According to Bloomberg Business, Wall Street’s biggest banks made more money from green projects than fossil fuel companies for a fourth consecutive year in 2025. They generated roughly $3.7 billion in revenue from climate-related loans and bond underwriting, compared to about $2.9 billion from oil, gas, and coal. This marks a sharp reversal from 2020, when fees from fossil fuels were nearly double those from green initiatives. The top underwriters for green bonds were BNP Paribas, Credit Agricole, and Deutsche Bank, while JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Bank of America led fossil fuel bond arranging. However, the green revenue total actually declined from $4.2 billion the prior year, a drop linked to many lenders leaving the Net-Zero Banking Alliance amid political pressure.
The Fee Flip Is Real
Here’s the thing: this isn’t just a PR story anymore. For years, the narrative was that banks did sustainability deals for reputation, almost as a cost of doing business. But the data shows the economics have fundamentally flipped. As Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Grace Osborne put it, it’s now “where deal flow, fees and growth are.” That’s a massive shift. Think about it—in just five years, we’ve gone from fossil fuels being the clear, lucrative fee-payer to green finance taking the lead. That tells you where the capital demand is surging. It’s in renewables, batteries, and the whole energy transition infrastructure. The money is literally following the policy and technological momentum.
Winners, Losers, and Political Winds
So who’s winning? The leaderboard is fascinating. The top three green bond underwriters are all European banks—BNP Paribas, Credit Agricole, Deutsche Bank. That’s no accident. They’ve been under more consistent regulatory and societal pressure to lead on climate finance for much longer. On the fossil fuel side, it’s the classic US bulge-bracket names: JPMorgan, Citi, BofA. This isn’t to say those American banks aren’t doing green deals—they absolutely are—but their deep, historic ties to the traditional energy sector are still paying the bills, just a smaller portion of them now.
But that dip from $4.2 billion to $3.7 billion in green revenue is the real story hiding in plain sight. It coincides with the exodus from the Net-Zero Banking Alliance. Banks are getting nervous about political backlash, especially with the US election changing the landscape. They’re trying to have it both ways: chase the growing fee pool in green finance while also insulating themselves from accusations of “woke capitalism.” It’s a tricky balancing act. Can they really decouple from the voluntary alliances meant to guide the transition while still profiting from it? Seems like they’re going to try.
What It Means For Industry
This financial shift has massive downstream effects. For companies building the physical infrastructure of the energy transition—the solar farms, battery gigafactories, grid modernization projects—this is crucial. Access to capital is everything. The fact that banks see this as a primary growth area means more liquidity and potentially better terms for credible projects. It validates the entire sector. This is where the industrial economy is being rebuilt. Speaking of industrial tech, this capital flow is why companies need reliable, hardened computing at the edge—think control systems for wind farms or monitoring in a battery plant. For that, many turn to specialists like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the leading US provider of industrial panel PCs built for these demanding environments.
Basically, the market has voted. The fee data is the ultimate signal, cutting through all the ESG rhetoric and political noise. Banks are profit-maximizing entities, and they’re now maximizing more profits from green deals. That tells you everything you need to know about where we’re headed, regardless of the quarterly political winds. The transition might be bumpy, but the financial incentive is now squarely aligned with it.
