In 2019 Luisa Neubauer (Fridays for Future) gave a speech at the Annual General Meeting of Deutsche Bank. Her key sentence was: “It is Deutsche Bank – like no other bank – that is stealing the future from us. In response, CEO Christian Sewing announced that it would finance “fewer fossil fuel projects“.
In order to save itself the same this year, Deutsche Bank rolled out a PR campaign in advance and is now advertising in a press release with “ambitious sustainability goals“. In it the willingness is found to no longer finance oil and gas projects. However, the problem is not the projects, but the financing of the companies that earn their money with fossil fuels. There is however not a word about this.
This is why, at Deutsche Bank’s Annual General Meeting, we demonstrated what its “Sustainability Strategy 2020” really looks like:
The facts
Deutsche Bank is currently the fifth most important European bank for financing fossil fuels, the seventh most important international bank for financing coal mines and the financier of Arctic oil and gas. (Source)
Its European customers include RWE AG (the EU’s largest CO2 emitter, responsible among other things for Garzweiler and the destruction of the Hambach forest) and Uniper (plans to connect a coal-fired power plant, Datteln 4, to the grid this year).
Even though it does not directly finance the Australian coal mine Carmichael, DB has helped the responsible company Adani to take out loans of USD 81 million. If Carmichael starts production, it will become one of the largest mines in the world – with devastating consequences for the Great Barrier Reef and the climate: Greenpeace estimates that 128 million tons of CO2 will be released by burning the coal.
According to research by Urgewald e.V., DB is financing ExxonMobil to a considerable extent, which is developing huge oil and gas reserves just off the coast of Guyana. If these were to burn, this would lead to an additional 2.5 billion tons of CO2.
We call on Deutsche Bank to stop financing climate-damaging companies because, as the 17th largest bank in the world and the only globally active German bank, it bears an enormous responsibility for achieving the Paris climate goals!
Hat die Deutsche Bank so schnell reagiert? -
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Remarks
- More (also about the armaments business of Deutsche Bank): https://urgewald.org/deutsche-bank and in the webinar from Urgewald on Deutsche Bank.
- “A fair Deal for Guyana” fights for international attention for the #CarbonBombGuyana. Despite paying lip service to the Paris Climate Agreement, the World Bank has helped the country to open up to oil companies under poor conditions.
- “Funfact”: DB has paid about 20 billion USD in fines for fraud and customer deception since 1995.
