Natasha White, reporting for Bloomberg:

Just \$15.5 billion was mobilized globally last year across a total of 84 deals, Convergence, a network of 194 financial institutions, said on Monday. The figure, which doesn’t yet reflect the US government’s retreat from such programs, is down from a peak of \$20.2 billion in 2023. Just 5% of the money raised has gone to the poorest countries where it’s most needed, according to Convergence.

Just another dog-bites-man story about the inadequacy of climate finance, except this fun little nugget:

According to a developing-nation government minister who asked not to be identified discussing private talks, there has been at least one proposal to tokenize biodiversity into something akin to cryptocurrency. After two years of talks, though, it’s still not clear what the commercial bankers behind the proposal intended, the minister said.

No one is allowed to be surprised to find out that some bankers wanted to “tokenize” biodiversity two years ago. In fact, if you were an enterprising commercial banker two years ago, and you didn’t try to put the nature on a blockchain, what were you even doing?

It’s a little surprising, though, that these bankers are still talking about a biodiversity blockchain two years later. But who cares if “a developing-nation government minister” didn’t understand it, as long as the bankers had fun.

I don’t know why anyone interested in objectivity would give a rat’s ass about what fossil fuel interests say about our energy future, but here is Exxon gleefully predicting that the world won’t make enough progress on climate:

Exxon Mobil Corp. said net zero goals for the global energy sector are likely to drift further beyond 2050 due to consumers pushing back against high costs and a revival in demand for coal, the most polluting fossil fuel.

[…]

“If the world tries to shove in some of these more expensive sources too fast, there will be a reaction from consumers,” Chris Birdsall, Exxon’s director of economic, energy and strategy planning, said on a call with reporters. “In democratic societies where there are elections, elections have consequences. We can see political changes that then can slow progress.”

America’s biggest oil company has often repeated that it sees a long future for fossil fuels and that the world isn’t on course for net zero by 2050. But in recent months it has become more outspoken against decarbonization policies that it claims raise the cost of supplying energy, especially in Europe.

It’s like the mafia telling us “we expect crime rates to increase and stay at high levels”, with police officers standing around twiddling their thumbs. Some cops even invite mafia bosses to speak at criminology conferences, saying things like “your expensive crime-fighting efforts have failed.”

Renewables may not be the dirt cheap, unlimited energy source we had hoped for, but they are also not the reason for high electricity prices in the US or the UK. In fact, a big driver behind the high electricity prices is these countries’ dependence on fossil fuels (especially gas) and the lingering hangover from (believe it or not) Russia’s invasion of Ukraine more than two years ago. Exxon didn’t warn us about the political fallout from high gas prices back then, did they?

That throwaway line about “democratic societies where there are elections” is undoubtedly a not-so-subtle racist dig against China, where a sustained, massive expansion of renewables reduced coal consumption as electricity demands reached all-time highs, and rapid growth in EV sales continues to drive down oil demand. Exxon is right to worry about China.

We talked about how Net Zero Banking Alliance debased itself after a few big members left in response to Trump’s re-election. They did this in order to, ostensibly, attract more members. Reuters reported at the time:

Over 100 of the groups member banks have already set 1.5 degree aligned sector targets, but the group wants to attract banks in countries which are not aligned to 1.5 degrees to bolster its numbers.

Now a few months later, NZBA decides that it really shouldn’t have any member after all:

Members of the Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) have been asked to vote on whether the organisation should transition from a membership-based alliance to “establishing its guidance as a new framework initiative”.

The NZBA said the move came in response to member input, with the vote set to close in September.

[…]

“Recognising there is major opportunity for banks and key stakeholders to build on the Alliance’s outputs and to accelerate action on key priorities, NZBA encourages the banking sector to remain steadfast in implementing their net-zero commitments,” it continued.

Well, thank you, NZBA, for your steadfast encouragement.

Since its inception in 2021, NZBA membership and commitments have always been entirely voluntary, with no real enforcement or disciplinary mechanism to ensure members are delivering on their promises. That’s as loose as it gets for an “alliance”: basically, no real obligations. But as soon as a climate denier wins the White House, no-real-climate-obligation becomes too much for some of the world’s largest and most powerful banks to stomach.

How to get more members to join your alliance, then? NZBA’s answer was “less obligation than no obligation”. It turns out, I guess, even that is too much for banks. So now, if you can’t get people to join your alliance of less-obligation-than-no-obligation, why bother having an alliance at all?

It’s interesting that “the move came in response to member input”. Why would an existing member of NZBA, after putting in all these efforts to first join the alliance and then to debase themselves, want to effectively disband the alliance? My Occam’s razor answer is that many of them also want to leave the less-obligation-than-no-obligation alliance, but they don’t like reading about their cowardly exits in the Guardian or Reuters. They choose to effectively dissolve the alliance, so that they could say “we didn’t leave NZBA to please the Orange King, but we decided the best way for Net Zero Banking Alliance to accelerate global transition to net zero is not to have a Net Zero Banking Alliance.”

