Every one of the six largest U.S. banks has pulled out of the Net Zero Banking Alliance, and a new study finds overall financial-sector support for major climate commitments has collapsed by nearly 90 percent in four years.
JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo, the six institutions that anchor American finance, have all walked away from the alliance they once joined with fanfare. The Committee to Unleash Prosperity, a free-market research group, published a report measuring the scale of the exodus, and the numbers are stark: support for net-zero initiatives among the financial institutions it examined has plunged by almost 90 percent since the movement's peak.
The retreat did not happen overnight. It built across 2024 and into early 2025, driven by a collision between climate pledges and the realities of energy markets, fiduciary duty, and antitrust scrutiny from state law-enforcement officials. What emerged is a portrait of an industry that spent years chasing political approval, and then reversed course when the costs became impossible to ignore.
Goldman Sachs left the Net Zero Banking Alliance in December 2024. The other five major U.S. banks followed in short order, a wave that Jerry Bowyer, CEO of Bowyer Research and co-author of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity study, told the Daily Mail became "unmistakable" in late 2024 and early 2025. He described the trend as "a steady progression away from the radical climate change policies, including net zero."
The banking alliance had grown fast. Launched in 2021, it reached 140 member banks representing $75.5 trillion in assets by November 2024. But losing America's six biggest banks gutted its credibility. By October 2025, the alliance stopped operating as a membership organization altogether and rebranded itself as a provider of voluntary climate guidance.
It was not just the banking alliance. The Net Zero Asset Managers initiative, once boasting more than 300 members overseeing nearly $60 trillion, suspended operations in January 2025 after BlackRock and other major U.S. firms withdrew. It relaunched in October 2025 with softer membership requirements. Climate Action 100+, another major environmental coalition, lost JPMorgan, State Street, and BlackRock's U.S. operations.
Vanguard had already left the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative back in December 2022, making it an early defector. But the dam broke two years later.
One catalyst the report highlights: in October 2022, 19 state attorneys general launched an antitrust investigation into six major U.S. banks over their involvement in the Net Zero Banking Alliance. That investigation put a legal framework around a question that had been simmering, whether coordinated climate pledges amounted to collusion against fossil-fuel producers and the customers who depend on affordable energy.
The political pressure mattered. But Bowyer argues it was only part of the picture.
"The politics got them into these groups. Physics and economics got them out."
He pointed to surging electricity demand driven by artificial intelligence, the practical limits of transforming global energy infrastructure, and the fiduciary obligations that banks owe their clients and shareholders, obligations that sat uneasily alongside pledges to restrict financing for entire sectors of the economy.
Wells Fargo went further than simply quitting an alliance. In February 2025, the bank formally abandoned its sector-specific 2030 financed-emissions targets and its broader goal of achieving net-zero financed emissions by 2050. The bank said at the time that many of the conditions needed to help its clients transition had not occurred.
That admission is worth pausing on. Wells Fargo did not claim the goal was wrong in principle. It said the real-world conditions required to meet it simply did not exist. For a bank that had publicly committed to reshaping its lending portfolio around climate targets, that amounted to a concession that the targets were detached from economic reality.
Bowyer put the broader shift in blunt terms:
"The finance industry was still treating net zero as the price of admission to polite global opinion. Then reality intruded."
The institutional retreat tracked with a broader investor exodus. Bloomberg Intelligence figures cited in the report show that U.S. ESG and environmentally focused funds attracted roughly $485 billion in 2021, at the height of the green-finance rush. By 2025, those same funds had suffered $82 billion in outflows, a swing of more than half a trillion dollars in investor sentiment.
That reversal reflects something more durable than a political cycle. Investors who poured money into ESG products during the boom years watched performance lag and discovered that many of the funds carried higher fees for strategies that often amounted to little more than excluding certain stocks. When returns faltered, the ideological appeal wore thin.
Bowyer noted that some institutions are not fully out. Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Pimco, and Citigroup retain stronger links with environmental groups, and JPMorgan still carries substantial sustainability material on its website. European investors, the report observed, remain considerably more engaged with climate-focused investing than their American counterparts.
But the trajectory in the United States is clear.
"Firms will keep some climate language for public relations purposes, but the grandiose alliance model has been badly damaged."
The Committee to Unleash Prosperity study frames the retreat not as a policy debate but as an economic inevitability. Bowyer argued that the net-zero alliance model asked financial institutions to make commitments that contradicted the physical and economic constraints of energy production.
"The laws of physics and engineering do not bend to ESG branding."
He described the path forward in terms that prioritize market competition over mandated decarbonization timelines:
"The path to a cleaner and more prosperous economy is innovation, abundance, and competition, not coercive decarbonization targets."
And he predicted that the shift would continue, even if banks avoid saying so publicly:
"The more serious institutions will move back toward fiduciary duty, energy realism, and client choice. They may not all admit that net zero failed, but their behavior is already saying it."
Open questions remain. The report does not detail which specific banks were targeted in the 2022 antitrust investigation, and the precise baseline period for the "almost 90 percent" decline is not spelled out. Some banks that quit the formal alliances still maintain climate-related language and commitments in their public materials, raising the question of whether the retreat is substantive or cosmetic.
But the direction is not ambiguous. The alliances that once claimed to represent tens of trillions of dollars in coordinated climate action have either dissolved, restructured, or been reduced to offering optional guidance that no one is required to follow. The membership model that gave these groups their leverage is finished.
Bowyer's summary landed the point cleanly:
"Wall Street's retreat from net zero is the market correcting a political mistake."
When the biggest banks in the country quietly abandon the commitments they once trumpeted, it is not a trend. It is a verdict, delivered not by politicians or pundits, but by the institutions that actually have to answer for the money.