For the past two years, more than a dozen major banks have been not only reneging on their climate commitments - they’ve been actively making the crisis worse, like a firefighter who keeps tossing gasoline on the flames because it’s profitable.
In 2024 and 2025, leading up to President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, all six of the nation’s largest banks abandoned the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, a voluntary climate coalition that apparently had all the binding power of a pinky swear. The Alliance shut down completely in October. Since then, others including Royal Bank of Canada, Scotiabank, HSBC, NatWest, Santander, and JPMorgan Chase have either weakened or scrapped their decarbonization targets. Because who needs targets when you have quarterly earnings?
Now, new evidence shows banks are ramping up spending on fossil fuels - and not just for extracting more oil and gas, but also for bankrolling the industry’s pivot to plastics, fertilizers, and other petrochemical products. Two reports released earlier this month illustrate the trend. An analysis from the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) and other environmental groups found the world’s top 65 banks contributed $508 billion to companies expanding fossil fuel development in 2025. That’s a 27 percent increase since 2024, and more than any other year since at least 2016. So much for net-zero.
The second report comes from the nonprofit Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL). It found that between January 2019 and June 2025, big banks gave the world’s top 15 petrochemical companies at least $591 billion in loans and underwriting. Some of that benefited integrated oil and gas corporations; the amount CIEL could directly attribute to petrochemical activities was $252 billion. For context, New Zealand’s GDP is about $279 billion. So banks lent almost an entire New Zealand’s worth of money to make plastic.
Together, the reports suggest that large financial institutions are enabling a long-term viability strategy for the fossil fuel industry: offsetting declining demand for oil and gas in energy and transportation with a boom in petrochemicals. Indeed, oil majors including Exxon Mobil, Shell, and Saudi Aramco have invested heavily in this field by acquiring majority stakes in plastics and chemical companies and retrofitting oil refineries to accommodate a shift in production. Because if you can’t burn it, you can always wrap your sandwich in it.
These investments reflect projections from the International Energy Agency that plastics, agrichemicals, and other petrochemical products will account for more than one-third of the growth in oil demand through 2030, and nearly half by 2050 - much more than other sectors like aviation and shipping. “Petrochemicals are not just a general growth area for fossil fuel companies,” said Ximena Banegas, a plastics campaigner for CIEL. “They are a deliberate and pivotal strategy to ensure that we continue using fossil fuels.” Mission accomplished?
Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and the Japanese bank Mizuho Financial were among the top banks increasing financing for fossil fuel expansion last year, RAN’s analysis found. All 65 banks it analyzed boosted funding for new oil and gas exploration, transportation, and refining. But the largest growth was for transportation - including new pipelines and capital-intensive LNG export terminals, which can create a decades-long commitment to using methane gas. “It’s overall disappointing,” said Allison Fajans-Turner, a senior energy finance campaigner for RAN. “Banks are unfortunately continuing to put profits over responsible societal action.” She noted that fossil fuel financing is becoming more concentrated among a smaller number of large banks, primarily in North America and Japan, as several European banks have begun to scale back funding. So at least some banks have a shred of decency.
RAN’s report didn’t look directly at financing for petrochemical production, but some findings indicate growing interest. A significant increase in loans and underwriting for coal expansion, for example, is at least partially linked to a recent spike in coal-to-chemical plants planned globally - mostly in China and India. Environmental advocates say these investments risk giving coal “a new lease of life.” Because coal wasn’t problematic enough.
Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and Mizuho Financial are also among the top funders of petrochemical activities, according to CIEL’s report. The top 15 recipients include Exxon Mobil, Syngenta, LyondellBasell, and Dow. Although CIEL didn’t compare each year, it noticed a significant jump in petrochemical finance in 2024, the last full year examined. As evidence of the industry’s ongoing expansion, Banegas pointed to a recent report estimating that 127 new polyethylene projects will come online between 2025 and 2030. That’s a lot of plastic.
CIEL’s report also notes the petrochemical industry’s outsize contribution to toxic chemical pollution and global warming. As of 2020, petrochemicals’ annual greenhouse gas emissions amounted to 1.9 billion metric tons - more than twice that of aviation and shipping. So while you’re feeling guilty about your flight to grandma’s, remember that the plastic cup you’re drinking from is twice as bad.
Fredric Bauer, a senior lecturer at Lund University in Sweden, said it’s not surprising to see continued interest in big plastics and chemicals projects, although it is perhaps counterintuitive. Despite warnings that the petrochemical industry is in “structural decline” - shown by canceled projects, credit downgrades, and price shocks due to the war with Iran - companies keep investing because they often “do not respond to conventional market signals.” Instead of saying “Oh, there’s oversupply, we should probably not invest,” their priority is “to ensure long-term markets for oil and gas.” Because logic is for hippies.
A coalition of advocacy groups including CIEL are calling on big banks to end support for fossil fuel and petrochemical expansion. They want policies against financing facilities that produce virgin plastics and fossil fuel-derived fertilizers. They also want banks to require clients to adopt credible transition plans to keep global warming below 1.5°C (2.7°F), which may include targets to reduce plastics use and phase out some pesticides.
Fajans-Turner said the upward swing in fossil fuel financing reveals the weakness of voluntary sustainability commitments and reinforces the need for regulation. She suggested that governments require better incorporation of climate risks when determining a borrower’s creditworthiness. “That would actually have many downstream consequences about who gets funding and who does not,” she said. Joel Tickner, a professor of public health at UMass Lowell, said it’s important that governments scale back loans and tax incentives supporting the fossil fuel industry - subsidies that amount to more than $1 trillion annually. Some of that money could help develop greener chemistry. “If we’re serious about sustainable materials, then we need to put our money where we want to go,” he said. In other words, stop funding the problem and start funding the solution. Novel concept.