UK banks put £75bn into firms building climate-wrecking ‘carbon bombs’, study finds
Exclusive: Britain is key financial hub for destructive fossil fuel mega-projects, according to research
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'Banks in the City of London have poured more than $100bn (£75bn) into companies developing “carbon bombs” – huge oil, gas and coal projects that would drive the climate past internationally agreed temperature limits with catastrophic global consequences – according to a study.
Nine London-based banks, including HSBC, NatWest, Barclays and Lloyds are involved in financing companies responsible for at least 117 carbon bomb projects in 28 countries between 2016 – the year after the landmark Paris agreement was signed – and 2023, according to the study.
If the projects go ahead, the study says they will have the potential to produce 420bn tonnes of carbon emissions, equivalent to more than 10 years of current global carbon dioxide emissions.
“Despite the UK’s seemingly ambitious climate plans, it is astonishing how much money has flowed from UK banks to companies worldwide developing the biggest climate-wrecking and damaging projects since 2016,” said Fatima Eisam-Eldeen, a lead analyst at the Leave It in the Ground Initiative, the climate thinktank that produced the study. “Real climate ambition and leadership would mean proper financial regulation not only within the country but also beyond the country’s borders by stopping all financial flows to companies exacerbating the climate crisis we all suffer.”
The report follows a Guardian investigation that revealed how big fossil fuel companies were quietly planning scores of vast projects that threaten to shatter the effort towards the international goal of limiting global heating to 1.5C above preindustrial levels.’
Revealed: Forecasts of greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels soar in Trump’s first 100 days
Tariff chaos hampers Trump’s pledge to ‘drill, baby, drill’, but analysis still shows surge in planet-heating emissions
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/02/trump-drill-baby-drill-tariffs
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'Donald Trump’s ambitions for the US to “drill, baby, drill” for more fossil fuels have ironically been hampered by the economic chaos unleashed by his own tariffs, but the US is still on track to increase oil and gas extraction, causing a surge in planet-heating emissions, a new analysis shows.
The US was already the world’s leading oil and gas power, producing more of the fossil fuels than any country in history during Joe Biden’s administration. But Trump has sought to escalate this further, declaring an “energy emergency” to open up more land and ocean for drilling and launching an unprecedented assault on environmental regulations in his first 100 days back in the White House.
This new political climate means that the expected amount of greenhouse gas emissions from active and planned projects in US oil and gas fields has jumped under Trump, after previously dropping under Biden, forecasts shared with the Guardian show.
Despite awarding more drilling leases than Trump in his first 100 days, Biden also pursued policies to combat the climate crisis that saw oil and gas companies revise down their production estimates. That situation has now reversed, threatening a pulse of new pollution that will further add to the fever of a planet already suffering from heatwaves, floods, droughts and other disasters accelerated by global heating.’