Canada's #1 And #3 Banks Expected To Abandon Net Zero Banking Alliance; Mealy-Mouthed Voluntary Process Just Too Much
The Royal Bank of Canada and the Bank of Montreal are signalling that they’re reconsidering their membership in the Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA), part of a global network that UN Climate Finance Envoy Mark Carney brought together to mobilize US$130 trillion in global economic clout over 30 years to finance the low-carbon transition. RBC and BMO would be joining an “exodus” of U.S. banks that have left the alliance in recent weeks, Bloomberg reports, “with Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo & Co., Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., and JPMorgan Chase & Co. all leaving. The moves coincide with intensifying Republican attacks on what U.S. conservatives call ‘woke’ capitalism and criticisms that such voluntary alliances haven’t had a meaningful impact on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”
“All the U.S. banks are running scared of Trump 2.0,” Reclaim Finance senior analyst Paddy McCully told CBC. “Their fear over being attacked by Trump is much greater than their climate commitment, so they all ditched the NZBA.” The U.S. banks are taking multiple hits on social media for abandoning their climate targets while Los Angeles burns. “This brazen climate indifference arrives in the narrow window between Donald Trump’s election and inauguration, signaling a grim alignment of financial power with fossil fuel interests,” the We Don’t Have Time coalition wrote, in a weekly newsletter that featured a photo of a Bank of America branch in flames.
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Adam Scott, executive director of Shift: Action for Pension Wealth and Planetary Health, said there was never any front-line support for the initiative. “It’s not a real political movement of citizens,” he told CBC. “It’s a cynical attempt by the fossil fuel industry, in collusion with state governments, to try to slow down this inevitable transition that’s happening.”
But the seeds of GFANZ’ decline were sown before the highly-touted initiative was even officially launched. In the months leading up to the Glasgow COP, Carney was only able to bring together such wide-ranging investment firepower by assuring participating institutions they could set their own pathways to achieving net-zero, with or without a commitment to end fossil fuel investment, then counting on sustained public attention to keep them on track, The Energy Mix revealed during the first week of the COP.
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https://www.theenergymix.com/rbc-bmo-expected-to-quit-global-climate-finance-alliance/