by Mike O’Brien
About two weeks ago, on October 3rd, news broke that the Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) was no more. The NZBA was one of several business-led alliances convened by the United Nations Environment Programme Financial Initiative (UNEP-FI), with the goal of helping the financial industry to achieve a net-zero carbon footprint by 2050, with interim goals set for 2030. These various alliances (such as the Net Zero Insurance Alliance, which itself died in 2024, and the Net Zero Asset Managers Alliance, which suspended its activities earlier this year) were themselves grouped under the umbrella of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), founded by UNEP-FI at the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow in 2021 and co-chaired by former central banker and current Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney (in his capacity as UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance), billionaire and erstwhile presidential hopeful Michael Bloomberg (in his capacity as UN Special Envoy for Climate Ambitions and Solutions), and Mary Shapiro, former chair of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). (Acronym-averse readers are in for a rough ride.) Membership in GFANZ was conditional on a commitment (and demonstrable efforts) to align business activities with the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5℃ above pre-industrial temperatures.
At its founding in 2021, the NZBA’s membership comprised 42 banks representing about 28.5 trillion dollars. In 2024, membership had peaked at 140 banks representing about 74 trillion dollars. Its insurance equivalent, the NZIA, peaked in 2022 with 291 members representing 66 trillion dollars. How did these initiatives collapse, despite the participation of most of the world’s corporate financial power? American democracy ruined it. More precisely, Republicans gained control of the federal House of Representatives in the 2022 mid-term elections, and signalled that they would investigate companies participating in climate initiatives for anti-trust violations. This emboldened Republican-led state governments to launch their own “anti-woke” intimidation campaigns against financial companies flirting with ecological sustainability. Several Republican attorneys general threatened in 2022 to file anti-trust suits against participating financial institutions, prompting some NZBA member institutions on Wall Street to threaten to leave that alliance unless membership criteria were neutered to placate Republican climate change deniers and fossil puppets (the banks did not use such accurate language in explaining their predicament). GFANZ weakened its requirement that members move to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from their funded activities by 50% by 2030.
This would not, of course, be enough to appease the Republican-represented fossil cartels (to be fair, the Democrats are also quite adept and practiced at representing the fossil cartels’ interests against the interests of American citizens, humanity in general, and all extant terrestrial life). In November 2022, Republican attorneys general asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission not to renew the licence permitting Vanguard (then-member of the Net Zero Asset Managers’ Alliance, and second-largest asset manager in the world) to invest in US utilities, which would deprive the firm of both a huge portfolio of prospective investments and an effective lever to reduce carbon emissions (not that they particularly cared about the latter). In December 2022, Florida led several other Republican-led states in pulling billions of state funds away from BlackRock (also a NZAM member, and largest global asset manager), with Florida’s Chief Financial Officer accusing that firm of violating its fiduciary duties by pursuing climate (and other non-pecuniary) goals to the detriment of maximizing returns on its clients’ assets. The Texas state comptroller accused BlackRock of participating in a boycott of fossil fuels (oh, to live in such a beautiful dream…), which in Texas is a sin unfathomable by even Satan himself, and a likely a scant few legal contortions away from a terrorism indictment.
By the end of 2022, both BlackRock and Vanguard had left NZAM, with Vanguard issuing a statement that membership in climate-focused alliances created “confusion about the views of individual investment firms” but not mentioning any of the mafia-style intimidation tactics by federal and state Republicans. The “confusion”, I suppose, was about whether financial firms could be counted on to bend the knee whenever called upon by the fossil cartels’ political representatives. This confusion was resolved.
Thus, 2023 began with the industry-led, UN-convened financial decarbonization regime diminished in its ambitions and in its ranks. The Republican-fronted fossil cartels, however, had gone from strength to strength, with stronger measures (like the threatened anti-trust actions) still on hand if needed. The threats of legal persecution (sic) from Republicans drove an exodus of founding firms from the Net Zero Insurance Alliance later in the year, and in April 2024 that membership-based group was dissolved and replaced by the Forum for Insurance Transition to Net Zero, a voluntary group for sharing information and guiding frameworks. Notably, the Forum’s legal counsel included experts in anti-trust law, in anticipation of more Republican attacks. Guidance documents issued by GFANZ member alliances were also updated to include disclaimers indicating that their members were directed to follow all applicable laws, including anti-trust laws. Reminding the lawyer-infested sectors of banking, insurance and investment management that laws exists is as preposterously unnecessary as placating the fossil cartels with disclaimers is futile. In June, a Republican-led panel of the House Judiciary Committee investigated GFANZ for facilitating “collusion” among financial firms that might violate American anti-trust laws, and interviewed Mark Carney and Mary Shapiro to answer for their organization’s crimes against oil. (An interim report of their findings was published in December of 2024, entitled “Sustainability Shakedown: How a Climate Cartel of Money Managers Colluded to Take Over the Board of America’s Largest Energy Company”.)
