This spring, as global markets gyrated, some of the world’s most influential investors and executives sat in a Scottsdale, Ariz., conference room engaged in deep discussion. But rather than President Donald Trump’s tariffs, the 120 attendees were focused on the future of energy, climate, and sustainability. Across the conference ballroom were individuals representing a combined $4.3 trillion in market capitalization and $4.2 trillion in assets under management. At my table sat JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon, Microsoft founder turned philanthropist Bill Gates, and Jim Farley, the CEO of the Ford Motor Co. Elsewhere in the room, I spotted an oil-and-gas CEO, a prominent clean-tech innovator, and some of the world’s biggest asset managers.
For all the financial might, there was hardly any hype or grandeur. Walking around the campus of the Four Seasons Resort in Scottsdale, there was little indication of the gathering’s host or its purpose. A logo on the wall simply read Scottsdale Action Forum. But at the center of the room Dimon, the conference host, sat watching intently all day.
To many casual climate observers, it may look as if the world’s biggest companies in the financial sector and beyond are shunning climate work because the political zeitgeist has made it inconvenient. But the truth is far more complicated. Global markets and regulatory pressures keep the issue on the corporate radar. Meanwhile, out of the public eye, executives continue to search for a path forward. It’s just unlikely that they will settle on the path everyone envisioned five years ago.
“We have an issue; we should face it,” Dimon told the crowd about the world’s growing carbon emissions. But at the same time, he said, the U.S. needs a “more rational conversation” than how the climate dialogue is often framed. “We have to have a full, honest assessment.”
For JPMorgan, that has meant affirming its commitment to financing oil and gas and acknowledging that it may not meet the bold climate targets it set in 2021 if the broader economic and policy landscape doesn’t change. At the same time, the firm hasn’t given up on efforts to build a green banking business or the push to drive global emissions reductions. In fact, the company’s corporate clients continue to demand they do so no matter the political winds.
“There is a huge market for clean energy that’s profitable. It’s not a giveaway,” Dimon told me when we spoke again in July. In his telling, rational energy solutions cannot mean that banks “make loans that are going to go bad” or “stop financing people who provide safe, reliable, affordable energy.”
JPMorgan is far from the only financial institution trying to thread this needle. For much of the past decade, the industry has occupied a central role in efforts to tackle climate change. In what I’ve taken to calling the Wall Street fix, climate advocates have sought to make banks, insurers, and other financial institutions central players in efforts to cut emissions. In the simplest terms, the theory goes, the financial sector can bring about the energy transition by financing good things, i.e., clean energy, and cutting funding for fossil fuels.
During the pandemic, banks announced targets to show their commitment to climate action. But politics—and markets—have been rocked by events ranging from the Russian invasion of Ukraine to the U.S. presidential election. This dynamic means the financial sector is caught fighting two distinct battles on the same front. Conservatives say banks have “gone woke,” unfairly favoring renewable energy, and have threatened firms with lawsuits and investigations. At the same time, some climate groups argue that JPMorgan, with its substantial funding of oil and gas, has failed to do its part. Indeed, climate scenarios show clearly that the world needs to shift away from fossil fuels to meet climate goals. Many with less fixed views have come to think the most influential companies have simply given up.
If the crowd in Scottsdale is any indicator, the private sector remains engaged. Many of the most influential corporate and financial players have modulated their public messaging and adjusted their climate-friendly work, but they are very far from abandoning it. The conversation in April centered not on the need to advance clean technologies—that’s taken as a given—but rather on how to do so profitably in line with client and investor expectations. “How much money is invested at below-market return for green purposes? Like none. Zero,” said Dimon. “It’s not going to work if it’s just for philanthropy.”
Indeed, getting capital to flow will require a society-wide shift. And while they may not have all the answers, one clear conclusion was reached in Scottsdale: profit will be the easiest way to make the Wall Street fix real.
At a conference table on the 41st floor of JPMorgan’s headquarters in Manhattan, Doug Petno is flexing his fluency across the languages of climate, finance, and old-school oil and gas. He speaks about addressing climate change as “existential,” but also hails natural gas as “one of the biggest decarbonizing forces for the U.S.” because of its role in replacing dirtier coal. He mentions leveraged buyouts and nature protection in the same breath.
