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DCL
Encouraging news on the devastating practice of mountaintop removal coal mining: banks are starting to shy away from it.
Large banks, Chase chief among them, have been funding, and profiting from, mountaintop removal mining for years. But the New York Times reports a decline in that trend:
After years of legal entanglements arising from environmental messes and increased scrutiny of banks that finance the dirtiest industries, several large commercial lenders are taking a stand on industry practices that they regard as risky to their reputations and bottom lines.
In the most recent example, the banking giant Wells Fargo noted last month what it called "considerable attention and controversy" surrounding mountaintop removal mining, and said that its involvement with companies engaged in it was "limited and declining."
Wells Fargo was one of the smallest players in the game of bankrolling mountaintop removal, but the story notes that some of the larger ones—Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citibank—are also scaling back or ending such loans completely.
Of course, this does not mean companies removing mountaintops for coal, like Massey Energy, will not get funding elsewhere in their quest to feed the country's demand for cheap energy. But it does signal a shift that will hopefully prove the director of the Rainforest Action Network right when she told The Times, "as access to capital becomes more constrained it will be harder for mining companies to finance the blowing up of America's mountains."
