Oil, gas, and coal investment from Wall Street’s six biggest banks was down 25% over the first seven months of this year compared to the same period in 2024, but not enough to offset larger increases in their financing the previous year.

While the big banks’ new fossil investment this year stood at US$73 billion through August 1, it still added up to a reduction that “coincides with what JPMorgan analysts say looks to be the first decline in global upstream oil and gas development spending since 2020,” Bloomberg reports. “Trump’s anti-climate and pro-fossil fuel policies have piled pressure on US banks and asset managers to publicly toe the line of the White House’s energy agenda. Yet behind the scenes, the data paint a more nuanced picture.”

Reductions from individual banks ranged from 54% at Morgan Stanley to just 7% by JPMorgan Chase, Bloomberg says.

“Wells Fargo & Co., which has gone further than its peers in walking back net zero goals, provided $19.1 billion in fossil fuel loans and bonds in the first seven months of the year,” the news story states. “That’s more than any other bank, but still down 17% from the same period last year, the Bloomberg data show.”

But the reduction wasn’t enough to outweigh dramatic increases in the same banks’ fossil fuel spending between 2023 and 2024, said Dianne Enriquez, climate and energy campaign director at the Rainforest Action Network, one of the organizations behind the annual Banking on Climate Chaos investment report. “Banking on Climate Chaos found that these large U.S. banks increased their fossil fuel investments in 2024 from 2023 by quite large percentages,” she told The Energy Mix in an email: Goldman Sachs by 50.26%, Citigroup by 49.88%, JPMorgan Chase by 39.03%, Morgan Stanley by 38.81%., Bank of America by 38.22%, and Wells Fargo by 30.16%.

From the limited public data available in the news report, it’s also hard to tell whether this year’s drop in investment spanned all the activities in fossil fuel production, Enriquez wrote. The reported reduction would be a lot less significant if it applied only to “upstream” exploration and development—not to fossil fuel transport, storage, or processing, or to the actual use of the end product that accounts for about 80% of the emissions in a barrel of oil.

“Oil and gas markets are volatile, and banks tend to be passive actors when it suits them, when they could be more active in taking decisive climate action aligned with science—for example, prudent moves to reduce the $38 trillion of climate risk in our markets,” she said.

BloombergNEF analyst Miquel Kishimoto Guardiola said the shift in lending activity is a better measure of the banks’ “meaningful energy transition impact” than the largely rhetorical net-zero commitments they’ve been walking back.

The 2023 edition of Banking on Climate Chaos identified the Royal Bank of Canada as the world’s biggest fossil fuel financier in 2022, with more than US$42 billion handed over to oil, gas, and coal projects, and the fifth-biggest between 2016 and 2021, the first six years after the Paris climate agreement was adopted.