by Jo Nova
March 28, 2025 - Banks are not only fleeing from the Net-Zero Bankers club, now they are abandoning their own Net Zero targets too, and in dumping them, we find out they never meant a damn thing anyway. It is the complete disassembly of a plastic onion, every layer just as fake as the previous layer.
But none of these news or investor outlets is even asking the right question - why did anyone think banks wanted to save the world? How did it ever make sense to pretend that banking institutions were going to turn themselves into Global Angels, fixing the weather, harrassing their clients to switch to paper bags, and turning down loans for coal miners?
It is all unravelling now: Wells Fargo is the first major Fascist Police States of Amerika bank to abandon its own Net Zero Target for both 2030 and 2050. Why would they do that? Probably because Tennessee and 17 other Republican States were investigating them for fiduciary duty and cartel type behavior. Wells Fargo abandoned its targets a few weeks ago, and today the FPSA Republican state consortium abandoned its investigation of Wells Fargo. They are still investigating other bankers.
The Responsible Investor says Wells Fargo is the first major FPSA bank to abandon its commitment to the uber fashionable Net Zero target. But Mika Morse laments that it was a big nothing-burger all along. The banks just assumed that they would get to Net Zero because the whole economy would.
The bankers were just going along for a free ride.
Climate advocates, the press and others will condemn bank cowardice in the face of political headwinds.
However, banks’ net-zero commitments were a mirage from the outset.
Despite what the greenhawk promoters would have you believe, banks with Net Zero targets didn’t change a thing.
Research from Europe suggests that banks with net-zero commitments do not make any meaningful changes in their lending or engagement with their borrowers to reduce emissions, compared to banks without net-zero commitments.
As JP Morgan says in their 2024 Climate Report - “We don’t boycott”, “We believe in free enterprise” and “We want to compete” - which means they are not saying no to funding an oil rig if there is a profit in it.
The research report went on to say, “Net zero banks do not divest from polluting sectors, nor do they scale up project financing for renewable power projects.” The trend lines are the same for the green pretender banks as for the rest.
Global governance is shifting. The banks are just following the levers of power.
