One month after the election of Donald Trump, and amid a deepening economic crisis in Europe, investment banking giant Goldman Sachs has broken ranks with a U.N.-sponsored coalition of high-end banks, dedicated to directing funds away from fossil-fuel projects worldwide.
In abruptly walking away from the Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA), New York-based Goldman Sachs is signaling that its financial interests may no longer be served by aligning itself with climate-centric lending and investments practices now clearly at odds with emerging political realities in Washington and elsewhere.
In a bland statement announcing its decision, Goldman Sachs gave no explicit reason for its departure, choosing instead to emphasize its continued compliance with climate-related reporting requirements imposed by international regulators.
“We have the capabilities to achieve our goals and to support the sustainability objectives of our clients,” the company said in a statement, according to Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/sustainable-finance-reporting/goldman-sachs-quits-global-climate-coalition-banks-2024-12-06/
Goldman Sach’s statement is a far cry from the NZBA’s commitment “to design, set, and achieve credible science-based net-zero targets for 2030 or sooner that deliver value for their investors, clients, and customers.” https://www.unepfi.org/net-zero-banking/
Even after Goldman Sachs’s exit, NZBA still boasts a membership of 145 banks in 44 countries, with assets of $73 trillion. Remaining in the alliance, at least for now, are U.S. behemoths Bank of America, Citigroup, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo
The financial heft of the NZBA, and its commitment to invest only in projects that align with its net-zero greenhouse-gas-emissions agenda, has not gone unnoticed by industries fearing they will be blacklisted by the big banks. Of those, none has been more alarmed than U.S. agriculture.
In a letter sent to the U.S. members of NZBA earlier this year, agricultural officials from 12 states warned that “we hold serious concerned about the commitments made by your bank as part of the Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA), and the potential impacts on the agricultural sector; specifically, food availability and price increases on consumers, credit access for our farmers and agricultural product producers, and overall negative economic consequences.”
“Achieving net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions in agriculture requires a complete overhaul of on-farm infrastructure – one of the goals of the NZBA,” the ag officials wrote. “This would have a catastrophic impact on our farmers. Proposed net-zero roadmaps describe dramatic, impractical, and costly changes to American farming and ranching operations, such as switching to electric machinery and equipment, installing on-site solar panels and wind turbines, moving to organic fertilizer, altering rice-field irrigation systems, and slashing U.S. nutrient meat consumption in half, costing millions of livestock jobs.”
As if these concerns were not enough, that state ag officials noted that “your banks have given the U.N. Environmental Programme (UNEP) authority to ‘review’ and monitor’ your banks’ climate targets for ‘consistency’ with U.N. criteria…”
These concerns were raised months before the political earthquake that returned Donald Trump to the White House. The incoming Trump administration cannot be expected to look favorably on American financial institutions remaining in a U.N.-sanctioned banking cartel that is fundamentally hostile to American agriculture. Making American farmers’ creditworthiness dependent on the adoption of suicidal agricultural practices, unrelated to producing food, is the very antithesis of “Putting America First.”
Another pillar of the climate cartel – ESG (environmental, social, and governance) investing – is being shunned by the very investors it purports to benefit. Like the NJZBA, ESG funnels investors’ cash into companies touting their commitment to net-zero emissions and other decarbonization schemes. Yet these “climate-friendly” investments have fallen on hard times. As recently noted by Austin Gae and Renzo Rodriguez in the Washington Times, “ESG funds have seen eight straight quarters of withdrawals by U.S. investors, the latest coming in the third quarter of 2024, when ESG funds saw a net outflow of $2.3 billion, contracting by 1.4% overall while the rest of the market expanded.”
Even before Goldman Sachs and disgruntled ESG investors became wary of decarbonization goals, Elon Musk had begun cutting his own ties to the climate cartel. The one-time donor to the Sierra Club and fan of Al Gore’s documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” called for “a popular uprising” against the fossil fuel industry in a 2016 film.
No more. Though Musk’s Tesla profited handsomely from the sale of carbon offset credits to other automakers that failed to meet EPA’s tailpipe emissions standards, he has now joined forces with climate-skeptic Trump. It may have dawned on Musk that SpaceX, Tesla, and his other energy-hungry enterprises will never be powered by wind turbines and solar panels. Musk and fellow billionaire entrepreneur Vivel Ramaswamy will soon spearhead a Trump administration initiative to cut waste in the federal government. Taxpayer handouts to otherwise non-competitive green industries are a prime target.
The growing recognition that decarbonization = deindustrialization is likely to persuade other titans of industry to reach the same conclusion as ordinary people burdened by high energy bills: The forced transition to green energy is a dead end.
Bonner Russell Cohen, Ph. D., is a senior policy analyst with the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT).
