A New Tack in the War on Mining Mountains | Alternative Energy | Forums

wonder what the outcome of this will be

Last week, with little fanfare, PNC Financial, the nation’s seventh-largest bank, disclosed a significant strategic shift. The bank said it would no longer finance coal-mining companies that pursue mountaintop removal of coal in Appalachia, an environmentally devastating practice that has long drawn opposition.

It was a big decision for PNC, which has been one of the largest financiers of companies that engage in the mountaintop mining of coal, which involves blasting off the summits of mountains to expose the coal beneath them and dumping the debris into valleys and rivers, which the environmental law organization Earthjustice described as “strip mining on steroids.”

PNC’s decision comes after environmental advocacy groups put intense pressure on Wall Street banks to stop financing such practices. PNC had been a holdout; Bank of America, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Credit Suisse and others had already distanced themselves from coal companies involved in mountaintop removal. GE Capital and UBS appear to be the only large financial institutions in the country still willing to lend money to companies involved in this mountaintop mining.

Environmental advocates have struggled in recent years persuading large investors to divest themselves of stakes in fossil fuel companies, but they may have just hit on a more effective approach: Cut off the companies’ financing.

It’s one thing for large investors like the Rockefeller family or Stanford University’s endowment to pull out of fossil fuel companies. The result, maybe, is a marginally lower stock price for the big oil players.

But it’s quite another when the nation’s banks decide, independently or collectively, to effectively shut off the financing for projects that require considerable capital. It has the effect of killing the business.

http://www.nytimes.c......html?_r=0