The dirty little secret the banks didn't want you to know about

Since 2016, Barclays and HSBC have invested £236bn into oil & gas.

To put that into perspective, all of the other big banks combined (Santander, Natwest, Lloyds, Standard Chartered) put in £88bn over the same timeframe.

Based on Oil & Gas investments in 2021, from Banking on Climate Chaos, 2022

This might be simply because Barclays and HSBC are the two biggest UK banks.

But a glance at the total assets of the big banks – traditionally one way to judge how big a bank is – suggests HSBC is far and away the “biggest” bank, but Barclays is not dramatically bigger than its competitors.

Based on annual reports for 2021

So why are these two banks consistently funding oil & gas?

Is it profit?

Since 2016, Barclays and HSBC are actually less profitable than the other 4 banks combined.

Based on annual reports for 2021 and Banking on Climate Chaos

So investing in oil & gas investment does not directly result in more profit. Of course, this is a simplified view, but it does beg the question, why do HSBC and Barclays continue to plunge money into fossil fuels?

We might never know.

It’s their dirty little secret.

But the hopeful news is that you can stop this.

It takes just a few minutes to find out the impact of your bank with MyMotherTree.com and a few weeks to transfer your money to a bank that is not actively destroying the planet.