Not That They Would Have Done Much, But World's Largest Banks Eager To Remove Themselves From Climate Commitments

Last week, as flames began tearing through greater Los Angeles, claiming multiple lives and forcing more than 100,000 people to evacuate, JP Morgan became the sixth major US bank to quit the Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) since the start of December. A smaller story, certainly, but the departure of top US banks from the NZBA in the weeks since Donald Trump’s re-election nonetheless speaks to a seismic political shift prompting major financial institutions to turn away from the climate-related commitments they made in the optimistic years after the Paris agreement.

The NZBA is a voluntary network of global banks committed to “align lending and investment portfolios with net zero emissions by 2050”. It is part of the umbrella Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), which counts among its membership dozens of “alliances” covering the various segments of global finance. For its part, the NZBA requires new members to submit science-aligned targets within 18 months of joining, alongside disclosing plans for and status updates on meeting them. At its height, the coalition boasted 40% of global banking assets. And at the time of its launch, its co-founder, the former Bank of England governor Mark Carney, described the NZBA as the “breakthrough in mainstreaming climate finance the world needs”.

EDIT

However, this was always an agenda that was equally attractive to governments. Private sector alliances such as GFANZ reflect a view of climate policy as technocratic exercise – crowding in finance here, de-risking a carbon capture project there. Treating it as such allowed governments to dodge the thornier issues of climate policy, from its direct relationship to economic inequality and outsized corporate power, to confronting the entrenched interests of the fossil fuel industry – whether through unwinding trillions in annual subsidies or directly regulating against fossil fuel expansion.

As Hans Stegeman, the chief economist at Triodos Bank, put it to me: “For too long, policymakers have placed excessive hope in private finance to resolve issues they hesitate to address through regulation or public policy.” As the climate crisis accelerates and increasingly far-right politicians make gains around the world – often on platforms that rally against the apparent elitism of climate politics – ignoring these issues is no longer a viable strategy.

EDIT

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/15/woke-capital-net-zero-banking-alliance