EU-regulated “green” funds are investing in some of the world’s biggest coal companies that are expanding their operations in contrast to a 2021 UN agreement for countries to reduce their use of the dirty fossil fuel.
European investors hold shares worth at least $65 million in major coal firms across China, India, the United States, Indonesia and South Africa within funds designated as “promoting environmental and social” goals under EU rules, an analysis by Climate Home and media partners found.
Taken together, these companies emit around 1,393 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere every year, putting them among the world’s top five polluters if they were a country.
The investments are owned by major financial firms including BlackRock, Goldman Sachs and Fideuram, a subsidiary of Italy’s largest bank Intesa Sanpaolo. Most firms analysed are signatories of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), whose members pledge to align their portfolios with climate-friendly investment.
The asset managers told Climate Home their coal holdings do not contradict EU green policies or the 2015 Paris Agreement to tackle climate change.
At the COP26 UN climate summit in Glasgow in 2021, countries agreed for the first time to accelerate efforts “towards the phase-down of unabated coal power”. “Unabated” means power produced using coal without any technology to capture, store or use the planet-heating CO2 emitted during the process.
But rather than shrinking, global coal capacity has grown since the signing of the Glasgow Climate Pact with a fleet of new coal plants firing up their boilers, primarily in China, India and Indonesia. Coal miners in those countries have also boosted their operations to keep up with the increasing demand.
European leaders have heavily opposed this, with EU president Ursula von der Leyen saying the bloc is “very worried” about coal expansion in China.
“Light green” funds
The investments analysed by Climate Home have been made by funds classified under Article 8 of the EU’s Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR), which the European Commission hoped would discourage greenwashing and promote sustainable investments when it was introduced in 2021.
Article 8 – known as ‘light green’ – refers broadly to a fund that has “environmental and social characteristics”, while the ‘dark green’ Article 9 refers more directly to sustainability.
The rules were also intended to offer members of the public more clarity on where asset managers invest their money and enable them to make an informed decision on whether they want their savings or pension pots to prop up climate-harming activities.
Workers shovel coal onto a truck at a coal yard near a coal mine in Huating, Gansu province, China. REUTERS/Thomas Peter
But a group of European financial market watchdogs warned this month the rules are having the opposite effect and called for an overhaul of the system.
“Status as ‘Article 8’ or ‘Article 9’ products have been used since the outset in marketing material as ‘quality labels’ for sustainability, consequently posing greenwashing and mis-selling risks,” they said in a joint opinion to the European Commission.
“The general public is still being misled when it comes to sustainable funds,” Lara Cuvelier, a sustainable investments campaigner at Reclaim Finance, told Climate Home. “The regulations are very weak and there is no clear criteria as to what can or cannot be included. It’s still in the hands of investors to decide that for themselves.”
Funding coal expansion
Climate Home identified investments in the biggest-polluting companies in the coal sector as part of a wider investigation led by Voxeurope, which tracked holdings by funds that disclose information under the EU’s sustainable finance directive.
These “green” funds include investments in mining companies like Coal India and China Shenhua – the respective countries’ top coal producers – and Indonesia’s Adaro Energy, as well as in giant coal power producers such as NTPC in India and China Resources Power Holdings.
All of these companies are planning large-scale expansions of their coal output, according to the influential Global Coal Exit List compiled by German NGO Urgewald.
No new coal mines, mine extensions or new unabated coal plants are needed if the world is to reach net zero emissions in the energy sector by 2050 and keep the 1.5C warming limit of the Paris Agreement “within reach”, according to projections by the International Energy Agency (IEA).
State-owned Coal India is the world’s largest coal producer, with fast-growing output topping 773 million tonnes in the latest financial year. It is targeting 1 billion tonnes of annual coal production by 2025-26 by opening new mines and expanding dozens of existing ones.
IEA calls for next national climate plans to target coal phase-down
In its latest annual report, Coal India cited “pressure of international bodies like [the] UN to comply with [the] Paris Agreement” as one of the main threats to its business. Coal India’s share value has more than doubled over the last 12 months on the back of stronger coal demand in the country, as extreme heatwaves have fuelled the use of air-conditioning among other factors.
State-run mining and energy giant China Shenhua plans to invest over $1 billion in 2024 to expand its fleet of coal power stations and build new coal mines. “We will keep a close eye on climate change to improve the clean and efficient use of coal,” its latest annual report said.
