from Sunday Herald, 12 May 2013
The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) is under fierce attack for
investing hundreds of millions of pounds in US companies that blast away the
summits of mountains to uncover coal.
Over 500 mountaintops have been eradicated by explosives in the Appalachians in West Virginia over the last few years, releasing toxic wastes into streams, polluting the air and threatening the health of local communities. Burning the coal that’s extracted also helps disrupt the climate.
RBS has been named in a report as the world’s seventh biggest financial backer of mountaintop removal (MTR), with £235.6 million ($362.5m) worth of lending and underwriting in 2012. The major US coal companies that benefited from the money are Arch Coal and Alpha Natural Resources.
RBS is going to come under fire from protestors for funding such large–scale environmental destruction, as its annual general meeting takes place at Gogarburn in Edinburgh on Tuesday. Campaigners will be calling for RBS to pull out of MTR.
“Despite years of greenwashing, RBS is still financing corporations which undertake horrific operations like MTR, threatening the local environment and adding to climate change globally,” said Paul Daly, corporate accountability campaigner at Friends of the Earth Scotland.
“The corporations financed by RBS act with complete disregard for local residents, spreading toxic chemicals in the air, water and soil. This results in health complications from cradle to early grave.”
The scale of the destruction in the US was “almost unimaginable”, Daly argued. “RBS needs to accept that renewable energy is the way forward and get out of fossil fuels, starting with these obscene mountaintop removal schemes.”
A report on the US coal industry, called ‘Extreme Investments’, by the Rainforest Action Network, Banktrack and the Sierra Club lists RBS along with Citigroup, Barclays, Morgan Stanley and others as the main backers of MTR. It also says that RBS is one of the top three banks backing all kinds of coal exploitation in the US with over £1,000m ($1,555m) of lending and underwriting in 2012.
According to Paul Corbit Brown, from the Keeper of the Mountains campaign group in the Appalachians, more than 20 peer-reviewed scientific studies had shown that MTR brought illness and death to mining communities. “The studies estimate more than 4,000 excess deaths in Appalachia annually, as a result of exposure to environmental pollution by coal mining,” he told the Sunday Herald.
Corbit Brown, who is due to speak at a public meeting in Edinburgh on Monday evening, accused RBS of unethical investment. “There is nothing ethical about mountaintop removal,” he said. “It permanently destroys air, water, soil, communities and people's health. It has brought nothing but poverty and sickness to the communities in my home state.”
RBS accepted that there was concern about the impacts of MTR, and has identified it as a heightened environmental and social risk. It is reviewing its policies and approach to MTR companies.
“We apply enhanced environmental and social due diligence to our clients involved in MTR, and where relevant engage with them on how they can improve performance to meet positive standards of corporate responsibility,” said an RBS spokeswoman.
“We welcome the efforts of the Virginia state and US governments as well as certain parts of the industry to reduce this sector’s social and environmental impacts through regulatory measures.”
Destroying the Appalachians: a Noah’s Ark for wildlife
My home of West Virginia is called “the mountain state” in the US, because it’s in the heart of the beautiful Appalachian Mountains. Biologists call them a Noah’s Ark of biological diversity, with thousand types of animals and plants, some of which are found nowhere else in the world.
Unfortunately they are also the place of an ecological nightmare called mountain top removal (MTR) - an extreme form of coal mining that is forbidden in Europe.
MTR uses massive explosions to remove the tops of mountains to get to the coal beneath. Every week, the mountains of West Virginia are subjected to explosions that equal the intensity of the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima.
The remains of this explosion are mindlessly thrown in the nearby valleys. This is called valley fill, and it chokes the birthplace of our streams and rivers.
Valley fills and the process of washing the coal before it goes to market allow dangerous amounts of selenium, mercury, cadmium, arsenic, chromium, lead and other heavy metals to enter our water supplies.
In only a few years more than 500 mountains in Appalachia have been destroyed by MTR and they have buried over 2,000 miles of our streams. Much of the coal extracted has been exported to Europe.
The exports are great for the coal industry, but the five regions of West Virginia that produce the most coal are among the poorest regions within the US. We also have dramatically more health problems than anywhere in the US.
People in mining communities are far more likely to suffer from heart, liver, lung and kidney disease and they are far more likely to have children with birth defects. Nevertheless the coal companies won’t stop poisoning our air, our water and our soil.
It is imperative that this practice ends. Not only is it environmentally devastating, it is an egregious violation of human rights and of all we hold sacred in Appalachia.
These may be merely issues of policies and procedures for banks, mining companies, and power stations. But for my people, they are matters of life or death.
Paul Corbit Brown, a campaigner with the Keeper of the Mountains in the Appalachians, is speaking at a public meeting organised by Friends of the Earth Scotland in Edinburgh on Monday evening.
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