The financial services industry’s players would no doubt deny, or at least downplay, their contribution to climate and environmental degradation. And they will continue to do so until it is brought publicly to their attention that a concerned community knows exactly what they are doing.
The banks are the obvious offenders. Their sustainability reports take liberties in using the broad indicators of sustainability as their licence to use the term. Their chosen usage places emphasis on the ability to stay in business, and they use it to legitimise their ability to make super profits by claiming dubious success in becoming better employers and more profitable places to work. It focuses attention only on the interests of those directly in their camp.
Their achievement may be a palliative to gullible shareholders, glad of the dividends, most of whom are unknowing of the environmental consequences of their own good fortunes.
But without exception, in the hands of a bank, sustainability reporting is a smokescreen designed to distract rather than inform. It is a prettified, thick-headed attempt to distract those who don’t hold their shares from the inconvenient fact they least want the public to know, much less talk about.
That fact is that they make profits from lending money and providing services to organisations that pollute the environment to the detriment of all others, including their own customers.
Extrapolate this to the broader financial services industry and you’ll see that all the fund managers, superannuation funds, insurers and so on likewise have their fingers in the same pie. All are hastening the demise of the common environmental inheritance. And as long as the climate is healthy, all well and good.
But evidence is mounting that the climate and the environment are not in good repair. Leaders of these companies make no suggestion, however, of change in the ways in which they will conduct their organisations’ affairs. They simply assure shareholders’ that their interests will continue to be looked after. They who turn a blind eye and who extract handsome bonuses from the returns on environmental depletion will continue to do so.
And when you’re furtively lining your pockets from everyone else’s common inheritance, why would you want others to begin to join the dots to find out how you are doing it and stop you? For one, it’s embarrassing. Second, there may be a cost to pay for what you made from everyone else’s ignorance.
Many of these organisations are now, however, much more vulnerable than they might appear. The music is slowing and for the slower-witted the party is coming to an end. When they tie their fortunes and sales pitches to the likely sustainability car crashes that are the reputations and share prices of companies such as Australia’s best-known department store, they deserve no better.
If they haven’t already realised how vulnerable their bonuses are, it is likely they have also overlooked how irresistible to a crowd is the scene of a spectacular accident.