Big investors
The funds with stakes in those coal-heavy companies are managed by Fideuram, an arm of Italy’s largest bank Intesa Sanpaolo, US-based AllianceBernstein and Mercer, a subsidiary of the world’s largest insurance broker Marsh McLennan.
Coal investments in Fideuram’s Article 8 funds – worth at least $16 million – also appear to breach the company’s own coal exclusion policy, designed to rule out holding shares in certain coal firms.
Two of its flagship “emerging markets” funds claim to promote environmental and social characteristics including “climate change prevention” and the “reduction of carbon emissions”, according to information disclosed under EU rules. To achieve their ‘green’ objectives, the funds claim to exclude any investment in companies “deriving at least 25% of their revenues” from the extraction, production and distribution of electricity connected with coal.
But Climate Home found the funds include investments in at least six major coal companies exclusively or primarily involved in coal mining or power generation.
A coal-fired power plant under construction in Shenmu, Shaanxi province, China, in November 2023. REUTERS/Ella Cao
Fideuram did not answer Climate Home’s questions about the funds’ apparent breach of their own policy. But a company spokesperson said in a written statement that “investments in sectors with high-carbon emissions do not conflict with the objectives of the SFDR, which concern the transparency of sustainability investments, nor with the Paris Agreement, which promotes a transition to a low-carbon economy”.
A spokesperson for Mercer said its Article 8 fund, which holds shares in NTPC and China Resources Power Holdings. has an exclusion policy to avoid investing in companies that generate more than 1% of their revenue from thermal coal extraction. “Based on the data provided by ISS [a provider of environmental ratings], no groups involved breach the 1% threshold, and therefore, the fund is not in violation of its SFDR commitments,” they added.
AllianceBernstein did not respond to a request for comment.
Coal-hungry steelmaking
While excluding investments in so-called thermal coal used for electricity generation, several ‘green’ funds put their money in companies producing coking coal – or metallurgical (met) coal – which is used to make steel.
Goldman Sachs’ Article 8 funds hold shares worth several million dollars in Jastrzebska Spolka Weglowa, Europe’s largest coking coal producer, and Shanxi Meijin in China. BlackRock offers exchange-traded funds (ETFs) tracking indexes that include investments in SunCoke, a leading met coal producer in the US and Brazil, Alabama-based Warrior Met and Shanxi Meijin.
Reclaim Finance’s Cuvelier said that, up until recently, the focus has been on pushing thermal coal out of investor portfolios because the alternatives to met coal in steel production were “less developed”.
“There are now increasing calls on financial institutions to cover met coal as well in their exclusion policies as alternatives exist,” she added. “It’s becoming very important because there are new projects under development that should be avoided”.
A spokesperson for BlackRock said: “As a fiduciary, we are focused on providing our clients with choice to meet their investment objectives. Our fund prospectuses and supporting material provide transparency as to the methodology and investment objectives of each fund”.
Goldman Sachs did not reply to a request for comment.
Reforms on the horizon
At the end of 2022, the European Commission began a review of the SFDR’s application with a view to updating its sustainable finance rules.
Future reforms may include changes to the ways funds are categorised. “There are persistent concerns that the current market use of the SFDR as a labelling scheme might lead to risks of greenwashing… partly because the existing concepts and definitions in the regulation were not conceived for that purpose,” the Commission said in a consultation paper released last year.
It also indicated that the existing categories under Articles 8 and 9 could either be better defined or scrapped entirely and replaced with a different system. The new Commission, yet to be formed following last month’s elections, will decide if and how to move forward with the reform process.
Lithium tug of war: the US-China rivalry for Argentina’s white gold
Separately, the EU’s market supervisory authority, ESMA, has recently issued guidelines to prevent funds from misusing words like “sustainability”, “ESG” – environmental, social and governance – or “Paris-aligned” in their names. A handful of the funds with coal investments analysed by Climate Home have used those labels.
Under the new guidelines, asset managers wanting to slap climate-friendly labels on their funds will have to exclude companies that derive more than a certain percentage of revenues from fossil fuels.
Climate Home produced this article with data analysis contributions from Stefano Valentino (Bertha Fellow 2024) and Giorgio Michalopoulos. This article is part of an investigation coordinated by Voxeurop and European Investigative Collaborations with the support of the Bertha Challenge fellowship.
