Bank of America is tracking emissions to reduce them to net zero, but this is troubling for those who want to unleash America’s energy capability. It means that financing will be easier to obtain if emissions are lower.
via breitbart:
“This is the worst woke story I’ve seen,” Fox Business host Larry Kudlow said about Bank of America’s use of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics against its own customers.
Kudlow made his comments during a Friday interview on his WABC radio show with Breitbart Economics Editor John Carney. The topic of discussion was a Breitbart report about the “Bank of UnAmerica” ad campaign launched by the advocacy group Consumers’ Research highlighting Bank of America’s ESG agenda.
“There’s this tremendous story up on Breitbart about Bank of America’s wokeness,” Kudlow said. “I’ve never seen anything like this before. It’s, I guess, the second largest bank in the United States monitoring your purchases, tracking your emissions, helping fund abortions, attacking your Second Amendment rights, and forcing environment, social, and governance metrics (ESG) to potentially lock individuals and businesses out of key banking services.”
Carney explained that Bank of America sees these efforts as part of the bank’s “social responsibilities,” particularly with regards to environmental issues. He noted that in a report last September, the bank’s officials revealed that they are not only tracking their own carbon emissions, but also the carbon emissions of their large corporate clients, especially auto and energy companies.
“The way Bank of America thinks about it is this is the emissions they are financing. And they want to reduce those over the course of the next couple decades to net zero as well,” Carney said. “They use very Orwellian language. They say they want to inspire and enable customers to do this. But, of course, when the second largest bank in the country is telling you that they’re tracking your emissions, what’s going to happen? It means that you say, okay, my financing will be easier to obtain if I have lower emissions. And, frankly, this should be really troubling to people like you and I who believe that we really need to unleash America’s energy capability. If you have a bank like Bank of America saying, ‘We’re not really on board with that,’ it doesn’t matter if we get the permits out if you can’t get financing to build the infrastructure needed to extract oil and natural gas out of the ground.”