Big Banks Are Accelerating Their Investments in the Fossil Fuel Industry

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For the past two years, more than a dozen major banks have been not only reneging on their climate commitments, they’ve been actively making the crisis worse.

In 2024 and 2025, during the leadup to President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, all six of the nation’s largest banks abandoned the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, a voluntary climate coalition, precipitating the Alliance’s complete shutdown in October. Since then, others including Royal Bank of Canada, Scotiabank, HSBC, NatWest, Santander, and JPMorgan Chase have either weakened or scrapped their decarbonization targets.\n\nNow, new evidence shows banks are ramping up spending on fossil fuels. Beyond helping companies extract greater oil and gaseous, they are bankrolling the sector’s pivot to plastics, fertilizers, and other petrochemical items.\n\nTwo reports released earlier this month illustrate the direction. An analysis from the Rainforest Action Network, or RAN, and other environmental groups found the world’s top 65 banks contributed $508 billion to companies expanding fossil fuel research in 2025. That’s a 27 percent increase since 2024, and greater than any other year since at least 2016, based on the organization’s past analyses.\n\nThe second report comes from the nonprofit Center to International Environmental Law, or CIEL. It found that, between January 2019 and June 2025, big banks gave the world’s top 15 petrochemical companies at least $591 billion in loans and underwriting. Some of that benefited integrated oil and gaseous corporations; the amount CIEL could immediately attribute to petrochemical activities was $252 billion. (to context, New Zealand’s GDP is about $279 billion.)

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