Efforts in 2024 to strengthen membership requirements by the NZBA, other remaining GFANZ member alliances, and similar green finance initiatives such as Climate Action 100+, faced resistance from financial institutions unready and/or unwilling to continue the path they had agreed to. The threat of political attacks continued to loom large, as did the shift from the “making promises” phase of these initiatives to the “making good on promises” phase. The NZBA changed its rules to require that members account for their capital markets activities when calculating their “net zero by 2050” targets. Climate Action 100+, a green finance initiative co-founded by California’s public employee pension fund and green investment group Ceres, introduced more restrictive rules on its members’ financing of oil and gas activities, prompting the exit of Goldman Sachs Asset Management and other American asset management firms.
These difficulties were nothing compared to the bloodbath triggered by Republican victories in the November 2024 general election. By the end of that month, Texas and ten other Republican-led states launched a lawsuit against three major asset management companies (BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, which had already left their respective green finance alliances), alleging that the companies pressured coal companies to change their operations, interfering with market competition and driving up energy prices. The suit sought to block financial firms from voting on shareholder resolutions and otherwise using their influence to reduce coal production and energy market competition, and also sought civil fines for violating federal anti-trust laws and Texas consumer-protection laws. With the Republicans poised to take control of every branch of the federal government (let’s not entertain any fairy tales about the independence of the judiciary), as well as many state governments, it was clear that such “lawfare” attacks would be pursued even more vigorously under Trump’s second term. Consequently, in December 2024 Goldman Sachs departed the NZBA, and was joined in the following weeks by every major Wall Street bank in the alliance, with JP Morgan being the last out the door in January 2025. In an instructive reminder that Canada is only slightly less bad than the most dangerous country on earth, all major Bay Street (Canada’s Wall Street) banks had also left the NZBA by the end of January, partly because they too were deeply involved in US markets, and partly because they too were never really committed to climate goals.
The remaining non-North-American members of the NZBA were in a difficult position, given the huge drop in assets represented by the alliance’s membership, and the consequently reduced ability to coordinate the banking sector around net zero goals. Some optimistic industry observers suggested that the departure of the North American banks, being the most resistant to decarbonization efforts, would allow the alliance to be more ambitious in its climate goals. Instead, GFANZ restructured from a membership-based alliance to a voluntary guidance framework in January, and the NZBA loosened its requirements in April, no longer requiring members to align their net zero plans with the Paris Agreement 1.5℃ warming goal. This was not enough to stop UK banks HSBC and Barclays from leaving the NZBA in July, and Swiss bank UBS from leaving in August. HSBC had already weakened its commitments in February, pushing its 2030 net zero goals to 2050 and de-emphasizing climate criteria in its CEO compensation metrics. (Addressing its failure to meet even modest targets, HSBC’s annual report stated “As such, we have revisited our ambitions.” One wonders if their ambitions were even home when the bank visited them for the first time. It should be noted that HSBC’s failed ambitions were restricted to decarbonizing their own operations, not those of their banking clients, so they couldn’t even be bothered to offset the carbon footprint of their office supplies and employee travel).
The remaining NZBA members, mainly EU banks such as ING, ABN Amro and Swedbank, discussed the future of the alliance in September and (to repeat the opening line of this article) announced its demise on October 3rd. The announcement elicited a range of sadness, outrage and cynical resignation from industry observers; Lucie Pinson, founder of the climate NGO Reclaim Finance, stated “We won’t mourn the NZBA. Like other financial alliances of its kind, it brought little – if anything – to the climate, and was doomed to fail. Its purpose was never to take real action, but to create the illusion of measures in order to ward off the risk of regulation. At least its demise brings clarity: the institutions genuinely committed to containing global warming will continue to act.” What does this clarity reveal to us? That any climate movement, no matter how tentative and institutionally enmeshed in the economic status quo, will be targeted by Republicans (and their global petro-fascist allies) for a back-alley execution the instant they gain traction. As the rule of law and the hope for institutional resistance fade away like so many other American fictions, it should surprise nobody if climate campaigners in the US are simply detained indefinitely, disappeared and/or murdered, as they have been in so many of Uncle Sam’s client regimes throughout the hemisphere. Let that message be received in perfect clarity by the upcoming generations of ecological partisans: they will kill you just for trying, so you’d better make your efforts count.
