No Bank Has Ever Had a Binding Climate Target

Watching the fires, the floods, the heat now killing people by the hundreds of thousands, I keep coming back to a question that feels simpler than the science and harder than it: how do we keep walking this path? We know, in precise and painful detail, what is happening and why — and we still can’t seem to change course. This isn’t a story about people failing to see the truth. It’s a story about a truth everyone can see, and a system that keeps moving anyway.

Banks have some of the best climate data in the world. They employ climate scientists. They publish detailed risk reports. Their own insurance arms are already pulling out of wildfire and flood zones because the risk is too high to price.

And yet, in 2025, the world’s 65 biggest banks put $906 billion into fossil fuel companies — 8 percent more than the year before, according to the 2026 Banking on Climate Chaos report. JPMorgan Chase alone provided $58 billion, up 12.6 percent, making it the single largest fossil fuel financier on Earth. Money for brand-new drilling and pipelines — not just existing projects — hit $508 billion, up 27 percent in one year, an all-time record. Since the Paris Agreement was signed a decade ago, the same 65 banks have channeled $8.7 trillion into oil, gas, and coal.

This isn’t banks failing to know. It’s banks knowing completely, and doing it anyway. That gap — full knowledge, unchanged behavior — is what the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan spent his career trying to explain. Translated into plain language, his framework fits finance almost too well, and it turns out to point at something very specific and fixable in how the Paris Agreement itself was written.