HSBC's dirty money in Asia
Published by MAC on 2019-04-05Source: Asia Times
London Calling the coal shots
How to "appropriately balance humanitarian needs with the need to transition to a low-carbon economy”?
That's a challenge faced by one of the world's leading international banks.
This is the massively-endowed and diversifed China-London based HSBC, which employs numerous slogans designed to seduce us into becoming its customers.
The "World's local bank", a "global citizen", devoted to "connecting money" are some of its mind-numbing catch phrases.
Among its flag-bearers are the British actor Richard Ayoade, whose televisual excursions swiftly take us across the globe, before landing us in a cardboard cut-out UK where we're invited to feel at home, securely in the lap of this god which has brought us firmly down to earth.
But, in reality, today's HSBC is a fount of confused policies, amply washed in hypocrisy: while claiming to reject investment in coal, it continues support for burning the "black stuff" in several poor countries.
One of which is Vietnam where, according to a recent Harvard University study, almost 20,000 people could die from coal-created pollution every year until 2030.
That's the inevitable connection between our money and their fate, which HSBC dare not make; and alas, intelligent, attractive, peronalities like Richard Ayoade are so far disinclined to present [See also: Worlds largest banks won't divulge clients responsibility ].
[London Calling is published by Nostromo Rearch and does not necessarily represent any other party. Reproduction of its comments are welcome under a Creative Commons licence]
Greening HSBC’s dirty money in Asia
By Nguyen Thi Hang
Asia Times
3 April 2019
Electricity in cities is taken for granted. Most of us turn on our lights with little understanding of where the energy comes from, even less the impact coal-fired power stations have on communities living in their shadow. As a city girl myself, I used to be the same.
While it’s a fact that Vietnam needs energy to continue its growth, it need not come at the cost of our environment, our air and our health.
Not that life in the city is easy. Because of high levels of air pollution, a clear blue sky is just a dream to me and others. Some days it feels like we’re choking. Unsurprisingly, Harvard University researchers project that by 2030, air pollution from coal-fired power stations could result in 19,220 premature deaths per year in Vietnam.
We simply cannot allow the 40 new coal power plants planned for our country to be built.
Strangely enough, the key to our future lies not inside our own country, but in the meeting rooms of international financial institutions such as HSBC.
For years HSBC has been one of the largest financiers of coal projects around the world, providing more than US$850 million in project finance lending to new coal power plants since 2010, with most of that going to Southeast Asia.
In 2018, it saw the light, ending finance to coal-fired power stations because of the devastating impacts on the global climate.
Except, of course, that it added a caveat or two.
One of these was to leave the door open for dirty coal power in Vietnam, Bangladesh and Indonesia.
Daniel Klier, the bank’s global head of sustainability, explained this “was to appropriately balance humanitarian needs with the need to transition to a low-carbon economy.”
HSBC’s justification of coal as a humanitarian act is cynical and offensive in the extreme.
That’s why this week an open letter was sent to John Flint, the bank’s chief executive officer, on behalf of 13 organizations – including my own – from the countries HSBC clearly believes don’t deserve clean air.
Currently, for example, it is still involved in the Vinh Tan 3 project in Vietnam, not surprisingly in one of the worst areas for pollution in the country. It is also funding the dredging of the Payra deep-sea port in Bangladesh, which would open the gates for coal imports to fuel new coal plants, a ticking carbon bomb on a global scale.
If HSBC is to be taken seriously, it must extend its “no coal” policies globally. Not just for people’s lives on the line in directly affected countries, but also to avoid the climate impacts that touch us all.
HSBC and others would no doubt argue that countries such as Vietnam are willing to trade clean air for more energy infrastructure. This is wrong on a number of levels.
As the cost of renewable energy has plummeted in the past decade, we no longer need to choose between energy and a healthy environment. Even when external costs are not taken into account, by 2020, solar power is expected to be cheaper than coal power in Vietnam.
But we do not need to wait until 2020 to see that happen. A total of 88 solar power plants will be put into operation by June 30 this year.
We continue to get coal power, not because it’s the better choice, but because the international finance we need for infrastructure ties our hands behind our backs.
Every coal deal involves a consortium of public and private finance, especially from Japan, China and South Korea.
As part of every financial package, corporations ailing from the shift to clean energy in their domestic markets, such as Doosan Heavy of Korea and Toshiba of Japan, always get the construction contracts to build coal plants in Vietnam.
HSBCs role is a critical one. If it were to close its loopholes and instead invest in clean energy, it would further remove the legitimacy of this kind of predatory coal finance.
In doing so, it would literally give us room to breathe.
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