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    SocGen Blacklists US Oil and Gas

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    Stockholm (NordSIP) – According to its new Climate strategy, Societe Generale, has set ambitious goals for decarbonisation and green investments for the coming decades to support the Paris Agreement.

    At the top of the Group’s announcement was the commitment to reduce its overall exposure to the oil and gas extraction sector by 10% by 2025. To achieve this goal, the French banking group has announced that it will stop financing oil and gas extraction in the USA. “This is an ambitious goal which goes beyond the trajectory recommended by the SDS 2020 (-4%) and which allows to take action within a very short time horizon,” said the press release.

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    The bank also repledged to finance up to €120 billion for energy transition projects between 2019 and 2023, including renewable energies. Societe Generale also committed to reducing the carbon intensity of its financing activities linked to electricity production by 18% by 2025 and by 76% by 2040 compared with the levels at the end of 2019.

    “After the Paris Agreement and given the urgency around the climate situation, Societe Generale is leading a responsible and voluntarist climate strategy that we wish to accelerate by pro-actively supporting our clients in their energy transition,” Frédéric Oudea, CEO of Societe Generale, said. “Guided by our corporate purpose, we are determined to play a driving role in ‘Building together with our clients a better and sustainable future through responsible and innovative financial solutions’.”

    “In this context, we are also announcing our decision to stop financing onshore oil and gas extraction in the US. We have a responsibility to redirect our portfolio of activities at a pace that is consistent with the climate scenarios and with an ecological transition that is economically viable and socially inclusive,” Oudea concluded.

    Societe Generale, ranked as the best bank worldwide in 2019 on environmental topics according to RobecoSAM and number one globally in the financing of renewable energies at the end of September 2020 according to IJGlobal.

    Image by ArtTower from Pixabay

    Filipe Albuquerque
    Filipe Albuquerque
    Filipe is an economist with 8 years of experience in macroeconomic and financial analysis for the Economist Intelligence Unit, the UN World Institute for Development Economic Research, the Stockholm School of Economics and the School of Oriental and African Studies. Filipe holds a MSc in European Political Economy from the LSE and a MSc in Economics from the University of London, where he currently is a PhD candidate.

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