Net growth via more coal power

From December 2024 up to this month, many big global banks have left and abandoned the Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) formed in 2021.

- Bienvenido S. Oplas Jr.

They realized that they are not optimizing their resources entrusted to them by their investors. So far, these are the big banks that left the NZBA.

Six from the US: Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo.

Six from Canada: Bank of Montreal, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, National Bank of Canada, Royal Bank of Canada, Scotia Bank, and Toronto Dominion Bank.

Three from Japan: Mitsubishi UFJ, Nomura, and Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group. And one from Australia, Macquarie.

The world's largest asset manager, BlackRock, also abandoned NZBA sister group, the Alliance for Net Zero.

This means that those big banks that minimized, if not avoided, lending to fossil fuel projects like coal plants may start or already started lending again to these projects. Good.

For a number of big economies in the world, expansion or shrinking of their coal power generation is among the major factors why their economies grow fast or crawl and contract.

I checked six countries' coal power generation over four decadal periods then compared with their average GDP growth rate over the same period. My sources are: annual power generation from Energy Institute's Statistical Review of World Energy 2024, and annual GDP growth from IMF World Economic Outlook 2024. Averages are my computations.

The countries are the three industrialized—US, UK, and Germany—and three big Asian economies—China, India, and Vietnam. Here are the numbers.

(A) Coal power generation average growth, and (B) GDP average growth, 1986-1995, 1996-2005, 2006-2015, and 2016-2023, all units in percent: