The United States is pressure on international regulatory organizations so that they can see their climate work downwards.

At the United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Glasgow (COP26), in 2021, Mark Carney had dominated the financial world as a colossus. Today Prime Minister of Canada, largely thanks to the call of US President Donald Trump to make the country on 51^e US State, he was in 2021 the United Nations Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance.

During COP26, Carney announced the creation of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), parent of three early children, the Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA), the Net-Zero Insurance Alliance (NZIA) and the Net Zero Asset Managers (NZAM). For some skeptics, all this comes down to a large number of zeros, but Carney has assured the world that “it is not bla-bla” and that the net zero would constitute “the critical infrastructure of the new financial system”.

Since then, how has Glasgow’s initiative evolved? At what end of the Specter Critical Infrastructure / Bla-Bla-Bla do we find?

The years that have passed have not spared the alphabetical soup concocted by Carney. At the start of this year, the biggest American banks – JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs and the others – withdrew from NZBA, clearly fearing political pressures from the new Trump administration.

The major American banks were quickly followed by Canadian banks, which showed little loyalty to the creation of their future Prime Minister. In April, the remaining members watered down initial commitments, focusing on alignment with a maximum increase in temperature of 2 degrees, rather than the 1.5 degrees long mentioned, and abandoning the objective of total compliance with zero net emissions by 2050.

However, this did not contain the flow of departures. At the beginning of the month, HSBC announced its defection, and it is very likely that others will do the same. Today, the members represent only a little more than half of the founders’ workers, but there are still committed banks and the NZBA remains alive.

The same cannot be said of her little sister, the Nzia. Even before the election of Trump, some general prosecutors of states controlled by the Republicans, raising concerns about collaborative climate commitments, had targeted the main members for antitrust reasons. Their motivations may have been different, but legally, they were not wrong. The founders had not thought about the implications of the commitments they made. After a series of withdrawals, the NZIA collapsed in April 2024.

There was a kind of replacement, in the form of the forum for the transition of insurance to the net zero. The obligations of the members of the forum are more flexible and there are no objectives or report obligations. He also claims to be armed with internal lawyers to protect himself against possible tickets to antitrust legislation.

To complete the table, the third child, the Nzam, also experienced a wave of withdrawals in January, under the leadership of BlackRock. This has led to the suspension of its activities and the deletion of the published list of signatories. It is not yet known when the suspension will be lifted, if it is one day.

We have examined the children, but what about the parent? GFANZ still exists technically, but it has been considerably reshaped. He now describes himself as an independent “principals group”, without preliminary qualifications, and turned away from his role as a zero net energy guardian to become a funding facilitator of the energy transition – a laudable task, but far from what had been envisaged at the start.

It is difficult to consider these developments, taken as a whole, as something other than a significant dilution of the commitment of the financial sector to support the green transition.

But where are the regulators, who exerted pressure on their customers so that they are committed and ensure that they are part of the solution to climate change, rather than being the victims of the problem?

The network for the greening of the financial system (Network for Greening the Financial System-NGFS) was created by an eight-voluntary central banks coalition in 2017. This coalition included the United Kingdom, France and China, but not the United States. After the election of Joe Biden in 2020, the federal reserve, which prides itself on its political independence, decided to join it, to withdraw earlier this year.

Other central banks, however, remain engaged in this coalition. Some, such as the Bank of England, have reduced the importance of their tests of resistance to climate change, but the members of the NGFS, which are today 140 in number, are still convinced that the increase in average temperatures threatens to disturb the economy and that the energy transition will make winners and losers.

A recent NGFS analysis suggests that economic risks are more important than you thought. If banks and insurers do not include implications, they could suffer the consequences, which would add financial instability to other threats we face.

However, it would be illusory to imagine that the rest of the world can continue to live as before. Undeniable signs show that the United States is putting pressure on international regulatory organizations so that they can lower their climate work. The latest press release from the Financial Stability Council indicated that “if many members believe that it is necessary to continue the work, others consider that the work carried out to date is sufficient”, and it seems that the latter have dominated the first. Likewise, the Basel Committee has revised its work on climate information and has deleted any obligation to comply with it.

The Basel Committee refused the United States’s request to dissolve its climate working group, but it would seem that American representatives simply do not arise, which has an obvious impact on its effectiveness.

So what to do now? All scientific evidence suggests that the impact of global warming in the financial sector is inexorably increased, but the resistance of the United States to any substantial action on the part of companies or their regulators is increasingly firm. The outcome of a confrontation between an irresistible force and an irremovable object is notoriously difficult to predict.

In this case, I bet on the irresistible force. A bad result, perhaps the first in the insurance world, will illustrate the importance of strengthening our defenses. But even in this case, non -American regulators must maintain the pressure.

Has Trump killed green finance?

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