The Lloyds Banking Group PLC annual shareholder meeting was disrupted by protestors berating the lender for actually increasing funding for fossil fuels last year.
Claims from the bank to have stopped financing oil and gas projects were slammed as “greenwashing” and a “PR fig leaf” by the Extinction Rebellion activists.
The FTSE 100-listed group increased its fossil fuel funding by over £400mln last year, according to research for the 2023 Banking On Climate Chaos report.
As chairman Robin Budenburg stood up to speak he was immediately interrupted by a series of protestors who called for the company to truly stop funding fossil fuel projects and do so for good.
BREAKING: @LloydsBank AGM disrupted ????
“In 2022, Lloyds did what few other global banks did and increased its financial support to the brutally destructive fossil fuel industry by $500 million."#DefundClimateChaos pic.twitter.com/lC9l6wsSAB
— XR Money Rebellion ????????????️⚧️ (@money_rebellion) May 18, 2023
Lloyds stopped funding the thermal coal sector last year and committed to not funding new oil and gas fields, while painting its £15bn of funding into the fossil fuel sector since the 2015 Paris Agreement as positive results as it is dwarfed by the lending supplied by HSBC and Barclays.
But the protestors said Lloyds had continued to fund projects that started before it made its commitment and also provide general corporate funding to many companies in the fossil fuel supply chain.
“Despite soothingly reassuring advertisements of stallions galloping through green valleys and over beaches, in 2022 Lloyds did what few other global banks did and increased its financial support to the brutally destructive fossil fuel industry by $500mln,” said 63-year-old protester Max Millar.
“This at a time of climate crisis when even the UN Secretary General calls investing in new fossil fuels infrastructure ‘moral and economic madness’.”
He said if Lloyds was truly fossil fuel free it would be attractive to multiple large institutions and called for the bank to “take the final step and set an example of real leadership to the UK’s major commercial institutions”.
Fellow protestor William Hunter, aged 65, said he found it “deeply ironic” that Lloyds’ is still financing fossil fuel industry while its core business is retail banking and mortgage lending, as “extreme weather events caused by climate change are on a clear pathway to causing ever more damage to the health and wellbeing of millions of Lloyds’ customers”.