Indigenous delegates said they were astonished by the “willful ignorance” they encountered when they asked global banks to prevent financing of new fossil fuel projects on their ancestral lands in what is now North America.
Representatives of the Carrizo Comecrudo tribe of Texas and Nahua Nation of Mexico met with executives from HSBC, Barclays and Credit Suisse in London this week to urge them to prevent support for damaged oil and oil pipelines and fuel export terminals.
Christopher Basaldu, a member of the Carrizo Comecrudo tribe, said he was horrified by the lack of awareness about the contaminants caused by fracking, a high-pressure drilling strategy that revolutionized the U. S. energy industry. It caused great environmental damage.
“I had to teach this bank manager a lesson about fracking 101. Their point of ignorance is appalling. They don’t know how potentially destructive hydraulic fracturing is to groundwater,” Basaldu told DeSmog. Privileged Europeans can be so intentionally ignorant and get such massive wages. “
Fracking works through confined explosions and an aggregate of water, sand and chemicals to fragment shale layers containing oil and gas. According to environmental organizations, this strategy can adjust groundwater, degrade landscapes and threaten wildlife.
In addition, fracking creates a poisonous stew of air pollutants that can cause severe headaches, asthma symptoms, leukemia in the formative years, center disorders and birth defects, and some of the more than 1,000 chemicals used in the procedure are known to cause cancer, according to a report through the National Resources Defense Council.
Basaldu is fighting plans through Houston-based oil and fuel company NextDecade to build a $10 billion facility on the South Texas coast near Brownsville. The formula would supercool the fractured fuel from the Permian Basin for export as liquefied herbal fuel (LNG).
Community members say the size allocation of Central Park, known as Rio Grande LNG, would protect low-income Latino and indigenous communities from destructive air pollution, cause irreversible damage to valuable wetlands, threaten endangered wildlife, and increase climate degradation and related carbon emissions. . .
The long-term Rio Grande LNG and other planned export terminals looked increasingly dubious as energy demand plummeted from the COVID-19 pandemic. In November 2020, French app Engie dealt another blow to the sector when it pulled out of negotiations on a long-term deal to buy LNG cargoes from Rio Grande LNG amid reports that the French government was involved in methane emissions from the Permian Basin.
But the scenario has changed dramatically since then, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sparked a European race for Russian gas, bringing once-moribund projects back to life. In May, NextDecade reported that Engie had returned to the negotiating table and signed a contract to purchase shipments from Rio Grande LNG starting in 2026.
The assignment took a step forward in September, when Credit Suisse helped NextDecade publish a personal placement of shares in anticipation of a final investment decision, Offshore Energy reported.
Barclays and HSBC are connected to the program through their role as lead financiers of oil primaries ExxonMobil and Shell, which signed contracts to buy shipments to Rio Grande LNG, according to a report by the Sierra Club and allied organizations. Both banks have minor exposures to Engie, according to Banking on Climate Chaos, a report through advocacy groups.
Barclays, HSBC and Credit Suisse declined to comment.
Basaldu traveled to London with Bekah Hinojosa, an artist and network organizer who has also opposed Rio Grande LNG since the assignment was proposed 8 years ago, and is the Sierra Club’s Gulf Coast Crusade representative.
The duo was accompanied by Oliveria Montès Lazcano, coordinator of the National Institute of Indigenous Peoples in the central Mexican state of Puebla. Lazcano is fighting TransCanada’s plan to build the Tuxpan-Tula pipeline to import fuel into central Mexico from Texas. HSBC, Credit Suisse and Barclays are TransCanada investments, activists say.
Indigenous networks have mobilized effective opposition to fossil fuel infrastructure in recent years, playing a key role in defeating flagship projects in North America, adding the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline and the Atlantic coast pipeline.
A report by the Indigenous Environmental Network and Oil Change International released last year found that indigenous communities resisting more than 20 fossil fuel projects analyzed had halted or delayed greenhouse fuel pollutants in at least 25 percent of annual U. S. emissions. USA and Canada.
While the world’s 60 largest personal banks have provided $4. 6 trillion in fossil fuel financing since the signing of the Paris Agreement in 2015, according to Banking on Climate Chaos, indigenous teams are looking to convince bankers to stop polluting projects.
In 2017, French bank BNP Paribas pledged to avoid offering money committed to fractured pipelines and export terminals in North America several months after an earlier delegation of South Texas indigenous leaders visited Paris and attracted much attention, speaking on radio shows and at rallies and shareholder meetings. .
Indigenous teams in Ecuador and Peru won new concessions in 2021 by persuading BNP Paribas, Credit Suisse, ING and other European banks to avoid financing crude oil exports from the Ecuadorian Amazon after defense teams Stand. earth and Amazon Watch published information revealing its multibillion-dollar value. Exposure to trade.
However, the gap between the overwhelming sense of urgency felt by indigenous peoples suffering to save their lands and slow climate change and the priorities of bank executives can weigh heavily.
In May, Stuart Kirk, then head of sustainable investments at HSBC’s asset control division, came forward under widespread complaint after dismissing warnings about the climate crisis as “baseless” and “strident” and asked, “Who cares if Miami is six years old?”meters underwater in a hundred years,” suggesting that the city could adapt. Kirk has since left HSBC.
In late September, Hurricane Ian hit Florida, causing devastating flooding and killing at least 130 people, more than any other hurricane since 1935.
Basaldu, who volunteers with the South Texas Environmental Justice Network, said he felt the bank executives he met this week were hiding “self-perceived identities of technocrats” involved in internal proceedings.
“I feel that they believe themselves innocent, rather than accomplices or perpetrators of climate crimes and human rights crimes and violations related to the ongoing genocide of indigenous and indigenous communities around the world, just to extract resources that make European countries cautious in their excessive energy consumption,” he said.
Lazcano echoed that impression, feeling that the bank officials he met had “lost touch with reality. “
“There is no evidence that they perceive what human beings are: the network we want as humans,” Lazcano added. “I’d like to think we were able to touch their hearts a little bit, communicate with them from human to human. “, and that there may be only one outcome of the meetings we had with them. “
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