Will Hild, executive director of Consumers' Research, explains that the Net Zero Banking Alliance "existed for the largest banks in the world to collude to use their loan portfolios to push a radical anti-humanist environmentalist agenda on the entire country and really the entire world without ever having to face the ballot box."
Corporations, he says, do not always have the needed cash flow on hand, so they finance regularly through lines of credit or bond offerings. Members of the Net Zero Banking Alliance were the few banks that can handle loans of that magnitude. The idea was to extract concessions from loan applicants to get them to reduce carbon emissions.
"This really was a banking cartel," Hild summarizes. "So, seeing that go away is a huge win for America and a huge win for consumers."
He thinks Morgan Stanley, Citi, and Bank of America abandoned the Net Zero Banking Alliance because of the incoming Trump administration and because of a recent antitrust lawsuit from state attorneys general led by Ken Paxton of Texas.
He is suing the members of the Net Zero Asset Managers, the sister organization to this banking alliance, for antitrust activity aimed at raising the price of coal.
"The aggressive action from organizations like Consumers' Research and activists like Robby Starbuck has played a role in highlighting for elected officials the problems with these organizations," Hild notes, "but I would say the two main factors are Trump and Attorney General Ken Paxton's lawsuit."
Consumers' Research will keep its eye on big banks to ensure this effort is not brought back under a different name.
If they continue to engage in the anti-consumer practices, even if they are not colluding with other banks to do so, Hild pledges to "name and shame and attack them" and bring attention to elected officials to do something about it.
