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Lindsey Hall: I'm Lindsey Hall.

Esther Whieldon: And I'm Esther Whieldon.

Lindsey Hall: Welcome to All Things Sustainable. A podcast from S&P Global. As your hosts, we’ll dive into all the sustainability topics that are reshaping the business world.

Esther Whieldon: Join us every Friday for in-depth analysis and interviews with leaders from around the globe. Together, we’ll break down big sustainability headlines and cut through the jargon.

Lindsey Hall: February 14, 2025, mark the anniversary of when we launch the ESG Insider podcast in 2019. Since then we’ve released more than 250 episodes and just this week the show hit 2 million downloads. 

To mark these milestones and the evolution of ESG insider podcast last week we launched a new name: the All Things Sustainable podcast. Our new name reflects an idea we’ve heard repeatedly from guest over the past 6 seasons. That solutions to bake sustainability challenges like climate change, like nature and bio diversity lose or achieving adjusting equitable transition. Those require action from all sectors and all stake holders.

Esther Whieldon: Also since we launched this show has vastly expanded in scope. Also since we launched, this show has vastly expanded in scope. We now have listeners on 6 continents. We're covering some of the world's largest sustainability gatherings, and we're interviewing CEOs and leaders from all sectors. And with our new name, we're committed to continue covering All Things Sustainable.

Lindsey Hall: We celebrated with a live event in New York City on February 6, and you can hear highlights from that event in last week's special anniversary episode. We talked to an international standard setter, an asset manager and a big global technology company. We also talked with a sustainability leader from the largest bank in the U.S., JPMorgan Chase. JPMorgan has $4 trillion in assets as of the end of 2024. I sat down with Brian DiMarino to hear how the bank is navigating this landscape. Here are the highlights from our conversation.

Brian DiMarino: I am the Deputy Director of Sustainability for JPMorgan. What does that actually mean? It means that, in general, I'm responsible for pretty much everything that my manager is responsible as the Head of Sustainability, but I have very specific focus areas.

Those 2 are -- I'll call them 3 really, operational sustainability. So how does JPMorgan not as a bank, but as just a corporation that operates all over the world, mostly real estate and business travel, decarbonize its footprint. So how do we measure that? How do we reduce it? How do we address what we can't reduce. Broad strategy, so a lot of that's working with the businesses on how are they addressing this? What are their clients saying, how can we help?

What conversations can we get involved in to support them along with the targets that we have and helping them support those targets. We have 8 sector targets for high-intense sectors. We also have an energy mix target, and we have a $2.5 trillion sustainable development target.

So we help the businesses work through those. And then the third piece is external engagement. So how do we talk to our stakeholders outside of the firm, not just our clients, but how do we talk to the NGO community, governments, things like that, regulators, what's on their mind and how do we help sort of marry the conversation across that universe.

Lindsey Hall: As the largest bank in the U.S., JPMorgan is often seen as a bellwether indicating where the financial industry is heading on a given topic. I ask Brian, how the bank's approach to sustainability is changing in 2025?

Brian DiMarino: It's not really changing at all, right? Like our focus on sustainability is steadfast, the same as it was last year, the year before and the year before that. We continue to work through these sector targets.

They're very complicated. We don't have a lot of control over what every one of these sectors does. So it's a lot about partnering with clients, helping them address their issues, trying to find ways to finance and facilitate the things that they need to do to decarbonize. But those things are hard, right? We've -- by definition, in almost every version of a reporting scheme or a focus to decarbonize, there's been an identification that there is a technology gap between where we are and where we need to be.

And so we need to find ways to get those technologies like from R&D to on the shelf to deployed in the market. And I think that's been one of the big struggles is the most interesting thing to me anyway about the challenge of climate is that it is seeded in a very real understanding of thermodynamics, organic chemistry and like logic.

Like we sort of understand the issue now and how we need to go about solving it. And the majority, I think, of the technologies you probably need have been identified somewhere in some university lab, and we just need to find a way to get those things scaled up and get them moving. And that's really the hard part. So we're continuing to do everything that we've done in the past. We continue to grow teams that focus on these topics. We continue to address client concerns and issues on these topics, but it is a very complex space, and it's growing every day.

Lindsey Hall: You used the term technology gap, and we hear a lot of talk on the podcast about the finance gap, the climate finance gap, but less so about this technology gap. Can you just tell me a little bit more about where do you see that gap?

