"Green" Initiatives Growing in Financial Services, New Report Says

On Tuesday, the TowerGroup announced that it has found that while the impact of the financial services industry on the environment isn't as strenuous as that of the coal, automotive, and chemical industries, the financial industry nevertheless has a role to play that is bigger than its own carbon footprint.

Analyst Inci Kaya finds that sustainability initiatives, including both environmentally friendly and socially-responsible actions, are growing as a free market force among financial services institutions operating in the United States.

TowerGroup is the leading research and advisory services firm focused exclusively on the financial services industry, and Kaya's research extends to benchmarking IT spending, modeling and projecting technology investments, and trends and financial metrics across the financial services industry.

Financial services' "green" initiatives include sourcing power from "green" suppliers or affiliating themselves with associations such as the U.S .Green Build Council, offering "green-friendly" products to the marketplace (including expanding incentives to reduce paper statements and increase online account access by clients), and several others.

Within a given financial institution, sustainability initiatives need to be shaped around such prime business qualities as corporate culture, recycling, telecommuting, and marketing initiatives like "branding" the sustainable initiatives.

However, as the hue and cry over mankind's "carbon footprinting" grows louder, so does the opposition voice of the dissidents, who say they have been systematically suppressed.

A contingent of the scientists who actually share the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore have very recently said that at least two investigations by Committees of the House of the British Parliament find that United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has persistently and to a towering extent purposely exaggerated both the effect of greenhouse gases on temperature and the environmental consequences of warmer weather.

It has been asserted by these scientists and their supporters that the bureaucrats at the IPCC took their computer models of the possible rise in sea level over the next 100 years due to climate change and multiplied them by a factor of 10; that Al Gore's prize-winning movie, which is now being shown to countless numbers of school children, contains no less than 35 significant scientific errors; that talks of "global warming" threats to coral reefs and polar bears are pure mythology; that climate change had nothing to do with Hurricane Katrina, or indeed any other hurricane; and that when the IPCC's 2005 report on climate change stated that "the [carbon dioxide] radiative forcing increased by 20 percent during the last 10 years", that statement should have instead read "by one percent".

And, assert these dissidents, whenever the public hears the statement, "the science is settled", it has originated in the mouth of a scientifically-illiterate bureaucrat and should not be taken seriously.

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