We own RBS, so are we now greenwashing ourselves?

The Royal Bank of Scotland, now majority-owned by the taxpayer, trumpet their green energy investments while keeping quiet about oil and gas. Does this mean we are now greenwashing ourselves?

Fred Pearce
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 8 January 2009 11.14 GMT

Several people have contacted me about the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), owners of NatWest and the self-styled world's largest financier of renewable energy. This is quite a turnaround for a bank that - until a year or so ago - was equally pleased to call itself "the oil and gas bank". And from what I can see, this latter description remains much nearer the reality.
This is a special problem now. RBS was one of the banks that, back in November 2008 at the height of the credit crunch, was reportedly "hours from collapse" when it was bailed out by the government, which bought a 58% stake. So it seems that British taxpayers, through the good agencies of the Treasury, are now greenwashing ourselves.
Last year, before the bail-out, RBS put piles of leaflets in thousands of its branches declaring that "we are the largest financier of renewable energy in the world", and that it was "financing the transition to a low-carbon economy" by "only lending to projects that conform to the highest international environmental standards." Big claims.
RBS is indeed putting money into renewables. It had a bit of a splurge in 2006, the basis of its "largest financier" claim. And in October 2008, just before it was hit by the crunch, it announced that it was helping the Scottish company Burntisland Fabrications diversify from making oil production platforms for the North Sea to making the substructures for offshore wind turbines instead.
But such projects remain sidelines. RBS is still built on oil, and right now it is stumping up more cash for coal than renewables. Beside the wind power punt at Burntisland, consider what else it did in October last year:
• It led a consortium lending $500m to a US power generator called Great Plains Energy, which despite recent plans for wind turbines, powers the midwest by burning coal that emitted 26.5m tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2006.
• It announced a long-term tie-up with OilCorp, a Malaysian oil monolith, to exploit offshore oil and gas in the Middle East. A deal that could, according to OilCorp, eventually be worth "billions of dollars".
• And through its subsidiary bank ABN-Amro, it put up loans for sucking tar sands from beneath Alberta, Canada – one of the most unenvironmentally friendly energy projects in the world today.
You won't read about any of this in any of its green leaflets. Nor that its oil and gas team, which works out of offices above Liverpool Street station in London, is busy underwriting oil companies that are opening up new sources in central Asia, beneath the Arctic, in the Russian far east and off the shores of west Africa.
Nor indeed about RBS bankrolling E.On's planned coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth in Kent, which would be Britain's first new coal-powered station for more than 20 years.
Two recent studies by NGOs including Platform, People and Planet and Friends of the Earth Scotland have concluded that RBS, one of the world's largest energy investors, is still putting four times as much into fossil fuels as renewables. "RBS's business activities are contributing to climate change more than any other British bank," they said.
Just before Christmas, students in Manchester gave RBS their 2008 Greenwash Award. Spot on, guys. But now RBS is owned by us.
The British government says it wants to cut national carbon dioxide emissions by 80% by 2050, as part of a global cut of at least 50%. Much of the money that RBS, on behalf of British taxpayers, is pumping into the oil and coal industries round the world is going to build projects that will still be functioning – will still be causing carbon dioxide emissions - in 2050 and beyond. Shouldn't we be calling a halt? Now.
• How many more green scams, cons and generous slices of wishful thinking are out there? Please email your examples of greenwash to greenwash@guardian.co.uk or add your comments below