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France is Europe’s biggest supporter of “carbon bomb” extraction projects that hold enough fossil fuels to pump out more than a gigaton of CO2 each, the Guardian can reveal.
The four French banks – BNP Paribas, BPCE Group, Crédite Agricole and Société Générale – together invested $17.8bn in 2022 in companies planning or operating carbon bombs, the research found.
The original database of carbon bomb projects came from a research paper that counted 425 coalmines, oilfields and gasfields with potential lifetime emissions greater than 1 gigaton of CO2.
A spokesperson for BNP Paribas said it had stopped lending to some of the companies on the list, adding that one of the underlying databases contained errors that artificially inflated its figures.
“Just by virtue of their scale, the biggest banks in the world can offer better interest rates,” said Joe Thwaites, a sustainable finance campaigner at Natural Resources Defense Council.
“If you have major financiers refusing to finance fossil fuels, it’s not to say that the extraction companies won’t be able to find other sources, but they may have to pay a premium.
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