Goldman Sachs Group Inc is walking away from the world’s biggest climate alliance for banks, in the latest sign that Wall Street is recalibrating its affiliation with such groups.
Goldman has decided to no longer be a member of the Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA), the company said in a statement on Friday.
Firms are struggling to adapt to a deluge of increasingly fragmented environmental, social and governance (ESG) requirements from various standard-setters and jurisdictions. Goldman’s decision to leave NZBA was largely motivated by a need to comply with mandatory reporting guidelines, a person familiar with the matter said, adding that it would be helped by the rollout of the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, the person said.
Photo: Getty Images via AFP
“We have the capabilities to achieve our goals and to support the sustainability objectives of our clients,” the bank said in a statement. “Goldman Sachs is also very focused on the increasingly elevated sustainability standards and reporting requirements imposed by regulators around the world.”
A spokesperson for NZBA declined to comment. Members of the group commit to achieving net zero financed emissions by 2050 at the latest and to set interim five-year decarbonization targets.
The move comes amid intense and growing pressure from the US Republican Party on such coalitions, as part of a wider attack by the party on what it has characterized as “woke” capitalism. Last week, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton led a move to sue BlackRock Inc, Vanguard Group Inc and State Street Corp for allegedly breaching antitrust laws by using climate-friendly investment strategies to suppress the supply of coal.
That suit followed bans against ESG investing across numerous Republican-controlled states, with pressure expected to step up now that US president-elect Donald Trump is headed for a second term in the White House.
Against that backdrop, banks and asset managers have scaled back their association with high-profile climate groups.
In August, the asset management arm of Goldman said it had quit the world’s biggest climate alliance for investors, known as Climate Action 100+ (CA100+). Other firms that have quit the alliance include the asset management arm of JPMorgan Chase & Co and Pacific Investment Management Co.
On Friday, Franklin Templeton said it “won’t renew its status” as a signatory with CA100+.
CA100+, the world’s largest investor group formed to fight climate change, had been helpful in providing early-stages support, but Franklin Templeton has now built enough internal expertise around climate investing to no longer require the assistance of the group, the company said in a statement.
A separate climate alliance for insurers, NZIA, was gripped by an exodus last year, as firms responded to threats of antitrust litigation brought by US Republican state attorneys general, while a net zero alliance for asset managers suffered a blow when Vanguard, the world’s second-largest money manager, quit back in 2022.
RECYCLE: Taiwan would aid manufacturers in refining rare earths from discarded appliances, which would fit the nation’s circular economy goals, minister Kung said Taiwan would work with the US and Japan on a proposed cooperation initiative in response to Beijing’s newly announced rare earth export curbs, Minister of Economic Affairs Kung Ming-hsin (龔明鑫) said yesterday. China last week announced new restrictions requiring companies to obtain export licenses if their products contain more than 0.1 percent of Chinese-origin rare earths by value. US Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent on Wednesday responded by saying that Beijing was “unreliable” in its rare earths exports, adding that the US would “neither be commanded, nor controlled” by China, several media outlets reported. Japanese Minister of Finance Katsunobu Kato yesterday also
China Airlines Ltd (CAL, 中華航空) said it expects peak season effects in the fourth quarter to continue to boost demand for passenger flights and cargo services, after reporting its second-highest-ever September sales on Monday. The carrier said it posted NT$15.88 billion (US$517 million) in consolidated sales last month, trailing only September last year’s NT$16.01 billion. Last month, CAL generated NT$8.77 billion from its passenger flights and NT$5.37 billion from cargo services, it said. In the first nine months of this year, the carrier posted NT$154.93 billion in cumulative sales, up 2.62 percent from a year earlier, marking the second-highest level for the January-September
‘DRAMATIC AND POSITIVE’: AI growth would be better than it previously forecast and would stay robust even if the Chinese market became inaccessible for customers, it said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday raised its full-year revenue growth outlook after posting record profit for last quarter, despite growing market concern about an artificial intelligence (AI) bubble. The company said it expects revenue to expand about 35 percent year-on-year, driven mainly by faster-than-expected demand for leading-edge chips for AI applications. The world’s biggest contract chipmaker in July projected that revenue this year would expand about 30 percent in US dollar terms. The company also slightly hiked its capital expenditure for this year to US$40 billion to US$42 billion, compared with US$38 billion to US$42 billion it set previously. “AI demand actually
Jensen Huang (黃仁勳), founder and CEO of US-based artificial intelligence chip designer Nvidia Corp and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) on Friday celebrated the first Nvidia Blackwell wafer produced on US soil. Huang visited TSMC’s advanced wafer fab in the US state of Arizona and joined the Taiwanese chipmaker’s executives to witness the efforts to “build the infrastructure that powers the world’s AI factories, right here in America,” Nvidia said in a statement. At the event, Huang joined Y.L. Wang (王英郎), vice president of operations at TSMC, in signing their names on the Blackwell wafer to
RSS