If anyone still has doubt about who leads the big choices of today, the ones which will determine our future, these notions would, probably, be clarified by analyzing what is being decided by the boards of directors of the largest banks in the world, especially regarding energy sources. The Big Six, (that is, the six largest banking groups on the planet), led by the omnipotent Goldman Sachs, have decided, in black and white, that they will drastically and quickly reduce investments aimed at the detection and production of energy from fossil fuels, that is, coal, petroleum and natural gas. It is expected that the other five world leading banks will be quick to join.
To better understand this, Goldman Sachs has made it known that they will not pay a penny towards new explorations in the Artic or the opening of new coal mines on any of the five continents. To quantify the importance of this decision, it is enough to cite the inquiry published by The Guardian last October. The study calculated that, between 2016 and mid-2019, the great banks funded about 700 billion dollars towards the search of fossil fuels. That is, in the three years after the Paris climate agreements!
Environmentalists have very good reasons to rejoice at the ‘repentance’ of the global pollution funders. But, the reality is more complex. From the viewpoint of the banking giants, exiting from the fossil sector cannot happen overnight. This is because of both the impact it would have on employees in this immense industry, in terms of jobs, and the drastic drop in profits that the bank’s shareholders will suffer.
It explains, like Goldman Sachs, despite being at the helm of this virtuous turn, has not given up participating in the negotiating table for the purchase of shares of the oil company Saudi Aramco, which is notoriously the worst state-owned polluter on the planet.
However, the most chilling news about this business, that some equates to a crime against humanity, comes from the Climate Accountability Institute. The US Research Institute, committed to climate change and universally accredited, stated that, already in 1965, the administrators of about twenty oil companies and some political leaders were aware of the environmental impacts that the increasing production of fossil fuels would have. How this could have happened can only be explained by giving an answer to the question: who chooses the future of humanity in the modern world?
