NYT: ‘How Wall Street Turned Its Back on Climate Change’ – ‘Six years after the financial industry pledged to use trillions to fight climate change…its efforts have largely collapsed’

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/17/climate/how-wall-street-turned-its-back-on-climate-change.html

New York Times excerpt:

In January 2020, Larry Fink, the chief executive of BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world, stunned the business world by declaring that he intended to use the trillions of dollars managed by his firm to address global warming.

“Every government, company, and shareholder must confront climate change,” Mr. Fink wrote, calling for “a fundamental reshaping of finance.”

A few days later, Mr. Fink arrived in Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum’s annual gathering, donning a scarf featuring a design of the “warming stripes,” a pattern that depicts 150 years of rising global temperatures.

Mr. Fink’s impassioned call to address climate change was the unofficial start of a movement. Nearly every major financial institution was soon pledging to reduce emissions, joining high-minded alliances designed to phase out fossil fuels and promising to support clean energy. Environmental, social and governance factors, known as E.S.G., became a defining feature of Wall Street investing.

But six years later, many of those Wall Street institutions have walked back or abandoned their commitments.

The alliances — like the Net-Zero Banking Alliance and the Net-Zero Asset Managers initiative — that were meant to steer investments toward clean energy and away from fossil fuels have largely fallen apart. Investors have withdrawn tens of billions of dollars each quarter from E.S.G. funds.

While U.S. investment in clean energy has boomed in recent years — reaching $279 billion last year — many large corporations have gone silent on climate change. On company earnings calls, mentions of words like climate and sustainability have plunged by 75 percent over the past year, according to a Bloomberg analysis.

And with President Trump back in office and using the presidency to promote fossil fuels and attack the clean energy industry, Wall Street’s retreat from climate action has coincided with American banks doubling down on coal, oil and gas projects.

These dynamics will be on full display next week, as Mr. Fink, now co-chair of the World Economic Forum, welcomes Mr. Trump to Davos, where climate issues have taken a back seat to A.I. and geopolitics.

After President Trump’s re-election in November 2024, almost every major American bank and financial institution withdrew from the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, causing the group to fold.

…

“It was a bunch of empty promises from a bunch of Wall Street types who abandoned their pledges when it was no longer convenient,” said a former BlackRock executive who requested anonymity to speak freely about their former employer. “We marched up the hill, and we marched back down it.”