(Reporting by Matteo Civillini; additional reporting by Sebastián Rodríguez; editing by Sebastián Rodríguez, Megan Rowling and Joe Lo)
The post EU “green” funds invest millions in expanding coal giants in China, India appeared first on Climate Home News.
EU “green” funds invest millions in expanding coal giants in China, India
Climate Change
Cheniere Energy Received $370 Million IRS Windfall for Using LNG as ‘Alternative’ Fuel
The country’s largest exporter of liquefied natural gas benefited from what critics say is a questionable IRS interpretation of tax credits.
Cheniere Energy, the largest producer and exporter of U.S. liquefied natural gas, received $370 million from the IRS in the first quarter of 2026, a payout that shipping experts, tax specialists and a U.S. senator say the company never should have received.
Cheniere Energy Received $370 Million IRS Windfall for Using LNG as ‘Alternative’ Fuel
Climate Change
DeBriefed 27 February 2026: Trump’s fossil-fuel talk | Modi-Lula rare-earth pact | Is there a UK ‘greenlash’?
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Absolute State of the Union
‘DRILL, BABY’: US president Donald Trump “doubled down on his ‘drill, baby, drill’ agenda” in his State of the Union (SOTU) address, said the Los Angeles Times. He “tout[ed] his support of the fossil-fuel industry and renew[ed] his focus on electricity affordability”, reported the Financial Times. Trump also attacked the “green new scam”, noted Carbon Brief’s SOTU tracker.
COAL REPRIEVE: Earlier in the week, the Trump administration had watered down limits on mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants, reported the Financial Times. It remains “unclear” if this will be enough to prevent the decline of coal power, said Bloomberg, in the face of lower-cost gas and renewables. Reuters noted that US coal plants are “ageing”.
OIL STAY: The US Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments brought by the oil industry in a “major lawsuit”, reported the New York Times. The newspaper said the firms are attempting to head off dozens of other lawsuits at state level, relating to their role in global warming.
SHIP-SHILLING: The Trump administration is working to “kill” a global carbon levy on shipping “permanently”, reported Politico, after succeeding in delaying the measure late last year. The Guardian said US “bullying” could be “paying off”, after Panama signalled it was reversing its support for the levy in a proposal submitted to the UN shipping body.
Around the world
- RARE EARTHS: The governments of Brazil and India signed a deal on rare earths, said the Times of India, as well as agreeing to collaborate on renewable energy.
- HEAT ROLLBACK: German homes will be allowed to continue installing gas and oil heating, under watered-down government plans covered by Clean Energy Wire.
- BRAZIL FLOODS: At least 53 people died in floods in the state of Minas Gerais, after some areas saw 170mm of rain in a few hours, reported CNN Brasil.
- ITALY’S ATTACK: Italy is calling for the EU to “suspend” its emissions trading system (ETS) ahead of a review later this year, said Politico.
- COOKSTOVE CREDITS: The first-ever carbon credits under the Paris Agreement have been issued to a cookstove project in Myanmar, said Climate Home News.
- SAUDI SOLAR: Turkey has signed a “major” solar deal that will see Saudi firm ACWA building 2 gigawatts in the country, according to Agence France-Presse.
$467 billion
The profits made by five major oil firms since prices spiked following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine four years ago, according to a report by Global Witness covered by BusinessGreen.
Latest climate research
- Claims about the “fingerprint” of human-caused climate change, made in a recent US Department of Energy report, are “factually incorrect” | AGU Advances
- Large lakes in the Congo Basin are releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from “immense ancient stores” | Nature Geoscience
- Shared Socioeconomic Pathways – scenarios used regularly in climate modelling – underrepresent “narratives explicitly centring on democratic principles such as participation, accountability and justice” | npj Climate Action
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
The constituency of Richard Tice MP, the climate-sceptic deputy leader of Reform UK, is the second-largest recipient of flood defence spending in England, according to new Carbon Brief analysis. Overall, the funding is disproportionately targeted at coastal and urban areas, many of which have Conservative or Liberal Democrat MPs.
Spotlight
Is there really a UK ‘greenlash’?
This week, after a historic Green Party byelection win, Carbon Brief looks at whether there really is a “greenlash” against climate policy in the UK.
Over the past year, the UK’s political consensus on climate change has been shattered.
Yet despite a sharp turn against climate action among right-wing politicians and right-leaning media outlets, UK public support for climate action remains strong.
