks away, disrupting the Atlantic’s overturning circulation, shutting down the Gulf Stream and freezing the Northern Hemisphere in a global superstorm.
We may not get flash-frozen but the underlying mechanism of melting ice disrupting the ocean’s currents is eerily similar to the results scientists published this week in the journal Nature.
About 250 trillions tonnes of cold, dense salty water sink into the abyss off Antarctica each year, and that downward flow acts as a kind of pump, driving the deep currents of the “overturning circulation.” Oceans away, water rises back towards the surface in a majestic hydraulic loop, circulating heat and nutrients, carbon and oxygen around the planet. We terrestrial creatures go about our busy lives utterly clueless about our dependence on these deep cycles yet they determine the Earth’s climate, its carbon cycle, its winds and rainfall, marine life as well as life on land.
“But there are worrying signs these currents are slowing down,” write the scientists. “They may even collapse.
“Climate change is to blame. As Antarctica melts, more freshwater flows into the oceans. This disrupts the sinking of cold, salty, oxygen-rich water to the bottom of the ocean. From there, this water normally spreads northwards to ventilate the far reaches of the deep Indian, Pacific and Atlantic oceans. But that could all come to an end soon. In our lifetimes.”
There’s already evidence of a slowdown in the North Atlantic and the scientists published measurements confirming a similar weakening is underway in the Antarctic. They project the Antarctic overturning will slow by more than 40 per cent over the next 30 years, along with another 20 per cent weakening in the Atlantic.
“It’s yet another reason to address the climate crisis — and fast,” they say.
Which brings us to that other pump, the one pumping money, fuelling the crisis, overwhelming even the most mighty hydraulic forces. Like most big banks, RBC says it’s addressing the climate crisis and committed to net zero. At last week’s shareholder meeting, its CEO called for an “orderly transition,” just like he did the year before.
It’s a strange definition of transition — RBC increased its fossil finance year on year. Canada’s biggest bank is now the biggest fossil financier in the world.
Another way to measure a “transition” is the ratio of investments in fossil fuels versus clean energy. And that ratio couldn’t be more dramatic: RBC pumped $99 into fossil fuels for every $1 in renewables.
RBC is even bucking the broader tide among the banking sector. Overall, financing for fossil fuels decreased in 2022 while RBC’s went up. RBC provided over US$42 billion in fossil funding last year.
“It's totally obscene that we're in this situation and so clearly shows RBC is on the wrong track,” Richard Brooks told Canada’s National Observer. Brooks is the climate finance director for Stand.earth.
“This is why we need regulators to step in and regulate the banks into taking real climate action.”
Scotiabank and TD also made the “Dirty Dozen” list of the world’s dirtiest banks in 2022. Bank of Montreal and CIBC just missed that honour, ranking 15th and 16th respectively. It’s part of an arduous analysis of the world's biggest 60 banks, organized each year by Rainforest Action Network along with the Indigenous Environmental Network, BankTrack, Oil Change International, Reclaim Finance, Sierra Club and Urgewald. (I should probably disclose that I worked for Rainforest Action Network many years ago and was the organization’s executive director until 2003.)
The Banking on Climate Chaos report uncovered some other nuggets: no surprise the Canadian banks take the top five spots for bankrolling the oilsands but it is remarkable that RBC managed to come fifth globally for bankrolling fracking (Scotiabank and TD also cracked the Top12 on that measure).
And their ambitions are far-reaching. Both RBC and Scotiabank made the Top12 for bankrolling oil and gas in the Amazon.
One final metric of “transition”: bankrolling not just ongoing operations but expansion of the fossil fuel industry. RBC comes fifth in the world, beaten by some big American banks, but well ahead of China’s.
When it comes to fossil fuel expansion, banks and Big Oil are working against the oceanographers and climate scientists but also against the world’s top energy analysts. This week, the head of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol, told Deutsche Welle: "We have to bring the consumption of oil, gas and coal down. And if we are able to do that, if we have a trajectory like that, the current existing oil and gas fields and coal mines are more than enough to meet the demand growth."
Birol didn’t mince his words about companies making net-zero pledges or claiming alignment with the Paris Agreement: “If they say, 'I am going to increase my oil production three million barrels per day and my company's strategy is in line with the Paris Agreement' — this doesn't work.
"There is a contradiction here — black and white."
Or green and blue, perhaps. Pumping money into fossil fuels, stalling the planet’s deep hydrological forces. Banking right into the abyss.
Canada’s emissions
On Friday afternoon, the feds released Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions data for 2021 (there’s an infuriating lag time in reporting). Emissions went up by 12 megatonnes (1.8 per cent) from 2020 — that’s not surprising considering the drop during the pandemic. Emissions in 2021 were 53 megatonnes lower than pre-pandemic levels.
We’ll have more analysis after sifting through the numbers properly. But here’s the important line:
Growth in solar and wind ‘truly unprecedented’
Solar and wind are both growing far faster than other energy technologies that emerged in the postwar era.
Nick Ferris reports on an analysis by Shell tracking growth rates after each technology grew to one exajoule (roughly double the electricity consumption of Sweden): “Nuclear power took four years to double its contribution to 2EJ, while LNG took around nine years.
“Solar and wind, however, are tracking a different course: solar power has quadrupled its contribution in six years, while wind has quadrupled its contribution in a decade… Both solar and wind's growth rates are far outpacing LNG and nuclear.”
Overturning the abyss
I’ll leave you with this video profiling two of the scientists on that study about the abyssal ocean overturning slowdown. It’s some impressive knowledge mobilization — in less than four minutes of Australian accents, you’ll get a clear picture of the ocean circulatory system, the science behind their study and the effect torrents of Antarctic meltwater are having on our planet’s deep cycles.
Zero Carbon is made possible through the support of I-SEA and the Trottier and McConnell foundations.
