BlackRock CEO Larry Fink sent corporate America a letter in 2020 declaring climate risk was now his top investment priority.
Five years later, Republican attorneys general started asking questions Wall Street had no good answers for.
What one of those banks agreed to never do again is something the climate change lobby can't survive.
The Net Zero Banking Alliance Collapsed and ESG Investing Retreated 90 Percent in Four Years
A new report from the Committee to Unleash Prosperity documents the dramatic retreat by Wall Street from the Left's radical climate change agenda.
Wall Street's support for "net zero" climate causes crashed nearly 90 percent over the past four years.
All six major US banks – JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo – have quit the Net Zero Banking Alliance.
The coalition once counted 140 member banks representing $75.5 trillion in combined assets.
It ended operations as a membership organization in October 2025.
The Net Zero Asset Managers initiative also fell apart – BlackRock's January 2025 exit gutted a coalition that had grown to more than 300 members managing nearly $60 trillion.
"When Biden was running things, everybody rushed to sign on to these ideas," Stephen Moore, co-founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity and an author of the report, told the New York Post. "And of course, when Trump won, they all ran away from it."
Jerry Bowyer, CEO of Bowyer Research and co-author of the study, traced it to first principles.
"The politics got them into these groups," Bowyer said. "Physics and economics got them out."
Bank lending to oil and gas companies surged in 2024 to a three-year high of $869 billion, even as the banks publicly pledged net-zero commitments.
The soaring electricity demand from AI data centers – a variable the green lobby never modeled – made the fossil fuel restrictions inside those pledges economically impossible to honor.
"In the end, the laws of physics and chemistry win," Bowyer said. "And that's what we're seeing right now: the triumph of reality."
The Ken Paxton Anti-ESG Lawsuit That Forced Vanguard to Pay 29 Million Dollars
Wall Street didn't just abandon net zero on its own.
Republicans forced the reckoning.
In October 2022, 19 state attorneys general launched an antitrust investigation into the six major US banks over their membership in the Net Zero Banking Alliance.
Two years later, Texas AG Ken Paxton sued BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, accusing the asset managers of colluding to suppress coal production and drive up energy costs for American consumers.
"BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard – three of the most powerful financial corporations in the world – created an investment cartel to illegally control national energy markets and squeeze more money out of hardworking Americans," Paxton said.
In August 2025, a federal judge refused to dismiss the case.
The FTC and DOJ both filed statements of interest backing the states' legal theory.
The pressure worked.
Vanguard settled in February 2026 for $29.5 million and agreed its US operations would not join any group with "climate-focused investment or stewardship objectives."
That settlement put a dollar figure on what the net zero movement always was – a political operation that collapsed the moment it faced real legal accountability.
Bowyer singled out four banks that have not fully broken away – Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Pimco and Citigroup still hold memberships in smaller climate groups.
"You can take the bank out of the climate group," Bowyer warned, "but it's a little tougher to take the climate group out of the bank."
BlackRock and State Street still face the Texas antitrust suit in federal court, with the FTC and DOJ formally backing the states' claims and Vanguard's settlement already on the record.
Biden used the White House to push Wall Street into these coalitions.
The 19 attorneys general who launched that fight in 2022 spent years making sure that decision had consequences – and just watched a $75.5 trillion climate empire quietly fall apart.
The press that spent a decade cheering that empire's creation never bothered to write its obituary.
Sources:
- Ariel Zilber, "Wall Street's 'net zero' climate push collapses as US banks flee do-gooder alliances: report," New York Post, August 12, 2026.
- Committee to Unleash Prosperity, "Net Zero Climate Change Policy Is Dead," Unleash Prosperity, August 2026.
- Federal Trade Commission, "FTC and DOJ File Statement of Interest in Energy Collusion Case Against BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard," FTC.gov, May 22, 2025.
- Texas Office of the Attorney General, "Attorney General Ken Paxton Sues BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard for Illegally Conspiring to Manipulate Energy Markets," OAG, December 2024.
