The 32-Day NZBA Exodus: Wall Street Quits the UN Alliance

Between December 6, 2024 and January 7, 2025, every one of the six largest US banks walked out of the Net Zero Banking Alliance. Goldman Sachs went first. JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the country and the world’s largest fossil-fuel financier, was last. The four in between (Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley) defected over a 13-day stretch spanning the New Year’s holiday. The UN-convened coalition that Mark Carney built in 2021 to commit global banks to a 2050 net-zero financed-emissions pathway lost its entire US wing in 32 days. By July 2025 the alliance was effectively gutted. By autumn 2025 it had ceased operations. This is the largest single-cohort defection from any voluntary corporate climate commitment ever recorded.

Key Findings

• All six largest US banks exited the NZBA between December 6, 2024 and January 7, 2025: Goldman Sachs (Dec 6), Wells Fargo (Dec 20), Citigroup (Dec 31), Bank of America (Dec 31), Morgan Stanley (Jan 2), JPMorgan Chase (Jan 7).
• The Net Zero Banking Alliance launched in April 2021 with 43 founding banks. By 2024 it had grown to roughly 140 banks representing $74 trillion in assets.
• NZBA was the banking-sector arm of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), convened in April 2021 by then-UN Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance Mark Carney ahead of the COP26 summit.
• Vanguard left the parallel Net Zero Asset Managers initiative on December 7, 2022. BlackRock followed on January 10, 2025, three days after JPMorgan’s NZBA exit closed out the Wall Street banking departures.
• The exodus followed a Texas-led multistate antitrust lawsuit against BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street alleging that climate-coalition coordination amounted to anticompetitive conduct in coal markets. The Texas federal district court allowed the case to proceed in May 2025.
• The Texas Comptroller’s office maintains a statutory blacklist of financial companies that “boycott” the energy sector. Banks on the list lose access to Texas state and municipal business.
• Mississippi’s Secretary of State issued a cease-and-desist and multimillion-dollar penalty action against BlackRock in March 2024, alleging the firm made false and misleading ESG-related statements to Mississippi investors.
• By April 2025 NZBA eliminated its mandatory 1.5°C alignment requirement. By autumn 2025 the alliance itself was wound down, transitioning into a non-membership “framework” of guidance documents.

The Architecture of the Commitment

The Net Zero Banking Alliance launched in April 2021 with 43 founding banks. They committed to align their lending and investment portfolios with net-zero emissions by 2050, to set interim 2030 sector targets within 18 months of joining, and to report progress annually. The commitments covered financed emissions, which means the emissions associated with every loan, every underwriting deal, every project finance arrangement on the books. For a bank like JPMorgan Chase, with roughly $4 trillion on the balance sheet and a long history of energy-sector lending, the implications of a credible net-zero pathway were enormous.

NZBA was one of five sub-alliances inside the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, the umbrella coalition Mark Carney convened in April 2021 in his capacity as UN Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance. Carney, a former governor of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, had spent the back half of the 2010s arguing that climate change was a financial-stability risk and that the global financial system needed to coordinate on transition. GFANZ was the institutional answer. The sub-alliances were structured by industry: NZBA for banks, the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative for asset managers, the Net Zero Asset Owner Alliance for pension funds and insurers’ general accounts, the Net Zero Insurance Alliance for the insurance underwriting side, and the Net Zero Financial Service Providers Alliance for everyone else (consultants, data providers, accountants).

At its peak the GFANZ membership represented over $130 trillion in assets under management or financing. The headline figure was unprecedented. The number got cited in nearly every climate-finance speech given between 2021 and 2023. It was supposed to be the moment private capital aligned with the Paris Agreement.

The fine print mattered, though. NZBA membership was voluntary. The targets each bank set were the bank’s own. The methodologies for measuring financed emissions varied. There was no enforcement mechanism, no penalty for missing a target, no third-party audit with consequences. The accountability infrastructure rested on peer pressure, public commitments, and the assumption that the political environment in which these banks operated would continue to reward climate signaling.

That assumption is what collapsed.

The 32-Day Exodus

The chronology is precise. Each departure is documented in financial press coverage at the time, in many cases citing direct spokesperson statements from the banks themselves.

