New Research Shows Eight Major Banks Responsible for Majority of $20 Billion in Financing For Oil And Gas Companies Destroying the Amazon JULY 25, 2023 Oil and gas financing report exposes eight major banks’ complicity in Amazon rainforest destruction Belem, Brazil, July 25, 2023: Eight major U.S., European and Brazilian banks are fueling Amazon and climate destruction, by providing the bulk of financing for the oil and gas sector in deals directly traced to activities in Peru, Colombia, Brazil and Ecuador, according to research released today by Stand.earth and the Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin (COICA), ahead of next month’s Amazon summit in Belem.  Capitalizing on Collapse, the report authored by award-winning researchers at Stand.earth Research Group, details how JPMorgan Chase, Itaú Unibanco, Citibank, HSBC, Banco Santander, Bank of America, Banco Bradesco, and Goldman Sachs provided over $11 billion USD in financing to Amazon oil and gas activities over the past 15 years, from 2009 – 2023. These banks are responsible for 55% of the estimated $20 billion USD total that can be traced directly to the region, while making up just 5% of the banks in the database. Of the eight banks, six are either headquartered in the US or act through their US subsidiary and operate in deals across the region, while two Brazilian banks- Itaú Unibanco and Banco Bradesco – are highly connected to specific oil and gas projects in that country. Banks such as JPMorgan Chase, who top the list with 10% of direct financing (1.9 billion USD), have profited from financing oil and gas over the past 15 years despite the fact that the threat of an Amazon collapse has increased dramatically over the same time period. The rainforest has been fragmented, deforested, and burned to the point that scientists are warning it could be crossing a disastrous ecological tipping point. Decades of flaring and oil spills related to the oil and gas industry have polluted Amazonia waterways and soil, making Indigenous communities sick, reducing their livelihoods, and violating their rights. And as financing has created new opportunities for expansion, the industry has pumped carbon emissions into the atmosphere at the cost of a climate-safe future. Case studies included in Capitalizing on Collapse illustrate how each of these top banks has been involved in deals that expand oil and gas production in the Amazon, including involvement in the development of Amazonia’s biggest carbon bomb, the Parnaiba Gas Complex, which is capable of releasing two gigatons of carbon in its lifetime. According to the International Energy Agency, such expansion is not compatible with keeping global warming under control, despite bank climate commitments claiming to align with a 1.5C pathway.....read on......    
         https://stand.earth/press-releases/title-new-research-shows-eight-major-banks-responsible-for-majority-of-20-billion-in-financing-for-oil-and-gas-companies-destroying-the-amazon/

In 2021, France’s La Banque Postale committed to end financing for all companies expanding oil and gas, and to exit the sector completely by 2030. Consistent with this robustness  , La Banque Postale shows no financing for 2022 in this report. Until the remaining 59 banks in this report also enact policies to exclude financing for fossil fuel expansion, any commitments to net zero emissions are nothing more than greenwash. Thirteen banks still have no fossil fuel exclusion policy strong enough to merit any points in our evaluation. This includes eleven out of the thirteen Chinese banks in scope, State Bank of India, and U.S. Bancorp. U.S. Bancorp lags far behind its peers’ already inadequate policies. Meanwhile, fossil fuel companies brought in record income – estimated at $4 trillion in 2022.9 Fossil fuel companies used the devastating war in Ukraine to profit at the expense of affordable energy and a just, equitable transition. Governments, especially in emerging economies, attempted to shield their populations from the worst impact of these high prices with $1 trillion in energy consumption subsidies.This figure does not include the much higher toll of “implicit” subsidies that result from, for example, governments allowing fossil fuel companies to pollute without paying the full cost of the health and environmental damages they cause. Those funds could instead have gone to Indigenous land defenders protecting against deforestation and resource extraction, or to frontline communities experiencing climate extremes, or to workers displaced by the transition away from fossil fuels. In a special essay featured here (p. 36), the Indigenous Environmental Network argues that climate change mitigation consists almost entirely of false solutions that do not produce real emissions reductions, but do threaten Indigenous sovereignty and territory. Efforts to stop climate change must be trusted to and led by Indigenous Peoples, who control an estimated 80% of what remains of the Earth’s land-based biodiversity. This essay calls for climate change mitigation that begins with keeping fossil fuels in the ground and centers people in the energy transition. Communities fighting fossil fuel exploitation have been calling out the disastrous consequences of fossil fuels for the planet and are leading the way towards a just transition. This report amplifies some of these stories. Fossil fuel financing continues to exacerbate inequalities and result in human rights abuses, particularly in Indigenous, Black, and brown communities. Communities across the world are rising to this moment, from Mozambique, where families have been displaced by massive fossil fuel extraction and export facilities, to the Philippines, where fragile ecosystems have been destroyed by oil spills and are threatened with new LNG terminals. In the United States, the massive buildout of LNG export terminals in the Gulf South violates the land rights of Indigenous Peoples and threatens the health, livelihoods, and environment of communities who have fought environmental racism for decades. A sampling of these destructive projects and the people organizing, building power, and raising their collective voices to fight them are mapped on page 36; see BankingonClimateChaos.org/map to hear directly from communities impacted by fossil fuel financing. According to the latest IPCC synthesis report published in early 2023, the window of opportunity to keep global warming below below 1.5˚C and to build a secure, liveable, and sustainable future is rapidly closing.13 Banks must enable a shift to a just and clean energy economy. The first step is an immediate end to financing new oil, gas, and coal supply or infrastructure. Every dollar spent on fossil fuel expansion is a dollar that is funding climate chaos.....read the report- huge amount of data, graphs and references.....it's both revealing and shocking         https://www.ran.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/BOCC_2023_vF.pdf           

