Lending

Adding up lending and underwriting from 33 global banks to the fossil fuel industry as a whole reveals stark findings: Canadian, Chinese, European, Japanese, and U.S. banks have financed fossil fuels with $1.9 trillion since the Paris Agreement was adopted (2016 to 2018), with financing on the rise each year. Fossil fuel financing is dominated by the big U.S. banks, with JPMorgan Chase as the world’s top funder of fossil fuels by a wide margin.

In 2013, the U.S. federal and state governments gave away $21.6 billion in subsidies for oil, gas, and coal exploration and production.

Administered by the Department of Energy (DOE), the loan guarantee program encourages private investment in nuclear energy by lowering the cost of borrowing and possibly increasing the availability of credit for project sponsors—usually an individual utility, a consortium of utilities, or a merchant power producer. In exchange for providing a loan guarantee, DOE is authorized to charge sponsors a fee that is meant to recover the guarantee's estimated budgetary cost.