Balancing grief and hope amidst corporate climate finance backslides in 2025.

If 2024 was the year of the corporate greenwash, 2025 was the year of balancing grief and hope amidst corporate backslides, backroom deals, and unlikely victories.

While intensifying unnatural disasters – fires, floods, deadly heat, drought and smoke – become the “new abnormal,” right-wing authoritarians are attempting to stranglehold democracies around the world. Meanwhile, the majority of us are struggling to make ends meet.

Behind closed doors, corporations like fossil fuel companies and major banks are cozying up to fascists, profiting off our pain, and publicly backtracking on climate commitments.

Despite the forces we’re up against, Stand.earth and our allies continued to rise shoulder-to-shoulder with Indigenous leaders, frontline communities, and workers to hold banks, retirement funds and investors accountable. Against the odds, we’re building a climate-safe economy where all of us can thrive.

As we look back on 2025 and toward the year ahead, we grieve for all we’ve lost, and fight for all that’s left to save.

In the words of activist and writer Rebecca Solnit, “The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything, and everything we can save is worth saving.”

Hope: Action as an Antidote to Despair 

Throughout 2025, we prioritized inspiring tactics and campaigning with creativity, solidarity and tenacity, from 500+ actors launching Retire Big Oil, to the Banks vs. the Amazon scorecard, to an LNG storymap connecting fossil fuel infrastructure fights across North America. Despite the odds, we achieved important victories from major global financiers, investors, and their backers.

• JPMorgan Chase quietly added restrictions to fossil fuel financing in the Amazon rainforest, a long-overdue step in the right direction, proving that our pressure works. 
• In one of the biggest divestment announcements to date, 62 faith institutions announced fossil fuel divestment commitments during COP30, demonstrating strong moral leadership on climate.
• Oregon passed critical legislation to align its pensions with a climate-safe future, thanks to bold campaigning from Divest Oregon, our Climate Safe Pensions Network, Stand.earth, and allies.
• French Bank BNP Paribas confirmed that they will not finance the Galveston LNG Bunker Port project in Texas, after Stand.earth and allies alerted them to the significant risks associated with the project.
• A major music festival in Spain cut ties with Santander, a top Amazon oil and gas financier, following bold pressure and engagement from Stand.earth alongside Spanish and international organizations.
• Following the release of a major report last year, First, Do No Harm – the healthcare fossil fuel divestment campaign – launched a new website and tool for health workers to demand an end to the sector’s fossil fuel financing.

Grief: The Odds Seem Stacked Against Us

2025 has given the world a lot to despair: the rise of authoritarian governments, attacks on our immigrant and LGBTQ+ neighbors, devastating war and genocide around the world—all while most of us are struggling against ever-rising costs of living. It’s no surprise that our work to move money out of fossil fuels and into our climate-safe future has been affected, too.

• 2025 kicked-off with a groundbreaking exposé from The Examination, The Associated Press, Toronto Star, and Mississippi Today revealing how banks give billions to major polluters, and label it “sustainable.”
• As the Trump regime took over, the once-celebrated Net Zero Banking Alliance began to unravel, affirming that only government regulation – not voluntary commitments – will truly transform the financial sector’s climate commitments. 
• In February, Wells Fargo became the largest bank to abandon its commitment to reach Net-Zero financed emissions by 2050, in an egregious and cowardly move. 
• In July, Calcasieu Pass 2 (CP2) LNG’s developer moved ahead with the project in Southwest Louisiana despite fierce local opposition, after receiving financing from banks including Wells Fargo, JPMorgan, Royal Bank of Canada, and more. 
• Canadian PM Mark Carney named two massive LNG carbon bombs (LNG Canada Phase and Ksi Lisims LNG) as “projects of national significance.” Gitanyow Hereditary Chiefs, with our support, responded with a massively endorsed letter calling for financial institutions to not finance Ksi Lisims for violating their rights. 

We’re in the business of taking on the world’s largest financiers and investors. The odds have always been stacked against us, and that hasn’t stopped us from fighting — or winning.

Now, we’re closing out 2025 with a World Inequality Report revealing just 0.001% of the world’s population holds three times the wealth of the poorest half of humanity. It’s never been more clear: now is the time for workers to come together across our differences to take on this rising inequality and rigged system, and hold accountable the billionaires and executives profiting off climate chaos. 

This year, we’ve held space for big grief and rage, alongside real progress and reasons for hope. Our antidote to despair will always be action. It’s the only way to build the more just, thriving world we need. 2025 has shown us that even when the odds seem long, tenacity, solidarity, and creativity still gets the goods. 

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2025: Stand.earth Climate Finance Month-by-Month 

JANUARY

• 2025 kicked-off with a groundbreaking exposé from The Examination, The Associated Press, Toronto Star, and Mississippi Today on banks giving billions to major polluters, and labeling it “sustainable.”
• True to the accountability spirit, Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) released its annual Energy Supply Ratio report, revealing North American banks continue to vastly underfinance low carbon energy.
• As the Trump regime took over, the once-celebrated Net Zero Banking Alliance began to unravel, affirming that only government regulation – not voluntary commitments – will bring true transformation to the financial sector’s climate commitments. 

