Connect with us

Energy

The Real Threat to Banks Isn’t From Climate Change. It’s From Bankers.

Published

22 minute read

Over the last two years, some of the world’s most powerful and influential bankers and investors have argued that climate change poses a grave threat to financial markets and that nations must switch urgently from using fossil fuels to using renewables.

In 2019, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco warned that climate change could cause banks to stop lending, towns to lose tax revenue, and home values to decline. Last year, 36 pension fund managers representing $1 trillion in assets said climate change “poses a systemic threat to financial markets and the real economy.”

And upon taking office, President Joe Biden warned government agencies that climate change disasters threatened retirement funds, home prices, and the very stability of the financial system.

But a major new staff report from the New York Federal Reserve Bank throws cold water on the over-heated rhetoric coming from activist investors, bankers, and politicians. “How Bad Are Weather Disasters for Banks?” asks the title of the report by three economists. “Not very,” they answer in the first sentence of the abstract.

The reason is because “weather disasters over the last quarter century had insignificant or small effects on U.S. banks’ performance.” The study looked at FEMA-level disasters between 1995 and 2018, at county-level property damage estimates, and the impact on banking revenue.

Share

The New York Fed’s authors only looked at how banks have dealt with disasters in the past, and what they wrote isn’t likely to be the final word on the matter. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and most other scientific bodies predict that many weather events, including hurricanes and floods, which cause the greatest financial damage, are likely to become more extreme in the future, due to climate change.

And in February, The New York Times quoted one of six United States Federal Reserve governors saying, “Financial institutions that do not put in place frameworks to measure, monitor and manage climate-related risks could face outsized losses on climate-sensitive assets caused by environmental shifts.”

But the Fed economists looked separately at the most extreme 10 percent of all disasters and found that banks impacted not only didn’t suffer, “their income increases significantly with exposure,” and that the improved financial performance of banks hit by disasters wasn’t explained by increased federal disaster (FEMA) aid.

In other words, disasters are actually good for banks, since they increase demand for loans. The larger a bank’s exposure to natural disasters, the larger its profits.

Happily, the profits made by banks are trivial compared to rising societal resilience to disasters, which can be seen by the fact that the share of GDP spent on natural disasters has actually declined over the last 30 years.

While scientists expect hurricanes to become five percent more extreme they also expect them to become 25 percent less frequent, and now, new data showglobal carbon emissions actually declined over the last decade, and thus there is no longer any serious risk of a significant rise in global temperatures.

Banking Against Growth

Biden nominee Saule Omarova said she wants to bankrupt energy companies

The real risk to banks and the global economy comes from climate policy, not climate change, particularly efforts to make energy more expensive and less reliable through the greater use of renewables, new taxes, and new regulations.

“For policymakers,” warned the three economists writing for the New York Fed, “our findings suggest that potential transition risks from climate change warrant more attention than physical disaster risks.”

While they may seem like outliers, they are far from alone in expressing their concern. The second half of the quote by the Fed governor about climate change, which was hyped by The New York Times, warned that banks “could face outsized losses” from the “transition to a low-carbon economy.” (My emphasis.)

And, now concern is growing among members of Congress about the dangers of over-relying on weather-dependent energy, with some members citing the New York Fed’s report after The Wall Street Journal editorialized about it last week .

Proof of the threat to the economy from climate policy is the worst global energy crisis in 50 years. Shareholder activists played a significant role in creating it, according to analysts at Goldman Sachs, Bloomberg, and The Financial Times, by reducing investment in oil and gas production, and causing nations to over-invest in unreliable solar and wind energies, which has driven up energy prices, and contributed significantly to inflation.

And yet a crucial Biden Administration nominee for bank regulation has openly said she would like to bankrupt firms that produce oil and gas, the two fuels whose scarcity is causing the global energy crisis. Progressive academic, Saule Omarova, nominated by Biden, said recently that “we want [oil and gas firms] to go bankrupt” and that “the way we basically get rid of these carbon financiers is we starve them of their source of capital.

Omarova is not an outlier. The Biden Administration’s Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) is advocating 30 new climate regulations that should be imposed on banking. Many analysts believe the US Securities and Exchange Commission will require new regulations. The goal is to radically alter how America’s banks lend money, the energy sector, and the economy as a whole.

