At its AGM on Wednesday, Standard Bank is fighting off a shareholder resolution that it disclose its exposure to climate risk — that is, how heavily it is invested in fossil fuel assets and, consequently, how much it might lose as the pressure to respond to climate change increases. Evidently, it would rather we didn’t know.
So it “supports the adoption of higher efficiency, lower-emission coal-fired power plants, and carbon capture and storage technologies to reduce the environmental and social impact of coal-fired power generation”. Carbon capture and storage doesn’t feature in the criteria. That’s no doubt because it would cost too much to be possible anywhere. It has been tried on a power plant in Canada and it failed. Moreover, the storage bit was never really part of it. To pay for the exorbitant costs, the COwas sold for “enhanced oil recovery”: That is, it was pumped into an oil well to restore the pressure needed to extract more oil — along with a return flow of COStandard says nothing about what else it will emit.