FEBRUARY

• The second annual report from Stand.earth and Sierra Club – The Hidden Risk in State Pensions – exposed how U.S. state pensions are failing to act on the climate crisis through their proxy voting decisions.

MARCH

• On International Women’s Day, Stand.earth joined Indigenous Amazonia leaders, WeMove, and Eko to urge Santander’s Global Head of Responsible Banking, Lara de Mesa, to use her leadership to stop financing the destruction of the Amazon. 

APRIL 

• Following last year’s major report release, First, Do No Harm – the healthcare fossil fuel divestment campaign – launched a new website and tool for health workers to end the sector’s fossil fuel financing. 
• For the fourth year in a row, an Indigenous-led delegation attended the RBC’s shareholder meeting, warning of the risks of financing new LNG projects that may be unprofitable before they are even built. 

MAY

• We stood with movement partners and grassroots groups to keep up climate accountability at major fossil bank shareholder meetings, including Citi, Wells Fargo, and JPMorgan Chase. 
• Shoulder-to-shoulder with New York City allies, we submitted testimony to the NYC Banking Commission urging them to vote against dirty fossil fuel financing banks as Designated Banks.
• Connecting the dots between LNG tankers and marine shipping, we endorsed Solutions for Our Climate (SFOC)’s new report – “No Room for More: Why LNG Carriers Are a Climate and Financial Risk” – on how LNG tankers enable catastrophic pollution.

JUNE

• Over 500 members of the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) union launched the Retire Big Oil campaign, calling on the $4 billion SAG-Producers Pension Plan to phase out coal, oil, and gas holdings.
• In a major win to greening festivals and ending fossil bank sponsorship, after months of conversations with music festival Primavera Sound, Banco Santander Foundation is no longer a sponsor of the festival.
• After 42 groups sent letters urging financial institutions to not finance the Galveston LNG Bunker Port (GLBP) in Shoal Point, Texas, BNP Paribas confirmed they will not finance the project!

JULY

• We celebrated a win from Divest Oregon where the state legislature passed the  Treasury’s “Net Zero” Bill to align the Public Employee Retirement System’s (PERS’) investment strategies with climate goals that uphold fiduciary duties.
• Rosario Dawson, actor and member of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), shared her personal Retire Big Oil story calling on SAG to divest from fossil fuels. 

AUGUST

• It’s official: the Net-Zero Banking Alliance is dead. Cause of death: profit and greed.

SEPTEMBER 

• Responding to challenges facing youth organizers, we piloted a Youth Climate Finance Fellowship to place organizers with movement partners to grow key skills and provide support.
• Stand Executive Director Todd Paglia joined celebrities and SAG-AFTRA members at a panel at Climate Week NYC discussing the impact and momentum behind the Retire Big Oil campaign.
• Ten years after Mark Carney’s ‘Tragedy of the Horizon’ speech, we responded to new analysis from InfluenceMap’s FinanceMap that the Big Five Canadian banks are still failing to consider ‘transition risk.’
• We endorsed a report from Reclaim Finance – Banking on Business as Usual – finding that big banks provided over twice the financing for fossil fuels as for sustainable alternatives between 2021-2024.

OCTOBER 

• Ahead of COP30, we released the groundbreaking Banks vs. the Amazon database and scorecard showing that banks added $2 billion of direct financing for destructive Amazon oil and gas since the beginning of 2024. To reach audiences around the world, we published findings in English, Spanish & Portuguese 
• While fossil fuel executives peddle poisonous LNG as a solution, we are building out resources to connect community fights across North America, as well as spotlighting dirty financiers bankrolling these toxic and unnecessary projects to challenge the big LNG lie.

LNG: Poison pollution peddled as solution

NOVEMBER

• Stand.earth co-hosted a webinar on Investing Your Retirement Plan in a Climate-Safe Future where experts shared different aspects of climate-safe investing and tips to take action for a climate-safe economy.
• We teamed up with Wells Fargo Workers United and Stop the Money Pipeline to explore the power of labor and climate movements uniting, and the “magical reality that happens when talking to people about the power they already have to impact a corporation and the world.”
• Alongside our colleagues defending forests, the Climate Finance team brought our message to COP30 in Brazil, from speaking about the foreign money behind fossil fuel expansion in the Amazon, to celebrating 60+ new faith institution fossil fuel divestment commitments, to acknowledging JPMorgan Chase’s Amazonia policy update in English, Spanish & Portuguese.

DECEMBER

• Ahead of an anticipated Final Investment Decision (FID) in 2026, Gitanyow Hereditary Chiefs sent a letter to 43 banks and pension funds to respect Gitanyow rights, and urge against financing for the proposed Ksi Lisims LNG project or its developers, which PM Carney recently designated a “Project of National Interest.”
• Thanks to relentless community organizing, NYC Comptroller Brad Lander recommended the pension funds to move $42 billion away from climate criminal BlackRock. Unfortunately, the final decision will be punted to 2026 for the next Comptroller and Mayor.