Petno, a rumored potential successor to Dimon and co-CEO of JPMorgan’s commercial and investment bank, began his career at the firm 35 years ago helping structure deals in the natural resources division. But by the early 2010s the firm began to get pushback—from both activists and clients—for financing the polluting sector.
So Petno, with the support of the company’s other senior executives, began exploring how to advance the company’s sustainability strategy—not for the marketing or government-relations divisions but for the company’s core business. “We wanted to build our franchise in a sustainable way that would be climate smart, carbon smart, apolitical, science-based, but fundamentally do what we do best as a bank,” Petno says.
To respond to banker and customer questions about climate change and evolving energy markets, Petno set up a brain trust of sorts with a new internal advisory hub dubbed the Center for Carbon Transition. Senior bankers were pulled in from across the firm and tasked with studying climate change and the energy transition. The center became home for climate scientists, dozens of whom are now employed across JPMorgan.
And then there’s the firm’s green-economy banking practice, designed to service clients in the clean-technology sector with subject matter expertise, including scientists and engineers, as well as leading bankers in the field. Petno says that at the time of its launch, the bank knew the sector would be cyclical—“feast or famine,” to use his words—but investments were nonetheless meant to be as profit-oriented as they were climate-oriented. Last year, JPMorgan generated more than $1 billion in revenue from green transactions and clients.
But activist pressure has remained consistent. Following the adoption of the Paris Agreement in 2015, the Rainforest Action Network activist group rated the bank as the world’s biggest financier of fossil fuels—a title that the bank retained as of last year. In 2018, in one prominent demonstration, protesters chained themselves to a sculpture in one of the company’s New York offices over its financing of oil pipelines Climate activist Bill McKibben once called Dimon an “oil, coal, and gas baron almost without peer.” Indeed, even with the bank’s growing climate investments, a fundamental mismatch remained. What is rational to a bank isn’t necessarily rational for the planet—and humanity. The planet needs us to cut emissions; banks need to continue making a profit.
In the first years of the COVID-19 pandemic, the activist pressure and profit motive seemed to be aligning. Combined with low interest rates, investor demands, and policy pushes, companies and financial firms made a series of bold climate commitments. Today, it feels almost like a hazy dream: financial firms committed not only to eliminating their own emissions but to cutting their financed emissions, i.e. customer emissions that result from the firm’s financing. Financial sector leaders like BlackRock’s Larry Fink and Bank of America’s Brian Moynihan showed up to the U.N. climate conference in Glasgow in November of 2021 in full force promising to support the global net-zero push.
Dimon himself skipped Glasgow, but the bank still came to the conference with a series of splashy commitments. Those included a pledge to align JPMorgan’s funding in key sectors with a pathway to a net-zero-carbon-emissions world and a goal of financing $1 trillion in green initiatives by 2030. At the time, the firm joined with its biggest counterparts in coalitions like the Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) and Climate Action 100+.
Even still, to activist dismay, at no point did JPMorgan say it would stop financing fossil fuels. In his 2020 annual letter, Dimon had said that JPMorgan would continue to work with oil and gas firms and argued that “abandoning companies that produce and consume these fuels is not a solution.” Dimon’s approach proved prescient. In 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine and energy prices soared. The Biden Administration went from talking about the decline of oil and gas to pushing companies to produce more. Around the same time, political backlash to parts of the E.U.’s Green Deal led to the bloc’s softening green policies. Supply-chain crunches slowed key technologies. And then there was Trump’s return to power.
JPMorgan tries to exude an aggressively nonpartisan and apolitical attitude even as the financial sector’s approach to climate has become a lightning rod in Washington and in statehouses around the country. When I talked to Dimon just after the passage of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which gutted most Biden-era clean-energy programs, he declined to endorse or reject the measure, saying it contained some good things and some bad things. To be clear, every analysis of the law’s climate impact shows U.S. emissions will be higher than they would have been without its passage.
