The Patriot Post® · Good Riddance, Net-Zero Banking Alliance
The climate cult recently suffered a significant setback. In its effort to impose policies predicated on climate alarmism, which claims that carbon dioxide is the primary driver of global warming, a United Nations-directed group formed the Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) in 2021.
The NZBA pressured banks worldwide, but primarily in the West, to commit to aligning their financial activities in pursuit of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. In other words, it was sending the message that “good banks” are those that promote the climate alarmist agenda and invest in so-called green technology to help realize the goal of net-zero carbon emissions.
It always was a pipe dream. Given the reality of fossil fuel-based energy production and the inherent limitations of renewable energy, anyone who examined the data and numbers could not honestly deny it.
But as with so many things, banks will go where the money is. Therefore, with governments increasingly investing billions of taxpayer dollars in the green energy industry, why not sign on for a piece of the pie? Besides, bankers aren’t scientists. Moreover, if this promised utopian vision of a net-zero world were possible, if not inevitable, then being left off the gravy train could spell future financial ruin.
Nearly 150 banks signed on to the NZBA, representing over 40% of the world’s banking assets, and all in the name of fighting the “climate crisis.”
The obvious threat the NZBA posed was to free market capitalism in that it sought to usurp people’s freedom to buy and sell that which they found best worked for them. The NZBA existed not only to impose a net-zero energy industry on the globe; even more insidiously, it aimed to eliminate the fossil fuel industry, the very industry most responsible for elevating vast numbers of people around the globe out of abject poverty.
The irony is that it is the net-zero climate cultists who are advocating for an energy transition that, if permitted to occur, would result in a massive increase in the poverty rate. That’s because cheap energy is necessary to produce a developed economy that grows and spreads wealth, enabling massive economic upward mobility. Simply put, green energy is an economic recipe for spreading poverty by significantly increasing the cost of electricity while simultaneously increasing its scarcity.
Thankfully, the election of Donald Trump hit like a proverbial hammer at the foundation upholding the NZBA. Six major U.S. banks exited the alliance in January as it became clear that Trump would not bow to the globalist green movement but instead would seek to unshackle the fossil fuel industry in an effort to boost the American economy.
And now, nine months into Trump’s second term, the NZBA has collapsed. In August, the remaining members of the alliance met to recreate the organization under a new “framework initiative” and voted to “cease operations immediately.”
For all intents and purposes, the NZBA is now dead. And good riddance. It serves as a reminder and a warning to people to choose their bank carefully. If you don’t want your hard-earned cash being used to invest in and finance interests and causes that you are opposed to, then don’t bank with them.