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.
