Banks finance fossil fuel companies because oil, gas and coal producers borrow and sell bonds like any other big company, and in 2025 the world’s 65 largest banks put $906 billion into that lending. That was 8% more than in 2024, and JPMorgan Chase alone provided $58 billion of that total, more than any other bank. Climate campaigns want banks to stop funding new fossil fuel projects, and through 2025 the banking industry’s main voluntary climate group lost so many members that it voted to shut down.
How much banks lend to fossil fuel companies
Banking on Climate Chaos is now in its 17th edition. The report’s authors include Rainforest Action Network and BankTrack, and its co-authors include Oil Change International and Sierra Club. Together they count $8.7 trillion in bank financing since the Paris Agreement was signed a decade ago. Twelve banks, which the report’s authors label the “Dirty Dozen,” provide close to 40% of that financing, even though roughly 2,000 banks worldwide do some fossil fuel lending.
JPMorgan Chase was the largest single fossil fuel financier in 2025, at $58 billion, up 12.6% from 2024. Bank of America and Japan’s Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group tied for second, at $47 billion each, with MUFG’s total up 21% from 2024. If your paycheck or mortgage runs through a US bank, you have more of a stake in this than you did a few years ago. Banks in the US supplied 32% of all global bank fossil fuel financing in 2025, up from 28% in 2021.
Financing aimed at expanding fossil fuel production grew even faster than the overall total. Money for companies actively expanding oil, gas or coal climbed 27% to $508 billion in 2025. Financing for new coal mines alone surged 77% to $84 billion in 2025. Coal power plant expansion financing rose 40% to $81 billion over the same year, even as coal’s place in the US power mix keeps shrinking.
How that financing works
A bank can lend to a fossil fuel company directly, through a corporate loan or a revolving credit line it draws on to cover drilling, pipelines or day-to-day costs. A bank can also underwrite the company’s bonds and shares, meaning it arranges the sale to investors and collects a fee instead of holding the debt itself.
You already know how the revolving line works if you carry a balance on a credit card. The company draws down what it needs for a delivery of drill pipe or a month of payroll, then pays interest on that draw until it settles the balance.
The report adds up both kinds of deal for the banks it tracks, whether the money funds a company’s general operations or one specific project like a pipeline or an LNG export terminal. That’s why a single bank’s yearly total can mix a loan that keeps an existing refinery running with underwriting for a brand-new gas terminal.
What climate campaigns want banks to do
Groups behind the report want banks to end fossil fuel expansion financing entirely. “Voluntary commitments aren’t working,” said David Tong of Oil Change International, one of the report’s co-authors, who wants governments to force change through binding rules instead of bank pledges. If you’re trying to sort real lending cuts from bank messaging, Lucie Pinson of Reclaim Finance, another co-author, pointed to BNP Paribas and Crédit Agricole as banks whose restrictions on financing new oil and gas fields have translated into real cuts in lending.
Street protests have targeted this financing directly. On September 20, 2025, a coalition led by 350.org and Women’s March held nationwide “Make Billionaires Pay” marches in cities across the US. The largest march, in New York City, was timed to the United Nations General Assembly meeting that same week, and demands included a shift away from fossil fuels alongside higher taxes on extreme wealth.
Why the Net-Zero Banking Alliance collapsed
The Net-Zero Banking Alliance started in 2021, when former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney set it up as a UN-sponsored group pushing banks toward net-zero emissions by 2050. It grew from 43 founding banks to more than 120 members across 40 countries.
Then, starting in December 2024, big banks began leaving. Six US banks, including Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase, departed between late December and early January, before Donald Trump’s second-term inauguration on January 20, 2025. Canada’s six largest banks left by the end of that month.
The UK’s HSBC and Barclays left NZBA in July 2025, and Switzerland’s UBS followed in August. Around the same time, Republican-led states led by Texas sued BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, arguing the asset managers had used climate goals to violate antitrust law by cutting coal production and driving up the power prices you and other customers pay.
In April 2025, NZBA dropped the requirement that members align their financing with limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, calling the update “version 3” of its guidance. Dutch bank Triodos left over the change, saying the new rules “fall short of the needed urgency.”
NZBA members then voted on October 3, 2025, to immediately cease operations and shift to a guidance-only framework instead of staying a formal membership group. Jeanne Martin of the investor-advocacy group ShareAction called the vote “bitterly disappointing”, while an NZBA spokesperson said its climate target-setting guidance would stay public for banks to use on their own. NZBA was the second UN-aligned net-zero industry group to shut down in 2025, after the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative suspended its work when BlackRock left it in January.
How individual banks have responded
Some banks pulled back their own climate rules once NZBA fell apart. JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs dropped their coal and Arctic drilling exclusions entirely, replacing them with case-by-case reviews instead of blanket bans. Of the 15 North American banks the Banking on Climate Chaos report tracks, 12 now have no meaningful fossil fuel financing commitments left.
Not every bank moved the same direction in 2025. The table below shows how six banks’ fossil fuel financing changed from 2024 to 2025, based on the same report.
| Bank | Change in fossil fuel financing, 2024 to 2025 |
|---|---|
| UBS | down 36% |
| La Caixa | down 34% |
| BNP Paribas | down 28% |
| Standard Chartered | up 28% |
| Deutsche Bank | up 20% |
| HSBC | up 16% |
Source: Banking on Climate Chaos 2026, Rainforest Action Network et al.
If you bank with UBS, BNP Paribas or La Caixa, your money moved the other way. Those three banks cut fossil fuel financing by 28% to 36% in 2025.
Apart from fossil fuel lending, Citi has committed $647.2 billion toward its $1 trillion sustainable finance goal since 2020, including $91.3 billion in 2025. Citi CEO Jane Fraser said in the bank’s 2026 sustainability report that clients now treat business resilience as “a competitive necessity.” That goal funds a mix of environmental and social projects and sits apart from the bank’s fossil fuel lending, which the report tracks on its own.
COP30 kept climate finance voluntary too
COP30, held in Belém, Brazil, in November 2025, produced a similar split between voluntary and binding rules. Countries agreed to work toward tripling adaptation finance and raising climate finance toward $300 billion a year by 2035, a goal first set at COP29 in Baku, but a push for a binding fossil fuel phase-out plan ended up as a voluntary “roadmap” sitting outside the formal UN process instead.
This financing data follows the same shape. Big banks left the Net-Zero Banking Alliance instead of keeping a shared climate commitment, and negotiators at Belém picked a voluntary roadmap over binding fossil fuel rules. If you want to see whether that pattern holds, how UN climate conferences work walks through what past summits delivered against their own pledges.
