…

By Jo Nova

Banks are not only fleeing from the Net-Zero Bankers club, now they are abandoning their own Net Zero targets too, and in dumping them, we find out they never meant a damn thing anyway. It’s the complete disassembly of a plastic onion, every layer just a fake as the layer before.

But none of these news or investor outlets is even asking the right questions — why did anyone think banks wanted to save the world? How did it ever make sense to pretend that banking institutions were going to  turn themselves into Global Angels, fixing the weather, harrassing their clients to switch to paper bags, and turning down loans for coal miners?.

It;s all unravelling now: Wells Fargo is the first major US bank to abandon its own Net Zero Target for both 2030 and 2050. And why would they do that? Probably because Tennessee and 17 other Republican States were investigating them for fiduciary duty and cartel type behaviour. Wells Fargo abandoned it’s targets a few weeks ago, and today The US Republican state consortium abandoned their investigation” of Wells Fargo. They’re still investigating other bankers.

“Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti of Tennessee said in a statement on Thursday that he commended Well Fargo’s decision to step away from “utopian” policymaking.” — Bloomberg

The Responsible Investor (poor thing) says Wells Fargo is the first major US bank to abandon its commitment to the uber fashionable Net Zero target. But Mika Morse laments, it was a big nothing-burger all along.  The banks just assumed that they’d get to Net Zero because the whole economy would.

The bankers were just coming along for a free ride:

Mika Morse

After each one, climate advocates, the press, and others will condemn their cowardice in the face of political headwinds.

But…   Banks net-zero commitments were a mirage from the outset.

Despite what the greenhawk promoters would have you believe, banks with Net Zero targets didn’t change a thing:

Research from Europe suggests that banks with net-zero commitments do not make any meaningful changes in their lending or engagement with their borrowers to reduce emissions, compared to banks without net-zero commitments.

As JP Morgan says in their 2024 Climate Report — “We don’t boycott”, “We believe in free enterprise” and  “We want to compete” — which means they’re not saying no to funding an oil rig if there is a profit in it, thank you.

The research report went on to say “. Net zero banks do not divest from polluting sectors (Figure 1), nor do they scale up project financing for renewable power projects (Figure 2).” The trend lines are the same for the green pretender banks as for the rest. (Click to enlarge).

Global governance is shifting . The banks are just following the levers of power.

It’s hard not to chuckle while reading Bloomberg’s opinion piece, “Years of Climate Action Are Being Demolished in Days by Trump.” One gets the sense that Mark Gongloff and Elaine He were typing furiously through a cascade of tears, their trembling hands barely able to clutch their reusable bamboo keyboards. Their anguish is palpable — and deeply entertaining.

According to the authors, “nothing could have prepared us for the breadth or intensity of the assault on climate action that Trump has unleashed.” Ah yes, the horror of returning to basic national sovereignty and energy affordability! Apparently, the unleashing of logic and cost-benefit analysis is too much for the climate-industrial complex to handle.

The article catalogs 82 actions across 20 government bodies in Trump’s first 52 days. Yes, 52 days. That’s one climate heresy every 15 hours. Magnificent. It’s almost poetic how efficiently bureaucratic bloat, pseudoscientific hand-waving, and fiscal recklessness were being scaled back. Bloomberg calls this a “climate onslaught”; most Americans would call it a long-overdue spring cleaning.

Here are a few gems that made the writers gasp in horror:

• The Environmental Protection Agency began overturning its 2009 “endangerment finding” that declared CO₂ — the gas you’re exhaling as you read this — a “threat to public health.” Reassessing this laughable conclusion is now apparently akin to committing a war crime.
• The Transportation Department ceased expanding the EV-charger network and halted congestion-pricing schemes. In other words, they stopped using tax dollars to subsidize cars for rich people and punishing working-class drivers.
• The Energy Department resumed approving LNG export projects, aka promoting energy abundance and American jobs. Scandalous.
• NOAA was told to halt international communications. Given NOAA’s track record of producing press releases about “record warm years” by tweaking data sets like they’re playing Jenga, this may be the most scientifically responsible act of the century.

The authors frame this as “abdicating America’s role as a global climate leader.” But let’s translate: Washington D.C. stopped spending billions to appease unelected foreign bureaucrats at climate conferences while saddling U.S. citizens with skyrocketing energy bills. Leadership, indeed.

We’re also treated to the classic Bloomberg refrain about “trillions in damages threatened by climate change.” Not projected — threatened. The assumption, as always, is that climate models, with their documented biases and missed predictions, are sacrosanct. Dissent is blasphemy. Ironically, these models continue to predict doom while observable data stubbornly refuses to cooperate.

And the best part? The fear. Gongloff and He declare that Trump’s actions “will deepen our climate crisis.” Oh no! Not the climate crisis! You know, the one that requires infinite subsidies, zero accountability, and science by press release.

Nowhere in this breathless obituary for climate bureaucracy do the authors mention the economic toll of Net Zero, the trillions spent for negligible climate benefit, or the consistent failure of international agreements to do anything measurable to global temperature or extreme weather trends. To question this is, of course, heresy.

This entire article is a monument to the worldview that believes government must centrally plan energy use, transportation choices, agricultural practices, and even your air conditioning settings — all in the name of an unverifiable catastrophe that always lies 10 years in the future. It’s not journalism. It’s therapy for the climate clergy.

So, to Trump’s team: bravo. In just 52 days, you’ve inspired more genuine reform, more reevaluation of flawed premises, and more public discussion than a decade of carbon tax conferences ever achieved. If the reactions from the climate alarmist media are this apocalyptic, it’s a clear sign you’re doing something right.

The scale and complexity of Trump’s onslaught — highlighted in the following table — may seem discouraging. Even the actions that courts have tried to overturn have still left chaos and uncertainty in their wake. But awareness is the first step to recovery. Our hopes of having a livable environment depend on it.

To the rest of us? Sit back, relax, and enjoy the sound of bureaucracies being defunded. It’s not just the hum of freedom — it’s the sound of common sense making a comeback.

For a good laugh, here’s a non-paywalled version, but finish your sip of coffee and put the cup down before reading. It’s got charts!