Al Gore has hit out at the banking industry, claiming it is still making profits from the oil and gas industry despite a climate crisis allegedly caused by the industry.
Speaking to Bloomberg, the prominent climate activist said that bankers “profit enormously” from financing and advising oil and gas companies.
Gore admitted, however, that it’s “a little unrealistic to expect fossil fuel companies to solve this crisis for us when they have incentives to do otherwise,” and it’s also unrealistic to expect banks to simply stop lending to the oil and gas industry.
The comments come amid a shift within the oil and gas industry toward a refocus on its core business rather than a prioritization of low-carbon ventures. BP said as much earlier this year after its CEO admitted that the low-carbon business was not doing well in terms of returns. Shell’s CEO made a similar statement, saying that Shell would not cut its oil and gas production as much as previously planned.
Both moves reflect the robust and resilient demand for oil and gas that led to significant price spikes last year, generating billions in extra profits for oil and gas companies to share with their shareholders. For a time, energy was the best performing sector in the S&P 500.
But according to activists like Gore, this must change in the name of reducing human CO2 emissions to net zero by 2050. According to BloombergNEF, this would require banks to invest four times as much money in low-carbon energy by 2030 as they currently invest in oil and gas. Currently, they put about $800,000 into wind, solar and the like for every $1 million they put into oil, according to BloombergNEF.