Brian DiMarino: Yes. Again, I don't think it's that we don't have an understanding of what we need to solve. I think it's about getting these technologies down the cost curve to become cost competitive with whatever their counterpart might be, whether it's in the energy space or the carbon capture space or the built environment or travel or whatever it might be, right? You have to get those things down the cost curve or there's always an economic disincentive for a company to adopt that option, right? And I think this is one of the greatest challenges of the climate era that we're living in.

It is voluntary for the most part. And so we need to recognize that on a voluntary basis, corporations and the capital society make decisions on economics. And so finding ways to draw business cases that actually make a ton of sense for companies is what I think will get us there. So again, I think the technology is very much where we exist and are understood. It's about getting them actually available to us at a price that is reasonable for people to start adopting.

Lindsey Hall: I wanted to understand how JPMorgan's clients are reacting to the changing landscape for sustainability. So I asked Brian about the questions he's hearing?

Brian DiMarino: What we're hearing from clients is how do I get involved? What are you guys doing as a company? I'm hearing about this carbon capture technology. What is that about? We heard you guys bought some of this stuff.

How do we buy? Like we're getting a lot of that pent-up interest. I think the thing we're learning is that people are still learning. When you're in this world, whether by job or investment or whatever, you start to really understand it and get through the technicalities of it and come up the curve pretty quick. If you don't involve yourself in it on a day-to-day basis, you don't really understand it. And so we tend to live in this echo chamber by accident, where we talk at conferences or we talk with partners and we sort of all understand what's going on.

But when you get to that 2 or 3 concentric circles away from that space, you start to understand there's a massive learning curve that we need to find a way to focus on. So one of the things that I want to spend a lot of my time on this year is how do we develop really cool, interesting thought pieces for clients so they can start understanding this stuff. I think our internal expertise has grown exponentially in the past 5, 10 years, but I really think we need to now start pushing that out to our client base.

Lindsey Hall: It's a really interesting idea, this idea of your silo, your echo chamber, something we try to address on the podcast, but it's a challenge. How do you make sure that you're not just preaching to the choir?

Brian DiMarino: I learned a long time ago this idea that there's no such thing as problems only opportunities. And so one of the things I am actually very excited about in the current world, which I think has created a ton of sort of pessimism and just like uncomfortableness around climate is there is a moment now for private institutions to step up and be the bellwether, as you described through whatever number of years we need to get through until I think the political landscape shifts hopefully, the consumer landscape shifts and we start to see more of that virtue signaling coming through policy.

But in the meantime, I think corporations, exactly like you asked, what has changed? Nothing is changing for us, right? I think for most corporations that have already leaned into this space, they're continuing to do this stuff. We're not doing it because any political wins have shifted. We're doing it because it's something that we truly believe internally is the right thing to do, and then we get to turn ourselves outward and work on that every day.

Lindsey Hall: One thing we talk about at S&P Global is the fact that, I mean, climate change is accelerating indifferent to politics. It is happening. And also the energy transition we're seeing at advance, although somewhat unevenly. How is JPMorgan thinking about its own climate strategy in this landscape?

Brian DiMarino: Yes. I think for one, we focus a lot on the numbers and we should, right? So to your point, you can talk about whatever you're hearing in the headlines and the news. But if you focus on the numbers, they're actually not that negative, right?

Battery capacity went up something like 76% like that. EV adoption went up 26% last year. Solar installations went up 35% last year. Even wind is growing at a pretty positive pace, I think it's in the single digits. But these economies are growing. And so as a financial institution, I think we tend to get this look when you're a big bank or any bank and say, like, why aren't you investing more in this stuff?

We should sort of need to like take that step back and understand what is the role of different investors across the sort of life cycle of any company from start-up to large publicly traded corporation. And that is why we have everything from Angel investors and seed investing to VCs and hedge funds and private equity. And then you get into this big bank world of like debt and equity type investing and stuff like that.

But the truth of the matter is that what JPMorgan is preparing itself for is as these companies start to sort of break into that like needing that type of project capital, TopCo equity, that kind of stuff that we can actually start to bring them into the fold into this larger ecosystem.

And we need to really just get the wheels turning on the financial landscape and getting these technologies moving and not worrying about what we're hearing around them. There is already progress. There is momentum. I think our greatest opportunity is to just like ride that wave and not get caught looking at it from a distance. This is happening, and it's going to be great for all the people that start financing it.

