French banks cut fossil fuel finance — but pipelines tell a different story
French banks reduced their fossil fuel expansion financing in 2025 — but a closer look at pipeline and LNG data reveals the retreat is partial at best, with a critical blind spot in revolving credit lines.
At a Glance
France’s four largest banks reduced their combined fossil fuel expansion financing to $16 billion in 2025, down from $18 billion in 2024 — but Société Générale bucked the trend, increasing its support, including doubling its funding for new transport infrastructure.
The decline is concentrated in oil and gas production, where formal exclusion policies have been adopted; funding for transport infrastructure (LNG terminals, pipelines) remains high or growing, and only BNP Paribas has meaningfully cut its exposure there.
Revolving Credit Facilities — flexible credit lines that fossil fuel companies rely on heavily for liquidity — account for 39.7% of total global fossil financing tracked by the report, yet remain largely outside the scope of French banks’ current exclusion policies.
This image is used for illustrative purposes only.
The numbers, bank by bank
The Banking on Climate Chaos 2026 report, released June 9 by a coalition of eight organizations including Rainforest Action Network and Reclaim Finance — a Paris-based climate finance NGO — tracks the financing activities of the world’s 65 largest banks across the fossil fuel sector from 2021 to 2025. The report focuses specifically on expansion financing: money flowing to companies developing new coal, oil, and gas projects across the full value chain, from extraction to transport to power generation. That’s the metric most directly relevant to 1.5°C climate targets.
BNP Paribas, France’s largest bank, cut its fossil fuel expansion financing by 22% compared to 2024. Crédit Agricole reduced its exposure by 16%, and the Banque Populaire Caisse d’Épargne (BPCE) group — France’s mutual banking conglomerate — by 11%. Their respective 2025 totals: $3.93 billion, $5.61 billion and $5.62 billion.
Société Générale moved in the opposite direction. The bank increased its overall expansion financing by 5% — a modest figure that obscures more dramatic shifts beneath: a 29% increase in oil and gas production funding, a 95% jump in new transport infrastructure financing, and a 101% surge in gas-fired power plant financing. Société Générale is also, according to the report, France’s largest financial backer of TotalEnergies in 2025.
The global backdrop makes the French numbers more significant, not less. The world’s 65 largest banks channeled $906 billion into fossil fuels in 2025, up 8% from 2024 — matching 2021 levels and erasing years of declared progress. More than half — $508 billion — went to companies actively developing new fossil projects. The two largest fossil fuel banks in the world are American: JPMorgan Chase at $58.2 billion and Bank of America at $47.3 billion.
Why Société Générale went the other way
Société Générale’s divergence isn’t primarily an absence of policy. It coincides with two market shifts worth examining.
The first is the accelerating expansion of liquefied natural gas (LNG), particularly in the United States. Under the Trump administration, U.S. LNG export infrastructure has expanded at an unprecedented pace. Among the three companies that received the most fossil fuel financing from the world’s largest banks in 2025, two are American and heavily LNG-exposed: Venture Global ($28.7 billion), Enbridge ($22.4 billion), and Energy Transfer ($18.3 billion). A segment of the financial sector has positioned LNG as a “transition fuel” — a framing that Reclaim Finance and its partners have systematically contested.
The second factor involves TotalEnergies, the French oil and gas major. In March 2026, TotalEnergies announced it was abandoning its 2050 carbon neutrality target — a move that may indicate a long-term strategic commitment to fossil fuel production, making Société Générale’s close financial ties to the group more durable than opportunistic.
When contacted by France Inter, Société Générale disputed the report’s findings, saying the data “does not reflect” the reduction in its fossil fuel financing “observed since 2019.” [translated from French] That objection is worth noting: Banking on Climate Chaos focuses specifically on expansion financing, not total sectoral exposure. Different perimeters produce different results — and the methodology dispute goes to the heart of what “reducing fossil finance” actually means.
The blind spot: pipelines, LNG terminals and revolving credit
The declines posted by BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole and BPCE in oil and gas production are real and documented. BNP Paribas cut its production-related financing by 80% compared to 2024, and by 65% since 2021 — the product of concrete exclusion policies adopted in 2024, when both BNP and Crédit Agricole announced they would stop underwriting bonds for oil and gas companies. These are structural commitments with measurable effects.