What happens when America’s flood insurance market goes underwater? More homeowners than ever need flood insurance. Fewer than ever can afford it. For millennia, the South has been shaped by its water. The bayous and brackish tributaries that drift into the Mississippi flowed with communication and commerce, while cities like Memphis and Nashville sprang up in the mouths of rivers. Suburbs grew around ports as waterways bustled. Exurbs expanded as they quieted.  Amidst these tides of progress, low-income communities have been relegated to the watery South’s “bad land — that constantly floods, that doesn’t have drainage,” said Reese May, chief strategy and innovation officer at SBP, a grassroots national recovery and resilience organization headquartered in Louisiana. When these areas are submerged, a more and more common occurrence, families who are least able to recover are hit the hardest. May and SBP case managers have watched this dilemma unfold for many years in Louisiana, as they helped New Orleans slowly rebuild after Hurricane Katrina. As SBP expanded its recovery work to communities hit by natural disasters in New York and Texas, employees like May saw family after family wrestle with complications with FEMA payouts and denied insurance claims. The repercussions are rippling: Damage from natural hazards like flooding is a major contributor to national wealth gaps, amplifying existing disparities.  Across the country, flooding is a growing risk — both in how high waters surge, and as a new hazard in areas previously unlikely to be inundated. As storms arrive more frequently, flood insurance and disaster relief programs themselves are now failing.  Yet most homeowner policies do not cover flood damage, requiring families to acquire an entirely different, second insurance plan. Most of these are purchased through a government-backed program called National Flood Insurance Program, or NFIP. “Private markets pulled back from floods decades ago,” Kousky explained. But as prices surge, hundreds of thousands of people have dropped their flood insurance, growing the burden on federal disaster assistance and straining its already stretched budgets. Many are falling through the cracks. The lack of clarity on what assistance will be available from insurance or disaster relief prevents many families from receiving the aid they need. These widespread hurdles are why SBP has stopped measuring success by how many buildings they could help reconstruct. Instead, May said, “We started thinking about what we could do to prevent a survivor from needing our help in the first place.” The majority of natural disasters in the United States already involve flooding. It’s a problem that will get worse with sea-level rise and more intense rain events. By 2050, coastlines will see a national average of 45 to 85 days per year of high-tide flooding. Meanwhile inland, rivers and streams are spilling over their banks more frequently, a type of flooding projected to increase by as much as 30 percent as temperatures rise. Extreme rain is also becoming more common: Peer-reviewed data from the First Street Foundation, a climate research nonprofit, suggests about 20 percent of the country will now see a “once in a century” rainfall about every 25 years. Despite this risk, just 4 percent of homeowners in the U.S. have flood insurance. Even those who do pay for flood protection are often misinformed about their property’s risk. Thanks to climate change, the problem is compounding.......there's muce, much more!     https://grist.org/economics/what-happens-when-americas-flood-insurance-market-goes-underwater/

Climate-damaged states see a way to make Big Oil pay Katie Myers | News, US News | February 12th 2024 Last July, the normally warm and humid but still pleasant New England summer was disrupted by a series of unusually heavy rainstorms. Flash floods broke creek banks and washed away roads, inundating several cities and towns. Vermont and upstate New York in particular saw immense damage. As communities attempted to recover from the havoc, legislators in these states, and several others, asked themselves why taxpayers should have to cover the cost of rebuilding after climate disasters when the fossil fuel industry is at fault.  Vermont is now joining Maryland, Massachusetts, and New York in a multi-state effort to hold Big Oil accountable for the expensive damage wrought by climate change. Bills on the docket in all four states demand that oil companies pay states millions for such impacts by funding, as Vermont’s proposal outlines, energy efficiency retrofits, water utility improvements, solar microgrids, and stormwater drainage, just to name a few resiliency programs. “There will be no shortage of climate expenses that it would be entirely appropriate for this fund to pay for,” said Ben Edgerly-Walsh, the climate and energy director for the Vermont Public Interest Research Group. “These are not going to be avoidable expenses at the end of the day because of the way the climate crisis is playing out.” One 2023 poll showed that over 60 per cent of voters nationwide support making polluters payfor the consequences of their actions. Should these bills become law, however, they surely face a long road of legal battles before they are implemented. The American Petroleum Institute, which represents some 600 fossil fuel companies, did not respond to a request for comment.  Still, such efforts have a number of precedents. The most obvious is the 1998 settlement that forced Big Tobacco to provide $206 billion over 25 years to underwrite state public health budgets. Another example is the federal Superfund legislation enacted in 1980 that followed a number of toxic spills that drew national attention to hazardous waste dumps. After intensive advocacy by environmental organizations and front-line communities, Congress passed the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, or CERCLA, which forced those responsible for these messes to clean them up or pay the government to do so. Vermont and other states hope to replicate that model, said state treasurer Mike Pieciak. The Climate Superfund Cost Recovery Program “would basically be an assessment” on larger oil companies, he said. The small state, home to just over 645,000 people, has repeatedly slung stones at oil industry leviathans. It is suing ExxonMobil under its consumer protection law, alleging that the company, which has for decades understood burning fossil fuels causes climate change, knowingly misled the state’s consumers on the risks of its products. Communities in other states, too, have explored ways to hold fossil fuel accountable for damages, sometimes much more directly. Public health researchers in Kentucky linked deaths in the state’s horrific 2022 floods — which killed more than 40 people — to excessive strip mining that flattened mountaintops and destroyed streams......and there's more            https://www.nationalobserver.com/2024/02/12/news/climate-damaged-states-see-way-make-big-oil-pay