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Two major banks leave UN Net Zero Banking Alliance in two weeks

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From The Center Square

Under Texas law, financial institutions that boycott the oil and natural gas industry are prohibited from entering into contracts with state governmental entities. State law also requires state entities to divest from financial companies that boycott the oil and natural gas industry by implementing ESG policies.

Not soon after the general election, and within two weeks of each other, two major financial institutions have left a United Nations Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA).

This is after they joined three years ago, pledging to require environmental social governance standards (ESG) across their platforms, products and systems.

According to the “bank-led and UN-convened” NZBA, global banks joined the alliance, pledging to align their lending, investment, and capital markets activities with a net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, NZBA explains.

Since April 2021, 145 banks in 44 countries with more than $73 trillion in assets have joined NZBA, tripling membership in three years.

“In April 2021 when NZBA launched, no bank had set a science-based sectoral 2030 target for its financed emissions using 1.5°C scenarios,” it says. “Today, over half of NZBA banks have set such targets.”

There are two less on the list.

Goldman Sachs was the first to withdraw from the alliance this month, ESG Today reported. Wells Fargo was the second, announcing its departure Friday.

The banks withdrew two years after 19 state attorneys general launched an investigation into them and four other institutions, Bank of America, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase and Morgan Stanley, for alleged deceptive trade practices connected to ESG.

Four states led the investigation: Arizona, Kentucky, Missouri and Texas. Others involved include Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Virginia. Five state investigations aren’t public for confidentiality reasons.

The investigation was the third launched by Texas AG Ken Paxton into deceptive trade practices connected to ESG, which he argues were designed to negatively impact the Texas oil and natural gas industry. The industry is the lifeblood of the Texas economy and major economic engine for the country and world, The Center Square has reported.

The Texas oil and natural gas industry accounts for nearly one-third of Texas’s GDP and funds more than 10% of the state’s budget.

It generates over 43% of the electricity in the U.S. and 51% in Texas, according to 2023 data from the Energy Information Administration.

It continues to break production records, emissions reduction records and job creation records, leading the nation in all three categories, The Center Square reported. Last year, the industry paid the largest amount in tax revenue in state history of more than $26.3 billion. This translated to $72 million a day to fund public schools, universities, roads, first responders and other services.

“The radical climate change movement has been waging an all-out war against American energy for years, and the last thing Americans need right now are corporate activists helping the left bankrupt our fossil fuel industry,” Paxton said in 2022 when launching Texas’ investigation. “If the largest banks in the world think they can get away with lying to consumers or taking any other illegal action designed to target a vital American industry like energy, they’re dead wrong. This investigation is just getting started, and we won’t stop until we get to the truth.”‘

Paxton praised Wells Fargo’s move to withdraw from “an anti-energy activist organization that requires its members to prioritize a radical climate agenda over consumer and investor interests.”

Under Texas law, financial institutions that boycott the oil and natural gas industry are prohibited from entering into contracts with state governmental entities. State law also requires state entities to divest from financial companies that boycott the oil and natural gas industry by implementing ESG policies. To date, 17 companies and 353 publicly traded investment funds are on Texas’ ESG divestment list.

After financial institutions withdraw from the NZBA, they are permitted to do business with Texas, Paxton said. He also urged other financial institutions to follow suit and “end ESG policies that are hostile to our critical oil and gas industries.”

Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar has expressed skepticism about companies claiming to withdraw from ESG commitments noting there is often doublespeak in their announcements, The Center Square reported.

Notably, when leaving the alliance, a Goldman Sachs spokesperson said the company was still committed to the NZBA goals and has “the capabilities to achieve our goals and to support the sustainability objectives of our clients,” ESG Today reported. The company also said it was “very focused on the increasingly elevated sustainability standards and reporting requirements imposed by regulators around the world.”

“Goldman Sachs also confirmed that its goal to align its financing activities with net zero by 2050, and its interim sector-specific targets remained in place,” ESG Today reported.

Five Goldman Sachs funds are listed in Texas’ ESG divestment list.

The Comptroller’s office remains committed to “enforcing the laws of our state as passed by the Texas Legislature,” Hegar said. “Texas tax dollars should not be invested in a manner that undermines our state’s economy or threatens key Texas industries and jobs.”

2025 Federal Election

Don’t let the Liberals fool you on electric cars

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CAE Logo Dan McTeague

“The Liberals, hoodwinked by the ideological (and false) narrative that EVs are better for the environment, want to force you to replace the car or truck you love with one you can’t afford which doesn’t do what you need it to do.”

The Liberals’ carbon tax ploy is utterly shameless. For years they’ve been telling us that the Carbon Tax was a hallmark of Canadian patriotism, that it was the best way to save the planet, that it was really a “price on pollution,” which would ultimately benefit the little guy, in the form of a rebate in which Canadians would get back all the money they paid in, and more!

Meanwhile big, faceless Captain Planet villain corporations — who are out there wrecking the planet for the sheer fun of it! — will shoulder the whole burden.

But then, as people started to feel the hit to their wallets and polling on the topic fell off a cliff, the Liberals’ newly anointed leader — the  environmentalist fanatic Mark Carney — threw himself a Trumpian signing ceremony, at which he and the party (at least rhetorically) kicked the carbon tax to the curb and started patting themselves on the back for saving Canada from the foul beast. “Don’t ask where it came from,” they seem to be saying. “The point is, it’s gone.”

Of course, it’s not. The Consumer Carbon Tax has been zeroed out, at least for the moment, not repealed. Meanwhile, the Industrial Carbon Tax, on business and industry, is not only being left in place, it’s being talked up in exactly the same terms as the Consumer Tax was.