Many casual observers conclude that the private sector—banks and big companies alike—has given up. But is it true?
What’s clear is that JPMorgan and the sector more broadly have fallen behind their targets. Between its 2021 pledge and now, the firm has financed $240 billion in climate initiatives. That’s not a small sum by any measure, but still doesn’t put it on track to meet its $1 trillion goal, the deadline for which is just five years away. Petno acknowledged the company might not meet its target. “It’s going to depend a little on how open and receptive the capital markets are,” he told me.
Read more: The Rise of Green Wall Street
It’s much the same across the sector. Many of the biggest banks have moved away from rigid portfolio-wide pledges toward looser guardrails and deal-by-deal discretion. Wells Fargo scrapped both its 2050 financed-emissions goal and 2030 sector targets. Morgan Stanley recast its 2030 targets as flexible ranges. Bank of America nixed hard bans on Arctic oil and new coal in favor of “enhanced due diligence.” The collapse of the industry coalitions, like the NZBA, has garnered significant press attention. One by one, banks, including JPMorgan, have left the group. Last month, it announced it was pausing operations.
But to say that the sector has lost interest, or worse, would be to miss the forest for the trees. Debt issued to support sustainable investments continues to increase. Transition finance, where financial firms actively pursue opportunities to fund polluting companies’ emissions reductions, has become a hot area. And, most importantly, clients are still asking questions about climate.
Dimon, for one, argues that what looks like walking away is really just a refocusing. “The things that people are dropping,” he says, “is stuff that just didn’t work—and was virtue signaling.” In a sign of its continued commitment, last year the firm hired Sarah Kapnick, a former chief scientist at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, to serve as the firm’s global head of climate advisory. She put it succinctly: “My job wouldn’t exist. None of this would exist if there wasn’t clear client demand for it.”
As the gathering in Scottsdale wore on, attendees bounced between discussions on everything from electrification to policy to the trade environment. At a candlelit dinner, they listened to speakers wax on geopolitics. The goal, Petno says, is “to create a crucible for combustion to happen.”
Given this was an event hosted by the world’s largest bank, one might expect the most consequential conversations to have centered on mobilizing capital—and there certainly was discussion of that. Attendees explored how venture capital firms could structure larger investments in capital-intensive climate technologies. While such an approach would increase risk, it could ensure companies receive sufficient funding to fully develop their low-carbon solutions. And participants discussed innovative ways to blend philanthropic and profit-oriented funding to unlock previously unfeasible projects.
Nonetheless, the conclusion of many conversations seemed only tangentially related to finance. Stable policy, durable business models, and public-private collaboration will go just as far as new financing tools. “Investors, industry participants, developers, banks, they need good rules,” says Petno. “When the rules swing with every election year, or when you have investor sentiments shift, it’s hard to get on solid footing.”
In some ways, that’s JPMorgan’s climate story too—and the story of finance more broadly. The world needs more financial innovation to tackle climate change, but the sector operates in a much broader societal context; finance is a poor bulwark when policies and markets constantly shift.
This is, in some ways, a tough pill to swallow—particularly for the groups that have put so much stock in the Wall Street fix as a solution to rising emissions. The planet is cooked. Finance can’t save us. But conversations are brewing about new ways to engage the industry. A September report from environmental non-profit RMI calls this moment an “inflection point” for how banks are viewed in climate circles and calls for “right-sizing” the role of banks in the conversation. That includes leaning into banks’ core strengths: structuring deals and advising clients.
The report reminded me of a conversation with JPMorgan’s Rama Variankaval, who oversees the Center for Carbon Transition and serves as the firm’s global head of corporate advisory. “At the end of the day, you have one CEO on the other side of the table that is making the decision. And you can’t simply say, ‘Hey, invest more in climate,’” he says. “He’ll walk out of the door.” Instead, Variankaval says, you need to make the case in terms of how it impacts the balance sheet, credit ratings, or shareholder engagement. “Only if you’re able to give them a complete picture, and say here are all the domino effects of doing that. Only then is it useful.”
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