Prof Federica Genovese, who studies climate politics at the University of Oxford, told Carbon Brief:
“The current ‘war’ on green policy is mostly driven by media and political elites, not by the public.”
Indeed, there is still a greater than two-to-one majority among the UK public in favour of the country’s legally binding target to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, as shown below.
Steve Akehurst, director of public-opinion research initiative Persuasion UK, also noted the growing divide between the public and “elites”. He told Carbon Brief:
“The biggest movement is, without doubt, in media and elite opinion. There is a bit more polarisation and opposition [to climate action] among voters, but it’s typically no more than 20-25% and mostly confined within core Reform voters.”
Conservative gear shift
For decades, the UK had enjoyed strong, cross-party political support for climate action.
Lord Deben, the Conservative peer and former chair of the Climate Change Committee, told Carbon Brief that the UK’s landmark 2008 Climate Change Act had been born of this cross-party consensus, saying “all parties supported it”.
Since their landslide loss at the 2024 election, however, the Conservatives have turned against the UK’s target of net-zero emissions by 2050, which they legislated for in 2019.
Curiously, while opposition to net-zero has surged among Conservative MPs, there is majority support for the target among those that plan to vote for the party, as shown below.
Dr Adam Corner, advisor to the Climate Barometer initiative that tracks public opinion on climate change, told Carbon Brief that those who currently plan to vote Reform are the only segment who “tend to be more opposed to net-zero goals”. He said:
“Despite the rise in hostile media coverage and the collapse of the political consensus, we find that public support for the net-zero by 2050 target is plateauing – not plummeting.”
Reform, which rejects the scientific evidence on global warming and campaigns against net-zero, has been leading the polls for a year. (However, it was comfortably beaten by the Greens in yesterday’s Gorton and Denton byelection.)
Corner acknowledged that “some of the anti-net zero noise…[is] showing up in our data”, adding:
“We see rising concerns about the near-term costs of policies and an uptick in people [falsely] attributing high energy bills to climate initiatives.”
But Akehurst said that, rather than a big fall in public support, there had been a drop in the “salience” of climate action:
“So many other issues [are] competing for their attention.”
UK newspapers published more editorials opposing climate action than supporting it for the first time on record in 2025, according to Carbon Brief analysis.
Global ‘greenlash’?
All of this sits against a challenging global backdrop, in which US president Donald Trump has been repeating climate-sceptic talking points and rolling back related policy.
At the same time, prominent figures have been calling for a change in climate strategy, sold variously as a “reset”, a “pivot”, as “realism”, or as “pragmatism”.
Genovese said that “far-right leaders have succeeded in the past 10 years in capturing net-zero as a poster child of things they are ‘fighting against’”.
She added that “much of this is fodder for conservative media and this whole ecosystem is essentially driving what we call the ‘greenlash’”.
Corner said the “disconnect” between elite views and the wider public “can create problems” – for example, “MPs consistently underestimate support for renewables”. He added:
“There is clearly a risk that the public starts to disengage too, if not enough positive voices are countering the negative ones.”
Watch, read, listen
TRUMP’S ‘PETROSTATE’: The US is becoming a “petrostate” that will be “sicker and poorer”, wrote Financial Times associate editor Rana Forohaar.
RHETORIC VS REALITY: Despite a “political mood [that] has darkened”, there is “more green stuff being installed than ever”, said New York Times columnist David Wallace-Wells.
CHINA’S ‘REVOLUTION’: The BBC’s Climate Question podcast reported from China on the “green energy revolution” taking place in the country.
Coming up
- 2-6 March: UN Food and Agriculture Organization regional conference for Latin America and Caribbean, Brasília
- 3 March: UK spring statement
- 4-11 March: China’s “two sessions”
- 5 March: Nepal elections
Pick of the jobs
- The Guardian, senior reporter, climate justice | Salary: $123,000-$135,000. Location: New York or Washington DC
- China-Global South Project, non-resident fellow, climate change | Salary: Up to $1,000 a month. Location: Remote
- University of East Anglia, PhD in mobilising community-based climate action through co-designed sports and wellbeing interventions | Salary: Stipend (unknown amount). Location: Norwich, UK
- TABLE and the University of São Paulo, Brazil, postdoctoral researcher in food system narratives | Salary: Unknown. Location: Pirassununga, Brazil
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.