This is just another reminder that amoral financial interests are as fickle as TikTok trends. Their commitment to any cause crumbles the moment any real political power threatens to hurt them. Those of us who cheered the launch of GFANZ in 2021 as a monumental turning point in the climate fight should all feel a little embarrassed now. I know I do.

It has been a long time coming. After years of a massive build out of renewables and battery storage, finally, in the middle of hot summer that drove electricity demand to new record levels, China’s coal power generation and CO₂ emissions are declining from the same period last year because new renewable generation is meeting the additional demand, and some. Lauri Myllyvirta first called it in Carbon Brief back in May, and now official data from the first half of 2025 confirmed this profound turning piont:

Clean-energy growth helped China’s carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions fall by 1% year-on-year in the first half of 2025, extending a declining trend that started in March 2024.

The CO₂ output of the nation’s power sector – its dominant source of emissions – fell by 3% in the first half of the year, as growth in solar power alone matched the rise in electricity demand.

[…]

The growth in clean power generation, some 270 terawatt hours (TWh) excluding hydro, significantly outpaced demand growth of 170TWh  in the first half of the year.

[…]

Coal use in the power industry fell by 3.4% compared with the same period a year earlier, while gas use increased by 6%, resulting in a 3.2% drop in emissions for the sector overall.

This is as much, if not more, of a monument as the successful negotiation of the Paris Agreement. Bloomberg noted that this trend is persisting well into the summer heat:

That’s even more impressive when you consider how much more power demand there is. The seasonal peak probably came in early August at a level about 100 gigawatts higher than last year, government officials said.

This summer, authorities have only asked factories to cut back use for a few hours one night in one province — Sichuan on July 17 — to make sure there was enough electricity to go around.

Besides wind and solar additions, China is building out power lines and battery storage to try to use those renewables when they’re most needed.

One day, the grid discharged almost 20 gigawatts of batteries at 95% capacity — the equivalent of turning on 20 nuclear reactors for about two hours — to meet peak demand across three provinces.

China’s hot summer is showing that clean energy and secure energy can go hand in hand.

Hell yeah.

David Gelles, Somini Sengupta, Keith Bradsher, and Brad Plumer reporting for the New York Times (emphasis mine):

Burning fossil fuels for more than 200 years has helped create the modern world while delivering great prosperity to developed countries such as the United States, which ranks historically as the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. But it has also led to what scientists now say is a growing crisis. The carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere by the burning of oil, gas and coal acts as a heat-trapping blanket, leading to rapid global warming.

Attributing climate facts to scientists is a widespread practice among journalists. Of course, they are technically correct because scientists do say greenhouse gas emissions lead to a growing climate crisis, but this seemingly innocuous framing unnecessarily undermines our lived climate realities. You won’t go around telling people “the Earth is round, according to scientists”, so why would you use such qualifiers for climate facts?

P.S. The rest of the article is a good read.

Hannah Alcoseba Fernandez, reporting on the failed plastic treaty negotiations last week:

The position of both plastic-producing countries has been cautious in previous treaty negotiations, unlike petrochemical states Saudi Arabia, Russia, Malaysia, Iran, and the United States. Known as the like-minded group, they have outrightly rejected binding commitments to reduce or cap plastic production, arguing that such measures would threaten their economies.

If the viability of your economies depends on messing up the climate system and leaving persistent plastic pollution all over the planet, I say you should go get yourself some better economies.

A key step in negotiating an international agreement is figuring out how to resolve disagreements. Different institutions and conventions have different ways to do this. Some institutions, such as the Montreal Protocol that deals with ozone-depleting substances, require substantive decisions to be made by a two-thirds majority vote. Others, like the Basel Convention on transboundary movements of hazardous wastes, ask negotiators to “make every effort to reach agreement on all matters of substance by consensus” before resorting to a two-thirds majority vote. Either way, a formally adopted set of voting rules provides a mechanism to move beyond differences and get things done.

But many international treaties require a consensus to adopt formal rules of procedure, which means there is no way to resolve disagreements over how to resolve disagreements. Countries who want to obstruct progress can block the adoption of a voting mechanism. Without a voting mechanism to resolve disagreements, all future decisions have to be made by consensus too, leaving opportunities for more obstructions at every turn. UNFCCC famously never formally adopted any rules of procedure because of obstructions by petrostates. All 29 COPs to date have been using a draft set of rules on a provisional basis, with a carve out that prevents voting on key decisions. This has worked well for obstructionist petrostates to stall global climate actions.

As you would expect, when 184 countries got together to negotiate a new global treaty on plastic pollution that threatens one of the last remaining fossil fuel demand drivers, petrostates pulled the same trick again. At the first negotiation session (INC-1) in Paraguay, Saudi Arabia, supported by its petrostate peers of Bahrain, Egypt, Qatar and Russia, raised a ruckus over a rule (rule 37) about how EU can vote on the behalf of its members, with the true intention of blocking the formal adoption of the full set of rules that include rule 38 which establishes voting by a two-thirds majority as a last resort for making decisions. Magnus Løvold wrote at the time:

It seems unlikely that Saudi Arabia’s proposal to move the brackets in rule 37 is motivated by a genuine concern with how regional economic integration organisations exercise their voting rights. Much more likely, the proposal is but the first step in a stratagem to forestall any attempt to take the Committee’s work to a vote in the first place.

