Silk Road did a spinoff where guns were being sold as the primary goods (the Armory) and they closed it because it wasn't profitable enough.

You're probably unaware that the GP specifically used 'HSBC' because they were caught laundering trillions of dollars of drug money and nobody was indicted.

He probably isn't unaware of that. He may well have actually read the indictment itself or a detailed summary of it, which made clear that the US case was very weak to the point of hardly working at all. In particular, not only did they fail to clearly establish that drug money was really moving (their case was "there is so much cash, some of it must be from cartels") but in particular they failed to show intent by HSBC execs to help drug cartels. Actually their case boiled down to HSBC didn't try hard enough, they weren't suspicious enough, etc. (I'm ignoring the Iranian transactions here which gets into issues of international jurisdiction, as you only brought up drugs).

The reason you think the are guilty is twofold. Firstly US anti money laundering laws are unbelievably extreme. The PATRIOT Act removed the need to have intent to be found guilty of money laundering. Bankers can now be found guilty of AML violations even if they genuinely tried hard and had no intent to break the law. Hence the accusations from the DoJ that were of the form "HSBC should have designated Mexico as high risk", etc. Secondly as part of the plea agreement HSBC had to act guilty and accept whatever the DoJ said about them. So you only heard one side of the story, the prosecutions side (except there was no court case). No surprises that you think the whole thing is cut and dried.

It's no crime to be ignorant of such things, but just try not to hold any policy positions on the subject.

Given that there was never any court case and HSBC was never able to defend themselves, pretty much everyone is ignorant in this case because we never heard the full story. But I'm pretty sure if DoJ had emails from HSBC execs that looked like the ones from BitInstant there would indeed have been prosecutions.

The climate is already changing, the goal is to reduce the amount of change.

The problem is the effort is not to reduce the amount, the effort is to send change, however slightly, in a VERY BAD direction.

We already know the Earth will enter a glacial period again. It may even be tending to do so now, we really don't have the understanding of climate to say for sure.

What we do know is that entering a glacial period is something we would vastly rather avoid over any of the climate warming models to date (now that we know runaway warming is simply not going to happen as the doomsayers predicted). Glacial periods will mean mass extinctions all over, and a huge shortage of arable land unlike the greatly expanded land that can be used for agriculture in a warmer Earth scenario.

It's fine to come up with ideas that promote the reduction of things that in theory increase warming, but it's extremely dangerous (or at least stupid) for life on Earth to do anything on a large scale that promotes global cooling of the atmosphere.