And former Bank of England chief, Mark Carney, co-chair of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, has organized $130 trillion in investment and said recently that his investors should expect to make higher, not lower, returns than the market. How? In the exact same way Omarova predicted: by bankrupting some companies, and financing other ones, through government regulations and subsidies.

Carney created the Glasgow Financial Alliance, or GFANZ, with Michael Bloomberg, and they did so under the official seal of the United Nations. “Carney said the alliance will put global finance on a trajectory that ultimately leaves high-carbon assets facing a much bleaker future,” wrote a reporter with Bloomberg. “He also said investors in such products will see the value of their holdings sink.”

What’s going on, exactly? How is it that some of the world’s most powerful bankers, and the politicians they finance, came to support policies that threaten the stability of electrical grids, energy supplies, and thus the global economy itself?

Donate to Environmental Progress

The Unseen Order

Tom Steyer, Michael Bloomberg, and George Soros

Three of the largest donors to climate change causes are billionaire financial titans Michael Bloomberg, George Soros, and Tom Steyer, all of whom have significant investments in both renewables and fossil fuels.

Soros is worth $8 billion and recently made large investments in natural gas firms (EQT) and electric vehicles (Fisker), Bloomberg has a net worth of around $70 billion and has large investments in natural gas and renewables, and much of Steyer’s wealth derives from investments in all three main fossil fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas — as well as renewables.

All three men finance climate activists and politicians, including President Biden, who then seek policies — from $500 billion for renewables and electric vehicles over the next decade to federal control over state energy systems to banking regulations to bankrupt oil and gas companies — which would benefit each of them personally.

Bloomberg gave over $100 million to Sierra Club to lobby to shut down coal plants after he had taken a large stake in its replacement, natural gas, and operates one of the largest news media companies in the world, which publishes articles and sends emails nearly every day reporting that climate change threatens the economy, and that solar panels and wind turbines are the only cost-effective solution.

Soros donates heavily to Center for American Progress, whose founder, John Podesta, was chief of staff to Bill Clinton, campaign chairman for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, and who currently runs policy at the Biden White House. So too does Steyer, who funds the climate activist organization founded by New Yorker author Bill McKibben, 350.org, which reported revenues of nearly $20 million in 2018.

The most influential environmental organization among Democrats and the Biden Administration is the Natural Resources Defense Council, NRDC, which advocated for federal control of state energy markets, the $500 billion for electric cars and renewables, and international carbon markets that would be controlled by the bankers and financiers who also donate to it.

In the 1990s, NRDC helped energy trading company Enron to distribute hundreds of thousands of dollars to environmental groups. “On environmental stewardship, our experience is that you can trust Enron,” said NRDC’s Ralph Cavanagh in 1997, even though Enron executives at the time were defrauding investors of billions of dollars in an epic criminal conspiracy, which in 2001 bankrupted the company.

From 2009 to 2011, NRDC advocated for and helped write complex cap-and-trade climate legislation that would have created and allowed some of their donors to take advantage of a carbon-trading market worth upwards of $1 trillion.

NRDC created and invested $66 million of its own money in a BlackRock stock fund that invested heavily in natural gas companies, and in 2014 disclosed that it had millions invested in renewable funds.

Former NRDC head, Gina McCarthey, now heads up Biden’s climate policy team, and Biden’s top economic advisor, Brian Deese, last worked at BlackRock, and almost certainly will return at the end of the Biden Administration.

Money buys influence. In 2019, McKibben called Steyer a “climate champ” when Steyer announced he was running for president, adding that Steyer’s “just-released climate policy is damned good!” And in 2020, McKibben wrote an article called, “How Banks Could Bail Us Out of the Climate Crisis,” for The New Yorker, which repeated the claim that extreme weather created by climate change threatens financial interests, and that the way to prevent it is to divert public and private money away from reliable energy sources toward weather-dependent ones.

Forms filed to the Internal Revenue Service by Steyer’s philanthropic organization, the TomKat Charitable Trust, show that it gave McKibben’s climate activist group, 350.org, $250,000 in 2012, 2014, and 2015, and may have given money to 350.org in 2013, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020, as well, because 350.org thanked either Steyer’s philanthropy, TomKat Foundation, or his organization, NextGen America, in each of its annual reports since 2013.

