Over the past two years, more than a dozen large banks have not only reversed their commitments to climate change, they have actively made the crisis worse.
In the run-up to President Donald Trump’s second term in office in 2024 and 2025, all six of the nation’s largest banks abandoned the voluntary climate alliance, the Net Zero Banking Alliance, which shut down completely in October. Since then, other banks have weakened or eliminated their banking functions, including Royal Bank of Canada, Scotiabank, HSBC, NatWest, Santander and JPMorgan Chase. decarbonization target.
Now, new evidence has been found that banks are increasing their spending on fossil fuels. It not only helps companies extract more oil and gas, but also supports the industry’s pivot to plastics, fertilizers, and other petrochemical products.
Two reports released earlier this month illustrate that trend. An analysis by Rainforest Action Network (RAN) and other environmental groups found that in 2025, the world’s top 65 banks gave $508 billion to companies expanding fossil fuel development. That’s a 27 percent increase from 2024 and more than any year since at least 2016, based on the organization’s previous analysis.
The second report comes from the nonprofit Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL). It found that major banks provided at least $591 billion in loans and underwriting to the world’s top 15 petrochemical companies between January 2019 and June 2025. Some of that benefited oil and gas integrated companies. The amount CIEL attributed directly to petrochemical activities was $252 billion. (For reference, New Zealand’s GDP is approximately $279 billion.)
Taken together, these reports suggest that large financial institutions are enabling a long-term survival strategy for the fossil fuel industry, in which petrochemical booms offset declining demand for oil and gas in energy systems and transportation. Indeed, oil majors such as ExxonMobil, Shell, and Saudi Aramco have invested heavily in the sector in recent years, acquiring majority stakes in plastics and chemical companies and retrofitting refineries to accommodate production shifts.
These investments reflect the International Energy Agency’s prediction that plastics, pesticides, and other petrochemicals will account for more than a third of oil demand growth by 2030 and nearly half by 2050. This is much more than other sectors such as aviation and shipping.
“Petrochemicals are not just a general growth area for fossil fuel companies,” said Ximena Banegas, a plastics activist at CIEL and author of the group’s report. “These are intentional and critically important strategies to ensure we continue to use fossil fuels.”
Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Japanese bank Mizuho Financial were among the top banks to increase financing for fossil fuel expansion last year, according to RAN’s analysis. All 65 banks analyzed ramped up financing across the board for new oil and gas exploration, transportation and refining. But the biggest growth so far has been in transportation, including new pipelines and capital-intensive LNG export terminals that could create a multi-decade LNG utilization effort. methane gas.
“It’s disappointing overall,” said Alison Fajance-Turner, RAN’s senior campaigner for energy finance. “Unfortunately, banks continue to prioritize profits over responsible social behavior,” he said, noting that fossil fuel financing is becoming concentrated in a small number of large banks, mainly based in North America and Japan, as several European banks begin to scale back funding.
Although the RAN report did not directly consider financing for petrochemical production, some of its findings indicate growing interest in this part of the industry. For example, the large increase in financing and underwriting for coal expansion is at least partially related to the recent surge in the number of coal chemical plants planned worldwide (primarily in China and India). Environmentalists say such investments risk giving coal a “new life”.
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Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Mizuho Financial are also among the top financiers of petrochemical projects, according to CIEL’s report. The top 15 recipients of the funding include a mix of oil and gas, agriculture, plastics and chemical companies, including Exxon Mobil, Syngenta, LyondellBasell and Dow.
Although CIEL did not compare 2019 and 2025 annually, it did notice a significant increase in petrochemical financing in 2024, the last full year examined. As evidence of the industry’s continued expansion, Vanegas pointed to a recent report that estimates 127 new polyethylene projects will come online between 2025 and 2030.
CIEL’s report also notes that the petrochemical industry contributes significantly to toxic chemical pollution and global warming. As of 2020, annual greenhouse gas emissions from petrochemicals reached 1.9 billion tons, more than double that of aviation and shipping.
Fredrik Bauer, a senior lecturer at Lund University in Sweden, conducted a similar study on petrochemical financing between 2010 and 2020. Although it may seem counterintuitive, the continued interest in large-scale plastics and chemical projects is not surprising, he said. Companies continue to invest despite industry analysts warning that the petrochemical industry is in “structural decline,” as evidenced by numerous project cancellations and delays, downgrades by multiple credit rating agencies, and recent price shocks for plastics and pesticides due to the war with Iran, he said, because companies “often do not respond to traditional market signals.”
Instead of saying, “Oh, there’s oversupply. Maybe we shouldn’t invest in more supply or capacity now,” their priority is to “secure the long-term market for oil and gas.”
A coalition of advocacy groups, including CIEL, is calling on major banks to stop supporting the expansion of fossil fuel and petrochemical businesses. They want policies that would ban loans to companies building facilities that produce virgin plastics and fossil fuel-based fertilizers. It also requires banks to urge customers to adopt credible transition plans to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), which could include goals such as reducing plastic use and phasing out some pesticides.
Fajance Turner said the upturn in fossil fuel financing reveals the weakness of voluntary sustainability efforts and reinforces the need for regulation. In addition to requiring financial institutions to have stronger decarbonization plans, he suggested that governments should require them to better incorporate climate risks when determining the creditworthiness of borrowers. “That would actually have a lot of downstream effects on who gets the funding and who doesn’t,” she says.
Joel Tickner, a public health professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and founder of the Independent Research Initiative on Sustainable Chemistry, said it’s important for the government to reduce the loans, tax breaks and subsidies that support the fossil fuel industry, which exceeds $1 trillion a year. Some of this funding could potentially fund the development and commercialization of greener chemistries.
Fossil fuel companies “have been receiving subsidies and financial support for decades,” Tickner said. “If you’re serious about sustainable materials, you need to put your money in the destination.”
