In a hard-hitting report to clients, the economists said that without action being taken there could be “catastrophic outcomes”. The bank said the research came from a team that was “wholly independent from the company as a whole”. Climate campaigners have previously criticised JP Morgan for its investments in fossil fuels. The firm’s stark report was sent to clients and seen by BBC News.
While JP Morgan economists have warned about unpredictability in climate change before, the language used in the new report was very forceful.
“We cannot rule out catastrophic outcomes where human life as we know it is threatened,” JP Morgan economists David Mackie and Jessica Murray said. Carbon emissions in the coming decades “will continue to affect the climate for centuries to come in a way that is likely to be irreversible,” they said, adding that climate change action should be motivated “by the likelihood of extreme events”. Climate change could affect economic growth, shares, health, and how long people live, they said….. Click Here to read more
JP Morgan has played the leading role in funding fossil fuel investment since Paris …
Rolling Stone ‘Bankers like numbers. Numbers tell the story. No emotion gets in the way. So let’s look at the numbers: Over the past three years — that is, in the years after the world came together in Paris to try to slow climate change — JPMorgan Chase lent $196 billion to the fossil-fuel industry.
Over the past three years, JPMorgan Chase lent more money to the fossil-fuel industry than any bank on Earth — 29 percent more. And over the past three years, JPMorgan Chase lent more money to the most expansionary parts of the fossil-fuel industry (new pipelines, Arctic drilling, deepsea exploration) than any other bank — 63 percent more.
That’s not to say that other banks don’t do plenty of damage: Citi, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America are all in the hundred-billion-dollar club. But Chase is in a league of its own. It’s the First National Bank of Flood and Fire. It’s Hades Savings and Loan. It is the Doomsday Bank.
It’s possible that could start to change as early as Tuesday, Chase’s annual investor day, when CEO Jamie Dimon comes out to greet the public. The bank has been under unrelenting pressure from activists — just last week, on successive days, they besieged the company’s Pacific Northwest headquarters in Seattle, leading to more than two dozen arrests.
And on Friday a private memo from company economists to high-end clients leaked to the British press, in which they explained that climate change could produce “catastrophic outcomes where human life as we know it is threatened.”
Perhaps Chase management will follow the recent lead of other players like giant asset manager BlackRock or investment bank Goldman Sachs and make at least some concessions. Perhaps they won’t.’
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