December 6, 2024: Goldman Sachs. Goldman went first. A spokesperson told media the firm has “the capabilities to achieve our goals and to support the sustainability objectives of our clients” and is “very focused on the increasingly elevated sustainability standards and reporting requirements imposed by regulators around the world.” Goldman framed the exit as procedural, noting its own 2050 net-zero target and interim sector goals remained in place. The departure was reported as the first high-profile defection from the alliance.

December 20, 2024: Wells Fargo. Wells Fargo left two weeks after Goldman, two days before the markets closed for Christmas. The bank issued a similar pattern of statement: own targets remain, alliance membership is no longer needed.

December 31, 2024: Citigroup and Bank of America. Both banks departed on the last business day of the year. The simultaneous timing was not officially coordinated, but it does not appear to be coincidence either. New Year’s Eve is the optimal news graveyard, the lowest-coverage day of the year for corporate announcements. Citigroup, like the others, kept its public net-zero target and pointed to its independent climate reporting.

January 2, 2025: Morgan Stanley. First business day of the year. Morgan Stanley’s exit was confirmed within hours of markets opening.

January 7, 2025: JPMorgan Chase. A JPMorgan spokesperson confirmed the exit to Reuters, saying the bank “will continue to work independently to advance the interests of our firm, our shareholders, and our clients” and would maintain its involvement with the broader GFANZ umbrella. JPMorgan is the largest US bank by assets and, per multiple annual Banking on Climate Chaos reports, has been the world’s largest financier of fossil-fuel projects in most years since the Paris Agreement was signed. Its exit was the symbolic capstone of the Wall Street departures.

Thirty-two days, six banks, every major US lender. The largest cohort defection from any voluntary corporate climate commitment ever recorded.

The pattern in each statement is worth noting. None of the six banks repudiated their own net-zero targets. Each said it would continue to pursue its independent climate goals. Each declined to remain inside the alliance. The accountability mechanism (the third-party coalition with shared reporting and peer pressure) was the part that got cut. The product line (a bank’s own published climate report) stayed.

Why Did They Leave?

The banks did not act on impulse. The political and legal environment around climate-coalition coordination had been deteriorating for two years before the December 2024 exodus began. The cumulative weight of state-level enforcement, federal antitrust theory, and the November 2024 election outcome converged.

Texas anti-boycott law and the Comptroller’s list. Texas Senate Bill 13, signed into law in 2021, requires the state Comptroller to maintain a list of financial companies that “boycott” the energy sector. State and municipal entities in Texas are barred from contracting with companies on the list. Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar first published the list in August 2022 with ten companies and roughly 350 individual funds. Updates followed. The Comptroller’s office has cited membership in NZBA, NZAM, and similar coalitions as evidence supporting designation. For banks that underwrite Texas municipal bonds (a substantial business line), getting on the list is a real revenue hit.

The Texas-led multistate antitrust case against BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street. In November 2024, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and ten other Republican-led state attorneys general filed an antitrust suit against the three largest US asset managers, alleging that their coordination through NZAM and related climate coalitions amounted to anticompetitive collusion in coal markets. The theory: by collectively pressuring coal companies to reduce production, the asset managers artificially constrained coal supply and raised electricity prices. In May 2025, a Texas federal district court denied the defendants’ motion to dismiss and allowed the case to proceed. The legal theory survived the first major test. For bank general counsels watching, the message was that participating in a coordinated climate alliance was now litigation-exposed in a way it had not been in 2021.

Mississippi enforcement action. In March 2024, Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson issued a summary cease-and-desist order against BlackRock, alleging the firm had made false and misleading statements to Mississippi investors about its ESG-related practices. The Mississippi action was paired with a letter from 16 Republican state attorneys general questioning BlackRock fund directors about NZAM membership and whether it conflicted with fiduciary duty to maximize returns for fund investors.

The November 2024 election. Donald Trump won the presidential election on November 5, 2024. The Goldman Sachs exit came 31 days later. Trump’s first administration had withdrawn the United States from the Paris Agreement; his second administration was widely expected to do the same, along with rolling back federal climate disclosure rules. For US banks, the political calculus that had favored coalition participation in 2021 had reversed. Visible membership in a UN-backed net-zero alliance was now a political liability and a regulatory liability in roughly equal measure, with no offsetting benefit at the federal level.

