Morgan Stanley joins list of banks quitting Mark Carney-backed climate group
financialpost.comMorgan Stanley & Co. LLC terminated its membership of a major climate-banking group, joining a wave of Wall Street firms that recently quit a global alliance intended to aid the reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions.
Morgan Stanley is leaving the Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA), the lender said on Thursday. Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp. said earlier this week that they were doing the same.
The defections are playing out against a tense political backdrop in the United States, as the country’s biggest financial firms find themselves the targets of Republican campaigns that have characterized net zero groups as climate cartels.
Such attacks have picked up, and as recently as November, Texas 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. BlackRock said the suggestion that it invests in companies with the goal of harming them is baseless.
Other banks that have recently quit NZBA include Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Wells Fargo & Co. All said they remain committed to their own net zero emissions goals and to helping clients reduce their carbon footprints.
“We will continue to report on our progress as we work towards our 2030 interim financed-emissions targets,” Morgan Stanley said by email.
Daniel Storey, a spokesperson for NZBA, declined to comment.
Morgan Stanley adjusted some of its green targets in 2024. Among these was a funding goal for plastics, with a report published in September omitting an earlier pledge to facilitate the prevention, removal or reduction of 50 million metric tonnes of plastic waste from the environment by 2030. The bank also has warned of
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