At the same time, McKibben’s motivations are plainly spiritual. He claims that various natural disasters are caused by humans, that climate change literally threatens life on Earth, and is thus “greatest challenge humans have ever faced,” a statement so unhinged from reality, considering declining deaths from disasters, declining carbon emissions, and the total absence of any science for such a claim, that it must be considered religious.

McKibben first book about climate change, The End of Nature, explicitly expressed his spiritual views, arguing that, through capitalist industrialization, humankind had lost its connection to nature. “We can no longer imagine that we are part of something larger than ourselves,” he wrote in The End of Nature. “That is what this all boils down to.” Indeed, for William James, the belief in “an unseen order” that we must adjust ourselves to, in order to avoid future punishment, is a defining feature of religion.

Climate change is punishment for our sins against nature — that’s the basic narrative pushed by journalists, climate activists, and their banker sponsors, for 30 years. It has a supernatural element: the belief that natural disasters are getting worse, killing millions, and threatening the economy, when in reality they are getting better, killing fewer, and costing less. And it offers redemption: to avoid punishment we must align our behavior with the unseen order, namely, a new economy controlled by the U.N., bankers, and climate activists. Unfortunately, as is increasingly obvious, the unseen order is parasitical and destructive.

When Nuclear Leads, the Bankers Will Follow

Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Emanuel Macron, and U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm

The unseen order of bankers, climate activists, and the news media is so powerful that it is difficult to imagine how it could ever be challenged.

The financial might of the climate lobby covers the wealth not only of billionaires Soros, Steyer, and Bloomberg, but also $130 trillion in investment funds, including many of the world’s largest pension funds, such as the one belonging to California public employees. The climate lobby’s political power is equally awesome, covering the entirety of the Democratic Party and a significant portion of the Republican Party, and most center-Left parties in Europe.

And all of that is sustained by cultural power, which has led many elites to view climate change as the world’s number one issue, has convinced half of all humans that climate change will make our species extinct, and has served as the apocalyptic foundation for Woke religion.

But serious cracks in the foundation are growing. The global energy crisis has revealed for many around the world the limits of unreliable renewables, with European governments having to subsidize energy to avoid public backlash, President Biden and other heads of state opening up emergency petroleum reserves, and all nations begging OPEC to produce more energy.

The blackouts and rising unreliability of electricity in California, along with the work of the pro-nuclear movement over the last 6 years, has resulted in a growing number of Democrats supporting nuclear energy. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm last week publicly urged California Governor Gavin Newsom not to close California’s Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, the signature nuclear plant Environmental Progress has been trying to save since 2016. Democratic support in particular for nuclear is growing.

And alternative media including Substack, podcasts, and social media platforms are increasingly providing a counterweight to the mainstream news media, exposing a huge number of issues that the media got wrong in recent years, and amplifying alternative voices.

Nowhere is the change occurring faster than in Europe, where energy shortages are affecting heating, cooking, and electricity supplies in ways that undermine the legitimacy of the banker-led climate efforts. In Britain, private energy companies have gone bankrupt, forcing the government to bail them out. For-profit energy companies, like banks, ultimately depend on taxpayers, who are also voters.

Outgoing German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who led her nation’s exit from nuclear energy, acknowledged that Germany had been defeated in its anti-nuclear energy advocacy at the European Union level, and that nuclear would finally be recognized as low-carbon.

Donate to Environmental Progress

And French president Emanuel Macron, under pressure from the political right as voters look to elections next year, gave a passionate speech in favor of nuclear energy last month, announcing $35 billion for new reactors.

As the world returns to nuclear, policymakers, media elites, and climate advocates will be increasingly confronted with the question of why consumers and taxpayers will benefit from a global carbon trading scheme and more weather-dependent renewables, particularly at a time of declining global emissions from the continuing transition from coal to natural gas, reduced deforestation, and increased reforestation.

Simply building more nuclear power plants means there is no climate change justification for weather-dependent renewables, which actually require greater use of natural gas, in order to deal with the high amount of unreliability.

Nuclear power goes with slow and patient capital. The obvious funders of a nuclear expansion in the West would be the pension funds, which need the secure return on investment that major construction and infrastructure projects provide, and which unreliable renewables, as the energy crisis shows, do not.

And though the news media is currently ignoring the New York Fed’s report, reporters will not be able to continue spreading misinformation about climate change indefinitely. Increasingly, they, and thus policymakers and the public, will be forced to confront facts inconvenient to their narrative, including that humans are adapting remarkably well to climate change, that renewables make energy unreliable and expensive, and that only nuclear can achieve sustainability goals of reduced emissions, material throughput, and land use.