The post DeBriefed 27 February 2026: Trump’s fossil-fuel talk | Modi-Lula rare-earth pact | Is there a UK ‘greenlash’? appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Seven Pacific island nations say they will demand heftier levies on global shipping emissions if opponents of a green deal for the industry succeed in reopening negotiations on the stalled accord.
The United States and Saudi Arabia persuaded countries not to grant final approval to the International Maritime Organization’s Net-Zero Framework (NZF) in October and they are now leading a drive for changes to the deal.
In a joint submission seen by Climate Home News, the seven climate-vulnerable Pacific countries said the framework was already a “fragile compromise”, and vowed to push for a universal levy on all ship emissions, as well as higher fees . The deal currently stipulates that fees will be charged when a vessel’s emissions exceed a certain level.
“For many countries, the NZF represents the absolute limit of what they can accept,” said the unpublished submission by Fiji, Kiribati, Vanuatu, Nauru, Palau, Tuvalu and the Solomon Islands.
The countries said a universal levy and higher charges on shipping would raise more funds to enable a “just and equitable transition leaving no country behind”. They added, however, that “despite its many shortcomings”, the framework should be adopted later this year.
US allies want exemption for ‘transition fuels’
The previous attempt to adopt the framework failed after governments narrowly voted to postpone it by a year. Ahead of the vote, the US threatened governments and their officials with sanctions, tariffs and visa restrictions – and President Donald Trump called the framework a “Green New Scam Tax on Shipping”.
Since then, Liberia – an African nation with a major low-tax shipping registry headquartered in the US state of Virginia – has proposed a new measure under which, rather than staying fixed under the NZF, ships’ emissions intensity targets change depending on “demonstrated uptake” of both “low-carbon and zero-carbon fuels”.
The proposal places stringent conditions on what fuels are taken into consideration when setting these targets, stressing that the low- and zero-carbon fuels should be “scalable”, not cost more than 15% more than standard marine fuels and should be available at “sufficient ports worldwide”.
This proposal would not “penalise transitional fuels” like natural gas and biofuels, they said. In the last decade, the US has built a host of large liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals, which the Trump administration is lobbying other countries to purchase from.
The draft motion, seen by Climate Home News, was co-sponsored by US ally Argentina and also by Panama, a shipping hub whose canal the US has threatened to annex. Both countries voted with the US to postpone the last vote on adopting the framework.
-
IMO head: Shipping decarbonisation “has started” despite green deal delay
Arsenio Dominguez said the shipping industry’s net zero emissions goal is not in dispute although countries have stalled on adopting a framework to reach it -
US-led alliance wins a year’s delay in adoption of green shipping deal
The IMO’s Net-Zero Framework will be up for approval again in October 2026, after the US and Saudi Arabia persuaded countries not to vote on it as planned
The IMO’s Panamanian head Arsenio Dominguez told reporters in January that changes to the framework were now possible.
“It is clear from what happened last year that we need to look into the concerns that have been expressed [and] … make sure that they are somehow addressed within the framework,” he said.
Patchwork of levies
While the European Union pushed firmly for the framework’s adoption, two of its shipping-reliant member states – Greece and Cyprus – abstained in October’s vote.
After a meeting between the Greek shipping minister and Saudi Arabia’s energy minister in January, Greece said a “common position” united Greece, Saudi Arabia and the US on the framework.
If the NZF or a similar instrument is not adopted, the IMO has warned that there will be a patchwork of differing regional levies on pollution – like the EU’s emissions trading system for ships visiting its ports – which will be complicated and expensive to comply with.
This would mean that only countries with their own levies and with lots of ships visiting their ports would raise funds, making it harder for other nations to fund green investments in their ports, seafarers and shipping companies. In contrast, under the NZF, revenues would be disbursed by the IMO to all nations based on set criteria.
Anais Rios, shipping policy officer from green campaign group Seas At Risk, told Climate Home News the proposal by the Pacific nations for a levy on all shipping emissions – not just those above a certain threshold – was “the most credible way to meet the IMO’s climate goals”.
“With geopolitics reframing climate policy, asking the IMO to reopen the discussion on the universal levy is the only way to decarbonise shipping whilst bringing revenue to manage impacts fairly,” Rios said.
“It is […] far stronger than the Net-Zero Framework that is currently on offer.”
The post Pacific nations want higher emissions charges if shipping talks reopen appeared first on Climate Home News.
Pacific nations want higher emissions charges if shipping talks reopen
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