Lindsey Hall: I also asked Brian to elaborate on the bank's own decarbonization strategy. In January 2025, JPMorgan said it was leaving the Net-Zero Banking Alliance. This is a UN convened group of global banks committed to aligning their lending, investment and capital markets activities with net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

A quick bit of inside baseball here. The Net-Zero Banking Alliance launched in 2021 as the banking component of the broader Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero or GFANZ. There are multiple financial subsector alliances that sit under GFANZ, and these alliances have seen some big changes in recent months.

For example, in January 2025, BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, exited the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative. That initiative then launched a review to ensure it remains fit for purpose. When JPMorgan left the Net-Zero Banking Alliance earlier this year, it joined several other large banks that had already exited, including Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. I ask Brian if this decision to exit the alliance changes things for JPMorgan?

Brian DiMarino: No, nothing changes, right? I think we join those things because they already are aligned with our decisions and how we're operating. And so we continue to press forward. We continue to do what we're doing. We continue to work towards our targets. We continue to work with our clients. None of that has changed. As far as like JPMorgan and its decarbonization work, it's something that I've been super excited and proud to be a part of. About 4.5, 5 years ago, I stood up operational sustainability at JPMorgan.

It wasn't to say there wasn't already work happening at the firm, but it was sort of in pockets. And the goal of operational sustainability was to bring it together, create a strategy, start working at various senior levels to advance that portfolio. And so the first step was measurement. So we followed the greenhouse gas protocol, obviously, and we measured our emissions, and we said, okay, where can we focus. And we started to develop decarbonization strategy at some of our largest sites. We've got on-site solar all over the place.

We've upgraded multiple buildings to reduce our emissions there. We've done a whole bunch of branch portfolio stuff. So keep in mind, we're not just JPMorgan, we're Chase, right? So we've got 5,000 branches. We operate in every one of the 48 lower states. So we've got solar arrays on a lot of those. We're working on super interesting investments in the built environment at that small scale, so like what type of materials we can be using, new installation, new building systems, AI-driven building management systems, all that kind of cool stuff.

So we continue to do that. What is always a challenge is this idea of zero. And so getting to like true zero is so hard, and I would hate to use the I word, but it's sort of impossible today. And so what we've been very focused on is how do we build a high-quality portfolio of carbon removal to address unabated emissions.

Even when we're on the track to reduce our emissions. If we go install a solar array at a campus, that might be a significant capital investment, and that's great that we're going to go do it. It might take us 5 years to go from approval to completed project. So in those 5 years, you're still emitting. And so we're constantly trying to build a strong portfolio of carbon removal. And so we do that through nature-based removal projects all the way up through engineered removal like direct air capture and biochar, stuff like that.

What I think is very cool is that we've moved this year into a very structured economic model on how we acquire that carbon removal. And so what we've done is we've created a model internally that we look at and we basically say across our scopes of emissions, we are willing to do different things in each scope because of the accountability we have, where it sits in our sort of value chain.

The direct impact we can have depending on what it is that we might be willing to spend a higher dollar per ton on a project or a power purchase agreement or carbon removal in that specific space.

And that has created this great business case for us to go out and really solution our portfolio, and it's been well received internally, which is great. As we developed it, there was very much a lot of head nodding like we like this. This is good. It helps us understand what you're doing. Because again, we're not just educating our clients and everyone else. But keep in mind, JPMorgan is a bank, right?

Like there are about 30 people at JPMorgan that do climate-related stuff every single day in the sustainability space. There are bankers that focus on this world, hundreds of them. But when you get up into like the executive ranks, this isn't what they're doing every day. They're running a bank. So for us to go sit in front of them, explain these models and have them say, we like that's really great, keep going. that's very helpful. So our strategy is, back to your original question, nothing has changed. We keep pressing forward.

Lindsey Hall: Okay. And you said already there are no challenges, only opportunities. So let me reframe my question here. What is the opportunity that you see in the landscape where we're having this pushback on things like ESG and DEI. Like how is JPMorgan approaching that, responding to that?

Brian DiMarino: We're not on an island, right? I think we do need to think hard about the connectivity between E, S and G and how we drive each one of those. They're not always interconnected. Sometimes they very much are. I do think it's a moment for rebrand of some of the language we've used, not because we're doing anything different just because sometimes people just need to hear it different.

