Green Lending

Tim Quinson for Bloomberg on 2026-01-02:

Wall Street’s biggest banks made more money financing green projects than they did from working with fossil fuel companies for a fourth straight year, even as they faced ongoing pressure to pull back from the business.

Lenders generated roughly $3.7 billion of revenue from climate-related loans and bond underwriting in 2025, compared with about $2.9 billion from oil, gas and coal, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

It continues to be more profitable to get on the sustainability train than to try to cling to fossil fuels.

Still, the $3.7 billion is a drop from the $4.2 billion banks collected for their work on green initiatives a year earlier. That decline came as many lenders abandoned the Net-Zero Banking Alliance — a group dedicated to helping lenders reduce their carbon footprints — in an effort to shield themselves from increasing political pressure as Donald Trump returned to the White House.

Interesting to see how political realities are resisting the forward momentum, but also how inevitable the shift to green energy is, even in the face of such significant political pressure in the opposite direction. The Trump administration continues to pick losing political stances, which I think will catch up with them once reality reasserts itself.