Rainforest Action Network

The last five years have seen three of America’s largest financial institutions – Citibank, Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase – coming out with environmental policies: both publicly and in documents they can be held to.

In May last year the board of JP Morgan Chase announced that they were going to lobby Washington about global warming. In September they used the brutal hurricane season – which cost approximately $200 billion in damages – to warn US clients that global warming poses financial risks. Then, in November, it seemed as though the unthinkable had happened: Wall Street was turning a shade of green that was not solely linked with a dollar bill.

The financial pages of American newspapers began buzzing with the news that Goldman Sachs had called on the Government to introduce mandatory regulations to confront climate change, saying that ‘voluntary action alone cannot solve the problem’.

In a carefully worded Environmental Policy Framework the company also acknowledges that ‘diverse, healthy natural resources – fresh water, oceans, air, forests, grasslands and agro-systems – are a critical component of social and...

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