Sometimes the branding changes, people's -- sometimes the thing they stop buying, they start buying again, and that's fine. But I think we need to be okay with the fact that there is a marketing angle to this stuff. We talk a lot about the word green. We have to green this or green that, and it's like get specific.

The word green doesn't actually mean anything specific. Let's get specific. So I think that's one we're going to stop using a lot. And I think ESG, again, you need to be more specific. So I think for us, what we're going to do and what I expect a lot of people to be doing in the next 12 to 18 months is really getting specific on what they're trying to get done and not use catch phrases so much.

Lindsey Hall: Well, that really resonates with me. We try really hard to avoid the jargon. The language matters.

Brian DiMarino: It really does.

Lindsey Hall: We just heard Brian talk about the language we use when we talk about sustainability. And this is something I think is on a lot of our listeners' minds this year. I ask Brian, what's your best advice to the sustainability professionals in our audience about how to navigate this changing landscape in 2025? Here's his reply.

Brian DiMarino: Science has told us what we need to do. Technology has told us we can do it, and economics will tell us whether it gets done or not. And so what I would say is you cannot take any one of those 3 things in a silo. They all have to live together. If you do things purely for economic reasons, we will never move. If you do things purely for scientific reasons, you will never succeed.

And so we have to find a way to play together in the sandbox, and that is what we are constantly focused on. Right now, one of the things I am spending more time on than I was in the past is not transition, but what are we going to do with new power, right? We need gigawatts and gigawatts of new power. Why don't we start making sure that is as low carbon as possible. It's not going to be zero carbon.

Let's be honest, but it’s possible, let's start making sure that we cycle these technologies and the research so that when we're ready to get back to transitioning the traditional assets, the business cases make a ton more sense because we've invested that money in that time. Like I think we need to find ways to drive this forward in a way that is just different than the way we've thought about it before. We're just going to keep getting stuck in the mud. It's the definition of insanity.

Lindsey Hall: To close out the interview, we also posed the question to Brian. How do we elevate climate literacy in the business sector to maximize sustainable impact at scale? And Esther, I really love this answer. You'll see why.

Brian DiMarino: One of the great values, I think, that JPMorgan can bring to this conversation is that we do have clients in every sector at every level of wealth from someone who just has a checking account all the way up to multinational companies. So one of our goals is to start creating more educational materials. Our clients do come to us for lots of information and lots of things. I think they're starting to figure out like where do they go for stuff around climate?

And they're asking us questions. We just don't have all the answers yet in the way that they want them. And so I think that for us is going to be a big goal. But you've got to start talking to -- you just have the conversations, be open and honest. And if you don't know stuff, but I think that's important. By the way, I just personally think that if we could start getting like Taylor Swift to talk about this stuff more, we would make like -- there's 100 million Swifties who now understand football just because Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce.

Lindsey Hall: So today, we heard how the biggest bank in the U.S. is approaching the changing landscape for sustainability. Brian said the science has told us what we need to do. Technology has told us we can do it and economics will tell us whether it gets done or not. He also noted you can't take any one of those 3 things in a silo. They all have to live together.

Esther Whieldon: Brian said that JPMorgan's focus on sustainability is steadfast. At the same time, he talked about the challenges of achieving true net zero. This contributed to the bank's decision to exit the Net-Zero Banking Alliance.

Lindsey Hall: And when I asked him how the bank is handling pushback on things like ESG, environmental, social and governance or DEI, diversity, equity and inclusion, he said, it's a moment for a rebrand of some of the language we've used. He said, this is “not because we're doing anything different just because sometimes people need to hear it different, sometimes the branding changes”.

Esther Whieldon: And I think we can expect more of this type of repositioning as 2025 progresses, changing the language to reach your audience more effectively and helping to bring the Taylor Swift effect to sustainability and climate issues. This is something we'll continue to cover in our interviews for this podcast. So please stay tuned.

Lindsey Hall: Okay. Esther new 2025 goal, get Taylor Swift as a guest on the All things Sustainable podcast.

Esther Whieldon: You know the Kelce Brothers have a podcast too. We should totally try to get them.

Lindsey Hall: Thanks for tuning in to this episode of All Things Sustainable. If you like what you heard, please subscribe, share and leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts. 

Esther Whieldon: And a special thanks to our agency partner, the 199. See you next time!  

Copyright ©2025 by S&P Global  

This piece was published by S&P Global Sustainable1, a part of S&P Global.     

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