The Republican attorneys general framework had been building since 2022. The Texas Comptroller list had been operating since 2022. The Mississippi enforcement action came in March 2024. The Texas multistate antitrust case was filed in November 2024. Trump won. Within four weeks, the dam broke.

What This Costs the Climate Project

NZBA was supposed to do specific things. Set interim 2030 sector targets covering the highest-emitting parts of each bank’s portfolio (oil and gas, power generation, real estate, automotive, steel, cement, aviation, shipping). Publish methodologies. Report annual progress. Allow third-party comparison across institutions. The headline value of the alliance was not the moral commitment. It was the coordination infrastructure that let analysts, investors, regulators, and counterparties compare apples to apples across banks operating in different jurisdictions with different starting baselines.

That infrastructure is gone now, at least in the US. Each of the six banks says its own targets remain in place. Each publishes its own climate report. Each uses its own methodology. There is no shared scope, no shared baseline, no shared timeline, and no third-party convening body that pressures laggards. The asymmetry of information that NZBA was designed to reduce is back, and worse.

The argument the banks make (we kept our targets, we just left the club) understates the change. A bank’s unilateral commitment to a 2050 net-zero pathway has approximately zero enforcement mechanism beyond reputational concern. A coalition commitment to the same pathway has the additional pressure of peer comparison, coordinated reporting, and the public-facing membership list itself. Removing the coalition layer doesn’t eliminate the commitment, but it removes the structure that gave the commitment teeth in practice.

This matters for what economists call “expectations formation.” Counterparties, regulators, and investors in 2021 had reason to believe that the largest US banks were on a coordinated trajectory toward lower-carbon lending. That belief affected pricing in transition-finance markets, affected which projects got funded, and affected the speed of capital reallocation toward lower-emissions alternatives. The exodus signals that the trajectory was conditional, not structural. Expectations should adjust accordingly.

The deeper question is whether the original coalition was ever doing what its marketing implied. Per our analysis in The ESG Industrial Complex, asset managers have generally collected premium fees on ESG-labeled products while underperforming benchmarks and operating with rating-agency definitions that disagree with each other about half the time. NZBA on the banking side had a similar pattern: large headline commitment, weak enforcement, methodology fragmentation. When the political wind changed, the structure had nothing holding it together except member willingness to stay. Member willingness evaporated.

What Happens Next

The NZBA itself has been wound down. In April 2025 the alliance eliminated its mandatory 1.5°C alignment requirement, at which point Dutch bank Triodos exited citing insufficient ambition. Through summer 2025 the European banks departed in waves: HSBC in July, UBS in August, Barclays in August (with a statement noting “the organisation no longer has the membership to support our transition”). By autumn 2025, NZBA members voted to transition from a membership-based alliance into a non-membership framework providing guidance documents. The alliance ceased operations. The website remains as a document repository. The coordination function does not.

On the asset-management side, the trajectory was similar. Vanguard had left NZAM in December 2022 (the first major defection, well ahead of the political cycle that drove the 2024-2025 exits). BlackRock left on January 10, 2025, three days after JPMorgan’s NZBA exit. NZAM’s statement on BlackRock’s departure was a single sentence of disappointment paired with an affirmation that “climate risk is financial risk.” Within weeks, NZAM had suspended operations and was reviewing whether to relaunch with reduced commitments. The relaunch, when it came, dropped the requirement that members commit to a net-zero-by-2050 target. The product that remained shared a brand name with the original NZAM but had different content.

GFANZ itself, the umbrella structure Carney built in 2021, persists as an institution. Michael Bloomberg chairs it. Mary Schapiro runs the secretariat. The published headline figures still reference the peak membership numbers from 2021-2023. The five sub-alliances have either dissolved, dropped binding commitments, or shifted to advisory roles. The coalition that was supposed to coordinate $130 trillion of capital toward Paris Agreement alignment is now a smaller, looser network primarily focused on transition-finance taxonomy work, regional capacity-building in emerging markets, and what GFANZ describes as “removing barriers to investment.”

This is not nothing. Transition finance is a real area of activity. The taxonomy work matters. The regional networks (APAC, Africa, Latin America and Caribbean) continue to develop. But the structural ambition (binding emissions-pathway commitments from the world’s largest financial institutions, enforced through coalition membership) is over.