No matter that it will continue to go up at the same rate as the Consumer Tax would have, such that it will be indistinguishable from the Consumer Tax by 2030. And no matter that the burden of that tax will ultimately be passed down to working Canadians in the form of higher prices.

Of course, when that happens, Carney & Co will probably blame Donald Trump, rather than their own crooked tax regime.

Yes, it is shameless. But it also puts Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives in a bind. They’ve been proclaiming their intention to “Axe the Tax” for quite some time now. On the energy file, it was pretty much all you could get them to talk about. So much so that I was worried that upon entering government, they might just go after the low hanging fruit, repeal the Carbon Tax, and move on to other things, leaving the rest of the rotten Net-Zero superstructure in place.

But now, since the Liberals beat them to it (or claim they did,) the Conservatives are left grasping for a straightforward, signature policy which they can use to differentiate themselves from their opponents.

Poilievre’s recently announced intention to kill the Industrial Carbon Tax is welcome, especially at a time when Canadian business is under a tariff threat from both the U.S. and China. But that requires some explanation, and as the old political saying goes, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.”

There is one policy change however, which comes to mind as a potential replacement. It’s bold, it would make the lives of Canadians materially better, and it’s so deeply interwoven with the “Green” grift of the environmentalist movement of which Mark Carney is so much a part that his party couldn’t possibly bring themselves to steal it.

Pierre Poilievre should pledge to repeal the Liberals’ Electric Vehicle mandate.

The EV mandate is bad policy. It forces Canadians to buy an expensive product — EVs cost more than Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) vehicles even when the federal government was subsidizing their purchase with a taxpayer-funded rebate of $5,000 per vehicle, but that program ran out of money in January and was discontinued. Without that rebate, EVs haven’t a prayer of competing with ICE vehicles.

EVs are particularly ill-suited for Canada. Their batteries are bad at holding a charge in the cold. Even in mild weather, EVs aren’t known for their reliability, a major downside in a country as spread out as ours. Maybe it’ll work out if you live in a big city, but what if you’re in the country? Heaven help you if your EV battery dies when you’re an hour away from everywhere.

Moreover, Canada doesn’t have the infrastructure to support a total replacement of gas-and-diesel driven vehicles with EVs. Our already-strained electrical grid just doesn’t have the capacity to support millions of EVs being plugged in every night. Natural Resources Canada estimates that we will need somewhere in the neighborhood of 450,000 public charging stations to support an entirely electric fleet. At the moment, we have roughly 30,000. That’s a pretty big gap to fill in ten years.

And that’s another fact which doesn’t get nearly as much attention as it should. The law mandates that every new vehicle sold in Canada must be electric by 2035. Maybe that sounded incredibly far in the future when it was passed, but now it’s only ten years away! That’s not a lot of time for these technological problems or cost issues to be resolved.

So the pitch from Poilievre here is simple.

“The Liberals, hoodwinked by the ideological (and false) narrative that EVs are better for the environment, want to force you to replace the car or truck you love with one you can’t afford which doesn’t do what you need it to do. If you vote Conservative, we will fix that, so you will be free to buy the vehicle that meets your needs, whether it’s battery or gas powered, because we trust you to make decisions for yourself. Mark Carney, on the other hand, does not. We won’t just Axe the Tax, we will End the EV Mandate!”

A decade (and counting) of Liberal misrule has saddled this country with a raft of onerous and expensive Net-Zero legislation I’d like to see the Conservative Party campaign against.

These include so-called “Clean Fuel” Regulations, Emissions Caps, their war on pipelines and Natural Gas terminals, not to mention Bill C-59, which bans businesses from touting the environmental benefits of their work if it doesn’t meet a government-approved standard.

But the EV mandate is bad for Canada, and terrible for Canadians. A pledge to repeal it would be an excellent start.

Dan McTeague is President of Canadians for Affordable Energy.

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2025 Federal Election

Three cheers for Poilievre’s alcohol tax cut

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By Franco Terrazzano

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation applauds Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre’s commitment to end and reverse the alcohol escalator tax.

“Poilievre just promised major alcohol tax cuts and taxpayers will cheers to that,” said Franco Terrazzano, CTF Federal Director. “Poilievre’s tax cut will save Canadians money every time they have a cold one with a buddy or enjoy a glass of Pinot with their better half and it will give Canadians brewers, distillers and wineries a fighting chance against tariffs.”

Today, federal alcohol taxes increased by two per cent, costing taxpayers about $40 million this year, according to Beer Canada.

Poilievre announced a Conservative government “will axe the escalator tax on wine, beer and spirits back to 2017 levels, ending the automatic annual tax increases.”

The alcohol escalator tax has automatically increased excise taxes on beer, wine and spirits every year, without a vote in Parliament, since 2017. The alcohol escalator tax has cost taxpayers more than $900 million since being imposed, according to Beer Canada.

Taxes from multiple levels of government account for about half of the price of alcohol.

Meanwhile, tariffs are hitting the industry hard. Brewers have described the tariffs as “Armageddon for craft brewing.”

“Automatic tax hikes are undemocratic, uncompetitive and unaffordable and they need to stop,” Terrazzano said. “If politicians think Canadians aren’t paying enough tax, they should at least have the spine to vote on the tax increase.

“Poilievre is right to end the escalator tax and all party leaders should commit to making life more affordable for Canadian consumers and businesses by ending the undemocratic alcohol tax hikes.”

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