As people ask, “How Bad Are Weather Disasters?”, not just for banks, but for all of us, the answer will increasingly come back, “Not very.”

Share

Todayville is a digital media and technology company. We profile unique stories and events in our community. Register and promote your community event for free.

Follow Author

2025 Federal Election

Canada Continues to Miss LNG Opportunities: Why the World Needs Our LNG – and We’re Not Ready

Published on

From EnergyNow.Ca

By Katarzyna (Kasha) Piquette, Founder and CEO, Canadian Energy Ventures

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Europe’s energy system was thrown into chaos. Much of the 150 billion cubic meters of Russian gas that once flowed through pipelines had to be replaced—fast. Europe turned to every alternative it could find: restarting coal and nuclear plants, accelerating wind and solar approvals, and most notably, launching a historic buildout of LNG import capacity.

Today, LNG terminals are built around the world. The ‘business case’ is solid. The ships are sailing. The demand is real. But where is Canada?

As of March 28, 2025, natural gas prices tell a story of extreme imbalance. While Europe and Asia are paying around $13 per million BTU, prices at Alberta’s AECO hub remain below $2.20 CAD per gigajoule—a fraction of global market levels. This is more than a pricing mismatch. It’s a signal that Canada, a country rich in natural gas and global goodwill, is failing to connect the dots between energy security abroad and economic opportunity at home.

Since 2022, Europe has added over 80 billion cubic meters of LNG import capacity, with another 80 billion planned by 2030. This infrastructure didn’t appear overnight. It came from urgency, unity, and massive investment. And while Europe was preparing to receive, Canada has yet to build at scale to supply.

We have the resource. We have the relationships. What we lack is the infrastructure.

Estimates suggest that $55 to $75 billion in investment is needed to scale Canadian LNG capacity to match our potential as a global supplier. That includes pipelines, liquefaction terminals, and export facilities on both coasts. These aren’t just economic assets—they’re tools of diplomacy, climate alignment, and Indigenous partnership. A portion of this investment can and should be met through public-private partnerships, leveraging government policy and capital alongside private sector innovation and capacity.

Meanwhile, Germany continues to grapple with the complexities of energy dependence. In January 2025, German authorities seized the Panama-flagged tanker Eventin, suspected of being part of Russia’s “shadow fleet” used to circumvent oil sanctions. The vessel, carrying approximately 100,000 tons of Russian crude oil valued at €40 million, was found adrift off the Baltic Sea island of Rügen and subsequently detained. This incident underscores the ongoing challenges Europe faces in enforcing energy sanctions and highlights the pressing need for reliable, alternative energy sources like Canadian LNG.

What is often left out of the broader energy conversation is the staggering environmental cost of the war itself. According to the Initiative on GHG Accounting of War, the war in Ukraine has produced over 230 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent (MtCO₂e) since 2022—a volume comparable to the combined annual emissions of Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. These emissions come from military operations, destruction of infrastructure, fires, and the energy used to rebuild and support displaced populations. Yet these emissions are largely absent from official climate accounting, exposing a major blind spot in how we track and mitigate global emissions.

This is not just about dollars and molecules. This is about vision. Canada has an opportunity to offer democratic, transparent, and lower-emission energy to a world in flux. Canadian LNG can displace coal in Asia, reduce reliance on authoritarian suppliers in Europe, and provide real returns to our provinces and Indigenous communities. There is also growing potential for strategic energy cooperation between Canada, Poland, and Ukraine—linking Canadian LNG supply with European infrastructure and Ukrainian resilience, creating a transatlantic corridor for secure and democratic energy flows.

Moreover, LNG presents Canada with a concrete path to diversify its trade relationships, reducing overdependence on the U.S. market by opening new, high-value markets in Europe and Asia. This kind of energy diplomacy would not only strengthen Canada’s strategic position globally but also generate fiscal capacity to invest in national priorities—including increased defense spending to meet our NATO commitments.

Let’s be clear: LNG is not the endgame. Significant resources are being dedicated to building out nuclear capacity—particularly through Small Modular Reactors (SMRs)—alongside the rapid expansion of renewables and energy storage. But in the near term, LNG remains a vital bridge, especially when it’s sourced from a country committed to environmental responsibility, human rights, and the rule of law.