What’s left at the bank level is a fragmented landscape of self-reported targets with varied methodologies, no third-party enforcement, and a Republican legal-policy infrastructure that treats coordinated climate commitments as antitrust-suspect. Each bank still has its own climate report. Each still has its own 2030 interim targets. Each still publishes financed-emissions figures. The reader of those reports has no reliable way to compare them across institutions or to verify that the trajectories described correspond to actual portfolio changes rather than methodology adjustments. The accountability vacuum is the policy environment now.

The next cycle will likely look different. The banks have learned that visible membership in a UN-convened coalition is now a political liability in the US. Asset managers have learned the same. The next iteration of climate-finance coordination, if it happens, will probably be quieter, more bilateral, and structured to avoid the coordination patterns that the Texas antitrust theory targets. The headlines have moved on. The carbon math has not.

What the 32-day exodus actually reveals is the conditional nature of the original commitments. The banks signed in 2021 because the political environment rewarded signing. They left in 2024-2025 because the political environment punished staying. The underlying business logic (financing the energy sector at scale, including fossil-fuel projects, because those projects generate fee income and underwriting revenue) was constant across both periods. What varied was the public framing. When the framing got expensive, the framing changed. The financing did not.

The WokeCorp assessment

The commitment. NZBA launched in April 2021 with 43 founding banks committing to align lending and investment portfolios with net-zero emissions by 2050, to set interim 2030 sector targets within 18 months of joining, and to report progress annually.

The outcomes. Goldman Sachs (Dec 6, 2024), Wells Fargo (Dec 20), Citigroup (Dec 31), Bank of America (Dec 31), Morgan Stanley (Jan 2, 2025), and JPMorgan Chase (Jan 7, 2025) all exited in 32 days. By April 2025 NZBA eliminated its mandatory 1.5°C alignment requirement.

The core question. Six major US banks exiting NZBA in three months in late 2024 and early 2025 is a coordinated signal, not a series of independent decisions. The stated reason, concern about antitrust risk, had been present since the alliance formed. Something else changed in the political environment that made the antitrust argument suddenly sufficient.

Compare with The ESG Industrial Complex: $35T in Monetized Virtue.

Related reading

• The ESG Industrial Complex: $35T in Monetized Virtue
• Net Zero Theater: 500 Corporate Climate Pledges vs. Lobbying Records
• BlackRock’s Exit From Net Zero Asset Managers
• Stakeholder Capitalism’s Balance Sheet
• ESG Rating Agencies Disagree About Half the Time

Sources

Verified May 2026.

• ESG Today, “Goldman Sachs Exits Net Zero Banking Alliance,” December 2024. esgtoday.com/goldman-sachs-exits-net-zero-banking-alliance/
• Banking Dive, “JPMorgan becomes latest major US bank to exit NZBA,” January 7, 2025. bankingdive.com/news/jpmorgan-chase-exits-net-zero-banking-alliance-nzba-gfanz-bofa-citi-wells-goldman-morgan-stanley/
• ESG Today, “Net Zero Banking Alliance Ceases Operations.” esgtoday.com/net-zero-banking-alliance-ceases-operations/
• ClimaTalk, “Dropouts: What Is Happening To The Net Zero Banking Alliance,” September 2025. climatalk.org/2025/09/15/dropouts-what-is-happening-to-the-net-zero-banking-alliance/
• Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, About page. gfanzero.com/about/
• Net Zero Asset Managers initiative, “Statement on BlackRock’s departure from the initiative.” netzeroassetmanagers.org/statement-on-blackrocks-departure-from-the-initiative/
• Bloomberg, “Vanguard Quits Net-Zero Group, Marking Biggest Defection Yet,” December 7, 2022.
• Texas Comptroller, “List of Financial Companies that Boycott Energy Companies,” August 2022 announcement and subsequent updates. comptroller.texas.gov
• ESG Today, “Texas Judge Greenlights Multi-State Lawsuit Accusing BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street of Using Climate Initiatives to Manipulate Energy Markets,” May 2025.
• Mississippi Secretary of State, “Mississippi Secretary of State Issues Order Against BlackRock, Alleged Securities Fraud Related,” March 2024. sos.ms.gov
• ESG Dive, “16 Republican AGs question BlackRock fund directors over ESG.”
• Yahoo Finance / Reuters wire, “JPMorgan completes Wall Street’s retreat from key climate alliance,” January 2025.