Carbon Principles

The Carbon Principles are a series of guidelines established by three leading Wall Street banks — Citigroup Inc., JP Morgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley — to assess the risks in financing electric power projects in terms of climate change. 

The Principles call for "enhanced diligence" in evaluating electric power industry borrowers in terms of their use of energy efficiency; renewable energy, and low-carbon distributed energy technologies; and conventional and advanced generating technologies.

The Climate Principles are a similar framework for climate change best practice for the financial sector. This is a comprehensive industry framework for a response to climate change and has been adopted by Crédit Agricole, Munich Re, Standard Chartered, Swiss Re and HSBC.

2011 RAN report
In January 2011, Rainforest Action Network released a report on the Principles, saying that "while the broader economy has been shifting away from new coal power plants, the banks that have signed onto the Carbon Principles are continuing with business as usual in regards to financing dirty coal."

Key findings include:
 * The Carbon Principles address the economic risk of financing climate change, rather than the environmental risk of providing this finance.
 * There is no evidence that the Carbon Principles have stopped, or even slowed, financing to carbon-intensive projects.
 * There is no evidence that the Carbon Principles have spurred investment in clean energy at greater levels than what is already happening across the economy.