One of the world's largest financial institutions said this week it will phase out lending money to coal operators that use mountaintop removal mining.
CHARLESTON, W.Va. - One of the world's largest financial institutions said this week it will phase out lending money to coal operators that use mountaintop removal mining.
Charlotte-based Bank of America Corp. said it will stop financing companies that produce more than half of their coal from mountaintop removal.
"We feel the practice has a significant impact on the environment and on communities," said company spokesman Ernesto Anguilla.
Bank of America has provided financing for several major surface mine operators, including Massey Energy and International Coal Group, according to corporate financial disclosures.
Bank officials announced their decision the same week that the Bush administration moved to finalize a rule that removes one potentially key legal hurdle for mountaintop removal.
The Bank of America move, announced Wednesday, was months in the making, and the result of lobbying by local citizen groups with the help of national organizations such as the Rainforest Action Network and the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Rainforest Action has sponsored protests outside banking operations across the country, and the NRDC took banking executives on a flyover to see West Virginia mining operations from the air.
"This is a testament to the hard work of Appalachian communities and anti-coal activists across the country, whose collective pressure left Bank of America with little choice but to abandon its support for this barbaric form of resource extraction," said Rebecca Tarbotton, director of Rainforest Action's Global Finance Campaign, which since October 2007 has pressed Bank of America to cease financing of mountaintop removal mining and coal-fired power plants.
CHARLESTON, W.Va. - One of the world's largest financial institutions said this week it will phase out lending money to coal operators that use mountaintop removal mining.
Charlotte-based Bank of America Corp. said it will stop financing companies that produce more than half of their coal from mountaintop removal.
"We feel the practice has a significant impact on the environment and on communities," said company spokesman Ernesto Anguilla.
Bank of America has provided financing for several major surface mine operators, including Massey Energy and International Coal Group, according to corporate financial disclosures.
Bank officials announced their decision the same week that the Bush administration moved to finalize a rule that removes one potentially key legal hurdle for mountaintop removal.
The Bank of America move, announced Wednesday, was months in the making, and the result of lobbying by local citizen groups with the help of national organizations such as the Rainforest Action Network and the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Rainforest Action has sponsored protests outside banking operations across the country, and the NRDC took banking executives on a flyover to see West Virginia mining operations from the air.
"This is a testament to the hard work of Appalachian communities and anti-coal activists across the country, whose collective pressure left Bank of America with little choice but to abandon its support for this barbaric form of resource extraction," said Rebecca Tarbotton, director of Rainforest Action's Global Finance Campaign, which since October 2007 has pressed Bank of America to cease financing of mountaintop removal mining and coal-fired power plants.
Rob Perks, director of advocacy campaigns for NRDC, said Bank of America's "bold step forward sends an unequivocal signal to the mining industry that business as usual is no longer acceptable.
"Make no mistake, this is a big step from one of the nation's biggest lenders," Perks wrote on his group's Switchboard blog. "And it marks a turning point in the campaign to end the war on Appalachia being waged by the coal industry."
Carol Raulston, spokeswoman for the National Mining Association, said Bank or America had made an "unfortunate decision ... without any consultation with mining companies that I am aware of."
Raulston said the bank's decision puts mountaintop removal operators in the same situation as consumers, small business and homebuyers who are having trouble borrowing money with today's credit crunch. "I don't believe B of A consulted them either," she said.
Bank of America's decision on mountaintop removal comes after the bank also joined with Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase and Morgan Stanley in adopting plans to take climate-change risks into account when lending money.
The ultimate effect of Bank of America's decision remains to be seen, said Dan Bakal, director of electric power programs with CERES, a group of investors, environmental groups and public interest organizations that pushes for sustainable financial practices.
"It definitely seems like a significant step, but it's not going to completely change the landscape," Bakal said Wednesday. "The key question is will other bankers follow suit, and if any significant number of them do, it could be a very big deal."
Reach Ken Ward Jr. at kw...@wvgazette.com or 348-1702.
In West Virginia, mining companies are literally moving mountains to uncover valuable, low sulfur coal reserves.
Mountaintop removal has become the dominant form of surface mining in the state. Coal operators are blasting off hilltops, and dumping leftover rock and dirt into nearby valleys.
An untold amount of the state has been flattened, and hundreds of miles of streams have been buried. Find out more in this Special Report.
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As for BoA's business decision, it will be up to their shareholders to let them know if that's a bad decision or not. BoA is in the business of making money, but they can also choose to make their money in some ways and not others. They may have looked at the finances and decided that there are better risks than loaning money to MTR mines that may be sued out of existence, or are bad publicity for their banking operation, or for any of a number of reasons that make good business sense that nobody on this board realizes.
In other words, maybe they've discovered that financing MTR operations is bad business or a big risk.
I brought God into it because many enviromentalists use that approach to back up their cause. Just saying it works both ways in most any argument.
Yes we need to look to the future for new energy sources. Until those sources are put into production we can't shut down what we have.
Just like the drilling off shore. Wouldn't be productive for ten years. What do the Dems want us to do. Wait til we're out of oil and then start drilling.
Scrubbers on emission systems installed at power plants have made coal as clean if not cleaner than other fossil fuels.
The "streams" involved are mostly creases and crevices in hill side. Dry until it rains. Those "streams" are replaced in the reclaimation process. More often than not it improves situations downstream.
Freshly reclaimed sites do have top soil problems. But a few years of grass and trees, the soil slowly returns. There are older reclaimed sites where if you didn't know there had been an operation there you wouldn't know it
If the news media spent as much time showing relaimed mine sites as they did working sites we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Yes a working mine is very destructive and ugly to watch.
But the reclaimed sites are contoured and reseeded/planted into usable land. Several sites are being used today providing work other than minimum wage tourism jobs.
Yes God created the mountains. He also created the coal inside. He also gave us the ability to retreive it and the earth the ability to heal itself.