I am trying to find to what extent the Irish banks are funding the fossil fuel industry – However their annual reports don’t have a breakdown of their loans

6 comments

1. Jesus christ I butchered the title. Banjaxed even

2. Every bank,pension fund, hedge fund , billion dollar company’s all have massive amounts of money in fossil fuel and will always have. Its only becoming rarer and rarer by the day. No matter what governments say about green plant and climate this and climate that, fossil fuel will always be invested in and these billion dollar industries are just going to make more money.

   You do realise your everyday plastic product is the buy product of fossil fuel. Clothing , technology. 90% of the stuff you touched over the last 7 days (other than food- I wouldn’t be surprised tho) probably was made in some way by fossil fuel.

   The US dollar is pretty much backed by fossil fuel known as , petro dollar – this means that no matter what country oil is bought from it will be paid in the US dollar , that means these country’s are going in invest with the US dollar. For e.g , putin wants his oil to be paid in rupble, this would be castrotropic to the value of the us dollar.

   What do we do about this? I don’t know and to be honest I don’t care about climate change, why should I worry about burning to much fuel or having a big carbon foot print and theres people out there spending millions on private jets and billions on super yachts. Climate change is real and is a problem for this planet but its also excuse to us ordinarily people to pay more tax , cause the big boys in this world don’t give a shit about it.

3. We would only report such info to specific questions from investors in our funds. Our investors are institutions rather than retail so it would be tough to get an answer from our investor relations team as an average Joe.

   I can’t speak for the rest of the firm but of the money that we manage from Dublin, we don’t have a single investment that generates more than 10% of revenues through the fossil fuel industry. Most of our newer investment mandates (since 2019 for example) have specific stipulations to not invest in the fossil fuel industry.

4. >I’m hitting dead ends and it seems that information is either deceptively hidden or just not available at all.

   Why do you find this surprising? What would be the motivation for them to bother breaking down their business dealings by those categories? It’s not some great conspiracy for fuck sake.

5. The 3 Irish banks won’t break their loan books into the level of detail you’re seeking in their annual reports but even a basic understanding of their business would probably answer your question.

   They’re all primarily focussed on lending to the Irish consumer (in the form of mortgages and consumer lending) and to the small business and agri sector. AIB and Bank of Ireland have a corporate business but again it’s primarily Irish corporates or the Irish arms of multinationals.

   So I suppose what I’m saying is, without putting any numbers on it, any lending to the fossil fuel industry is going to be immaterial on a global scale. Small lending facilities to a chain of petrol stations would be height of it. None of the Irish banks are out there lending to BP or some shale oil explorer, they’re just not big enough and they’re focussed so completely on Ireland.

6. Commenting to read in the morning