I am inclined to agree with Pinson that the NZBA and its GFANZ equivalents in other sectors were doomed to fail. This cynicism is not helped by reading through the accounts of the various departures from and shutterings of these groups. They follow a consistent pattern: the departing firms invariably reaffirm their commitment to climate goals after quitting an initiative dedicated to pursuing those goals, and industry observers almost always claim that the diminished alliance will be able to pursue their objectives more stridently, only to see those alliances weaken their objectives to prevent further defections, and then suffer more defections nevertheless. Even if they had succeeded in achieving their own goals, these groups would have failed to secure a livable climate for future generations of humans and non-humans alike. They certainly would have failed to limit global warming to 1.5℃ above pre-industrial limits, since that threshold will be surpassed before 2030 (using the Paris Agreement baseline of 1850-1900 temperatures), if it has not been well surpassed already (using a truly pre-industrial baseline from the 1700s). And had they succeeded in achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, so what? Let us count the ways in which “net zero by 2050” is a bullshit goal: it is achievable without real reductions in emissions, it is subject to accounting wizardry, it is woefully inadequate (given intensifying warming trends, net negative emissions are required to stabilize global temperatures, hopefully not achieved by spraying tons of mystery chemicals into the atmosphere), and it ignores the fact that we ran out of time to avoid catastrophic climate disruptions decades ago. I suppose I am part of the problem for giving this particular brand of green-washing even more attention.
Even if these alliances had meaningful goals, could their members be trusted to achieve them without immediate financial and legal consequences for failure? I don’t think so. If (and it’s a big If) civilization-collapsing levels of climate disruption can be avoided, it will be because governments force the closure of large emission sources, in their own territories and in territories governed by climate delinquents. Climate change is often described as a polarizing issue, but this is the mundane “polarization” of clashing public opinion. If climate change becomes polarizing in a robust political sense, it will create a bi-polar political order where states are coerced into aligning themselves with one pole or another, or else suffer consequences for their indecision (and worse consequences for choosing the wrong side). One pole of this order is already recognizable: the fossil cartels and their client states, principally the United States and Russia, who undermine science, democracy, civil society and public-interest institutions, because these forms of human cooperation would end the reign of fossil fuels if permitted to function properly. It should not be forgotten that these two countries also possess the vast majority of the world’s nuclear weapons, and a demonstrated willingness to doom the planet in pursuit of short-term material gains (I will let the reader ponder how these two qualities may intersect if the fossil cartels face a realistic prospect of defeat). The other pole is not yet so clearly defined, but it will likely be led by China, which is a net fossil fuel importer and renewable energy technology exporter, as well as being an exceptionally rational state by the standards of 2025. While most countries’ interests will align more with China’s “let’s not burn down the house while we’re inside it” ideology, I expect the fossil cartels’ disinformation and political interference campaigns will likely intensify and be supplemented by (more) violence from fossil client states and non-state actors, to prevent defections among the fossil-aligned states and coordination among the non-aligned states.
Spare a thought for Mark Carney, founding co-chair of GFANZ and now Prime Minister of Canada. He has continued his streak of climate failures in his new political career, abolishing this country’s consumer carbon tax in his first official act in office. To be fair, the previous Trudeau government did a disastrous job of explaining and, perhaps more importantly, defending the tax and its associated rebates, while Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre and his Trump-adjacent band of climate quislings shouted “Axe the Tax!” from the rooftops for months. The rhyming and shouting was very effective, because Canada’s electorate largely consumes American media (and American-owned Canadian media) and has now almost closed the stupidity gap with our southern neighbours. A few days ago, Carney publicly mused about weakening emissions caps on Canada’s oil and gas sector, which are already weak enough to permit the continued operation of some of the world’s dirtiest petroleum extraction. To continue being fair to Mr. Carney, this is largely because the oil-dependent province of Alberta, which is run by a cheap facsimile of a Fox News commentator, is facing a rising American-supported separatist movement (recall the occupation of Ottawa a few years ago by barbarians opposing mask mandates, vaccine mandates, Justin Trudeau’s perfect hair, and the very idea of governance. They, too, were radicalized, organized and funded with the help of American right-wing platforms, in a trial run of future attacks on the legitimacy of Canada’s federal government.) I don’t want to be too understanding of Carney’s appeasing instincts, though; appeasement in the face of fascist aggression has an infamous history of moral and strategic failure, and this time around is not likely to be different.
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