Six Biggest US Banks Abandon Net-Zero Goals, Because They Might Get Attacked As "Woke"
The six biggest banks in the US have all quit the global banking industry’s net zero target-setting group, with the imminent inauguration of Donald Trump as president expected to bring political backlash against climate action. JP Morgan is the latest to withdraw from the UN-sponsored net zero banking alliance (NZBA), following Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs. All six have left since the start of December.
Analysts have said the withdrawals are an attempt to head off “anti-woke” attacks from rightwing US politicians, which are expected to escalate when Trump is sworn in as the country’s 47th president in just under a fortnight. Trump’s vows to deregulate the energy sector, dismantle environmental rules and “drill, baby, drill”, were a big part of his campaign platform and are expected to form a key part of his blueprint for governing the US, the world’s biggest oil and gas producer.
Paddy McCully, a senior analyst at the campaign group Reclaim Finance, said: “The sudden exodus of these big US banks out of the NZBA is a lily-livered effort to avoid criticism from Trump and his climate denialist cronies. “A few years ago, when climate change was at the front of the political agenda, the banks were keen to boast of their commitments to act on climate. Now that the political pendulum has swung in the other direction, suddenly acting on climate does not seem so important for the Wall Street lenders.”
EDIT
Financial institutions’ membership of net zero alliances has come under attack from politicians on the country’s right. In 2022 a potential anti-trust legal action led by attorneys general in Republican states had led some US banks to threaten to leave the NZBA, with withdrawals avoided after the group made changes to guidelines that could be construed as requirements to take action on fossil fuels. Then in November, a group of states led by Texas sued BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, all large asset management firms, for adopting pro-climate policies to reduce reliance on coal that the claimants alleged had pushed up energy prices. Most recently, in December, the Republican-led judiciary committee of the House of Representatives, the US Congress’s lower house, accused “a cartel” of financial firms and climate activists of colluding to “impose radical ESG-goals” on US companies.
EDIT
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/jan/08/us-banks-quit-net-zero-alliance-before-trump-inauguration
= new reply since forum marked as read