The possibility of bringing an issue to a vote in the negotiations is enshrined in rule 38 of the draft rules of procedure. An argument can be made that as long as there are unresolved issues related to voting rights in rule 37, the Committee cannot apply rule 38, even if the rest of the rules have been provisionally applied. That is to say, it is highly unlikely that voting would take place as long as there is bracketed text in rule 37. In this scenario, the plastic pollution treaty could fail and end up in an eternal diplomatic gyre.

As a result of these efforts, INC-1 couldn’t formally adopt the rules of procedure but agreed to apply it “provisionally” to future sessions. At INC-2, a few countries (most notably Saudi Arabia, India, Brazil, and Russia) objected the “provisional” application of rule 38, and only relented after an interpretative note was adopted to state that “the provisional application of rule 38 […] has been a subject of debate” and “[i]n the event that rule 38 […] is invoked before the rules are formally adopted, members will recall this lack of agreement.” With that, once again, INC went on to negotiate a global treaty without formally adopting any rules of procedure.

Technically, rule 38 still applies “provisionally” and the principal legal officer of UNEP confirmed that this provisional rule has legal effect. But the strong objection to rule 38 by some countries means no one, including the chairperson of the negotiation, wants to re-open such a can of worms by calling for a vote. After failing to reach an agreement by consensus at its fifth session in Busan last year because of disagreements over plastic production caps, INC extended the fifth session to Geneva where, somewhat predictably, negotiators once again failed to reach a consensus over the same issues, yet the chairperson really don’t want to call for a vote：

At a press conference, [INC Chair] Vayas Valdivieso said the committee would continue to work with a consensus-based approach. “We are not preparing for a vote, our mindset is to be able to reach an agreement in a cooperative manner. We have worked with this constructive spirit during previous INC sessions, including at the INC-4 in Ottawa, where negotiations began,” he told journalists.

“Although we have encountered obstacles in the negotiation text, a collaborative spirit and compromise between member states was evident. I said it then and I repeat it today: this constructive, consensus-based approach strengthens the agreement and lays the foundation for an international instrument,” he said.

He fought hard at INC-2 to keep the provisional rule 38, but no matter how certain he feels about the legal validity of rule 38, it won’t work if others reject it. Much of international law is like Tinker Bell: it exists if and only if we believe in it.

Joanna Plucinska, Joe Brock, Marleen Kaesebier and Paul Carsten reporting for Reuters：

While airlines have announced 165 SAF projects over the past 12 years, only 36 have materialized, Reuters found. Among those, Reuters uncovered problems at three of the largest – including World Energy – that exemplify the systemic challenges plaguing the SAF sector.

Reuters was unable to find any public updates on the progress of 44 of these projects since their initial announcements. Of the remaining 73%, four were deals for SAF credits where no physical fuel is delivered and 23 have been abandoned. Out of the 94 left, 27 are delayed or on indefinite hold and 31 have yet to produce any fuel. Only 36 have materialised, Reuters found.

Among those 36, only 10 projects – just 6% of the total – have reported producing commercial volumes of SAF.

SAF’s track record so far seems almost as bad as carbon capture. And that’s with the help of some cooking oil arbitrage.

We have seen this story before:

UBS has become the latest major bank to withdraw from the Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) following its annual assessment of sustainability and climate-related memberships. In a statement, the Swiss banking giant said its ambition to be a leader in sustainability is “unchanged” and that it recognises the importance of an orderly transition to a low-carbon economy. “We remain steadfast in our commitment to be our clients’ bank of choice and support them with offerings that meet their evolving needs,” it added.

From the UBS’s press release:

UBS recognizes the NZBA’s valuable role in helping banks establish initial target-setting frameworks. With that work advanced and with our in-house capabilities strengthened, we have decided to withdraw from the NZBA, like a number of our global peers.

That is, “I’m so good at ESG now I don’t need you anymore, so adiós!”

This is what NZBA gets for debasing itself.

An editorial in the Guardian reflects on the recent corporate retreat from advocating for climate actions:

The deterioration of GFANZ reveals the weaknesses in relying on businesses to do the right thing. Its goals were always fuzzy: instead of calling for hard limits on the financing of fossil fuels, GFANZ encouraged banks to invest in low-carbon sectors. It has since drifted further from its mission, expanding its membership to companies without net zero commitments. Though it was never supposed to be a substitute for government action, inactive governments welcomed it. Boris Johnson, prime minister at the time of its creation, promised the alliance would help to “build back greener”.

Many green finance initiatives have less to do with preventing climate breakdown than minimising investors’ exposure to the risks this creates, such as carbon taxes or curbs on fossil fuels. “Green ethical investing”, writes Adrienne Buller, is a way of betting “on the likelihood of a greener economy, rather than contribute to bringing that economy into being”. When the risk of regulation wanes, as it has under Trump, so too does the impetus for this style of investing.

We like to think of Big Business and Big Finance as powerful agents of change, but we often forget (1) they wield their powers for amoral purposes, and (2) their amoral sense of power crumbles in the face of popular pseudo-moral powers.