Most people in the UK invest money in the country’s biggest banks and pension funds, but we have very little control over what they do with our money. Every year, these companies pour billions of pounds into coal, oil and gas extraction across the planet, pushing us ever closer to runaway climate change.

Dirty fossil fuel projects are often situated in poor countries, but instead of helping more people get access to electricity, all too often they make local people’s lives much worse by robbing them of their homes or polluting their land and water.

We need to cure our finance sector of its fossil fuel addiction, and as a first step banks and pension funds should be made to report the carbon emissions from the dirty energy projects they finance. Only when their impact on the climate is made public will we have a chance of forcing them to reduce it.

Richard Kite, Brown Street, Colne.