But exclusion policies don’t cover everything. Revolving Credit Facilities (RCFs) — flexible, renewable credit lines that energy companies draw on for liquidity, similar to a high-value line of credit a corporation can tap and repay as needed — account for 39.7% of all fossil financing tracked by the report globally. Unlike bonds, they are not systematically covered by the exclusion frameworks French banks have announced.
The transport infrastructure gap is equally significant. Globally, financing for oil and gas transport infrastructure — pipelines, LNG terminals — surged 84% between 2024 and 2025. Among French banks, only BNP Paribas reduced its support for this segment. Crédit Agricole and BPCE maintained elevated levels. Société Générale doubled its exposure.
Financing a new LNG terminal or pipeline in 2025 means underwriting an asset designed to transport fossil fuels well into the 2040s and 2050s — a time horizon directly at odds with the net-zero commitments the same banks have publicly endorsed.
France in the global rankings
France remained the world’s sixth-largest fossil fuel financing country in 2025 — behind the United States, but ahead of most European peers. That ranking reflects the weight of its four major banks in international capital markets, as well as the gap between their stated climate commitments and their measurable financing flows.
For readers outside Europe, a comparison helps frame the scale. JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America together provided $105.5 billion in fossil financing in 2025 — roughly six times the combined total of France’s four largest banks. American banks dominate global fossil finance, and American companies are its primary beneficiaries. The Trump-era LNG expansion is creating an asymmetry: European banks that align with U.S. demand for LNG financing risk reinforcing a trajectory their own climate pledges are supposed to counteract.
The international benchmark also matters. The Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), a global coalition of financial institutions that have pledged to align their portfolios with 1.5°C pathways, counts major banks among its members. According to the report, since GFANZ launched in 2021, the world’s largest banks have increased their fossil fuel financing. The 2025 data confirms that voluntary commitments don’t translate automatically into reduced flows.
Analysis
The 2021–2025 trajectory: real, but selective
BNP Paribas’s 65% reduction in oil and gas production financing since 2021 proves that structural policy changes can produce measurable results — and that reducing fossil finance is not technically impossible for a major bank. But the decline is concentrated in the segment most amenable to targeted exclusion, and coexists with sustained or growing exposure in less regulated areas. The trajectory is encouraging; the scope is incomplete.
Who adopted what — and what the policies leave out
The 2024 bond-exclusion commitments by BNP Paribas and Crédit Agricole are a genuine step forward. But they don’t cover direct loans, RCFs, or financing for transport or gas-power companies. For BPCE, the absence of any comparable structural commitment makes the bank’s 11% decline harder to assess as a durable trend.
What $16 billion actually finances in 2025
The $16 billion from France’s banks funds companies building infrastructure designed to move and burn fossil fuels for decades to come. The structural contradiction — financing today what makes tomorrow’s climate targets harder to reach — is precisely what the report defines as “expansion financing,” and what current exclusion policies don’t yet fully address.
The real question: what counts as reducing fossil finance?
The definition used by Banking on Climate Chaos is rigorous and transparent. But it produces a key insight: a bank can simultaneously report a declining overall exposure to the fossil sector and an increase in its expansion financing, depending on the measurement perimeter. Société Générale’s dispute with Reclaim Finance’s methodology isn’t merely defensive — it points to a genuine definitional gap that allows banks to manage optics without necessarily managing climate impact. Which perimeter is most relevant to actual climate outcomes is, ultimately, the question that regulators and investors have yet to force into the open.
The bottom line
The decline in French bank fossil financing in 2025 is a genuine signal — and a more ambiguous one than the headline numbers suggest. It arrives as global bank fossil financing rose 8%, and it stops exactly where exclusion policies stop.
The question for the coming years isn’t whether BNP Paribas and Crédit Agricole will continue cutting production financing — that trajectory appears set. It’s whether France’s banks will extend their policies to cover RCFs, LNG infrastructure and gas-fired power before those investments lock in fossil fuel dependence for the decades ahead.
The Société Générale divergence poses a related question: without binding commitments, a single strategic pivot can erase years of reported progress in a single year. The gap between France’s four largest banks in 2025 may not be the exception — it may be a preview of what happens to the others if their exclusion frameworks aren’t strengthened and extended.
Sources: Reclaim Finance / Banking on Climate Chaos 2026 (co-published by 8 organizations, June 9, 2026) · Reclaim Finance, French banks financing breakdown (annex, June 2026) · Reclaim Finance, Banking on Business as Usual (September 2025) · Reclaim Finance, European banks and gas-fired power plants (April 2026) · France Info / France Inter (June 9, 2026)