We are standing at the edge of a global shift. If we don’t step up, others will step in. The infrastructure gap is closing—but not in our favor.

Canada holds the key. The world is knocking. It’s time we opened the door.


Sources:

  • Natural Gas Prices by Region (March 28, 2025): Reuters
  • European LNG Import Capacity Additions: European Commission
  • German Seizure of Russian Shadow Fleet Tanker: Reuters
  • War Emissions Estimate (230 MtCO₂e): Planetary Security Initiative
Continue Reading

Energy

Trump Takes More Action To Get Government Out Of LNG’s Way

Published on

 

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By David Blackmon

The Trump administration moved this week to eliminate another Biden-era artificial roadblock to energy infrastructure development which is both unneeded and counterproductive to U.S. energy security.

In April 2023, Biden’s Department of Energy, under the hyper-politicized leadership of Secretary Jennifer Granholm, implemented a new policy requiring LNG projects to begin exports within seven years of receiving federal approval. Granholm somewhat hilariously claimed the policy was aimed at ensuring timely development and aligning with climate goals by preventing indefinite delays in energy projects that could impact emissions targets.

This claim was rendered incredibly specious just 8 months later, when Granholm aligned with then-President Joe Biden’s “pause” in permitting for new LNG projects due to absurd fears such exports might actually create higher emissions than coal-fired power plants. The draft study that served as the basis for the pause was thoroughly debunked within a few months, yet Granholm and the White House steadfastly maintained their ruse for a full year until Donald Trump took office on Jan. 20 and reversed Biden’s order.

Certainly, any company involved in the development of a major LNG export project wants to proceed to first cargoes as expeditiously as possible. After all, the sooner a project starts generating revenues, the more rapid the payout becomes, and the higher the returns on investments. That’s the whole goal of entering this high-growth industry. Just as obviously, unforeseen delays in the development process can lead to big cost overruns that are the bane of any major infrastructure project.

On the other hand, these are highly complex, capital-intensive projects that are subject to all sorts of delay factors. As developers experienced in recent years, disruptions in supply chains caused by factors related to the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in major delays and cost overruns in projects in every facet of the economy.

Developers in the LNG industry have argued that this arbitrary timeline was too restrictive, citing these and other factors that can extend beyond seven years. Trump, responding to these concerns and his campaign promises to bolster American energy dominance, moved swiftly to eliminate this requirement. On Tuesday, Reuters reported that the U.S. was set to rescind this policy, freeing LNG projects from the rigid timeline and potentially accelerating their completion.

This policy reversal could signal a broader approach to infrastructure under Trump. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, enacted in 2021, allocated $1.2 trillion to rebuild roads, bridges, broadband and other critical systems, with funds intended to be awarded over five years, though some projects naturally extend beyond that due to construction timelines. The seven-year LNG deadline was a specific energy-related constraint, but Trump’s administration has shown a willingness to pause or redirect Biden-era infrastructure funding more generally. For instance, Trump’s Jan.20 executive order, “Unleashing American Energy,” directed agencies to halt disbursements under the IIJA and IRA pending a 90-day review, raising questions about whether similar time-bound restrictions across infrastructure sectors might also be loosened or eliminated.

Critics argue that scrapping deadlines risks stalling projects indefinitely, undermining the urgency Biden sought to instill in modernizing U.S. infrastructure. Supporters argue that developers already have every profit-motivated incentive to proceed as rapidly as possible and see the elimination of this restriction as a pragmatic adjustment, allowing flexibility for states and private entities to navigate permitting, labor shortages and supply chain issues—challenges that have persisted into 2025.

For example, the $294 billion in unawarded IIJA funds, including $87.2 billion in competitive grants, now fall under Trump’s purview, and his more energy-focused administration could prioritize projects aligned with his energy and economic goals over Biden’s climate and DEI-focused initiatives.

Ultimately, Trump’s decision to end the seven-year LNG deadline exemplifies his intent to reshape infrastructure policy by prioritizing speed, flexibility and industry needs. Whether this extends formally to all U.S. infrastructure projects remains unclear, but seems likely given the Trump White House’s stated objectives and priorities.

This move also clearly aligns with the overall Trump philosophy of getting the government out of the way, allowing the markets to work and freeing the business community to restore American Energy Dominance in the most expeditious way possible.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

Continue Reading

Trending

X