Obeying in Advance

No one is forcing the environmental establishment to surrender. That’s exactly the problem.

The Net-Zero Banking Alliance was born in Glasgow in 2021, in the flush of a climate summit, with more than a hundred of the world's largest banks signing a serious promise: to bring their lending into line with a livable planet. At its height it counted close to a hundred and fifty institutions holding tens of trillions of dollars. It was, on paper, one of the most powerful coalitions ever assembled for any cause.

It died on a voluntary basis, in installments, over about ten months.

In the closing weeks of 2024 and the first weeks of 2025, the six largest banks in the United States — Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase — walked out, one after another, in a tidy procession, each departure making the next one cheaper. In February, Wells Fargo went further than leaving: it scrapped its own targets, the 2030 interim goal and the 2050 net-zero goal both. By late August the alliance had suspended operations; by early October it had voted to dissolve itself into a set of non-binding suggestions, which is to say into nothing. And the whole time the banks kept lending. In 2024 alone, the sixty-odd largest banks on earth put roughly $869 billion into fossil fuels — a three-year high — while the institutions among them that were quitting the alliance issued statements insisting they remained, of course, committed to their climate goals.

Notice what did not happen. No one resigned in protest. No one was fired. There was no scandal and no leak, because there was no secret — every decision was announced in the ordinary register of corporate prudence. The lawyers had flagged the exposure. Attorneys general in two dozen states had sent threatening letters. The fiduciary duty ran to shareholders, not to the atmosphere. Each bank could explain, sincerely, that it had done the responsible thing. They went home and slept fine.

That is what capitulation looks like when it wears a good suit. From the outside it reads as cowardice. From the inside it never does. From the inside it feels like maturity.

The banks are useful here precisely because they are far enough away to look at clearly. But the same choreography is running, more quietly, through the world of environmental and conservation organizations — the foundations, the green groups, the advocacy shops — where the rooms are smaller and the dollar figures lower and the surrender is harder to photograph. The strategy memo recommends saying less this year. The bold version of the campaign gets "refined" into the version that offends no one, and everyone in the meeting nods as though refinement and evisceration were the same word. Certain phrases go quietly missing from the website, even though everyone in the building knows those phrases still describe the actual work. None of it is coerced. That is the part worth sitting with.

The reasonable people

There is a name for this, and it does not come from the radical left. The historian Timothy Snyder, writing about how ordinary people behaved as the tyrannies of the last century came on, gave the instruction in three words: *do not obey in advance.* The people who guess what power will want and surrender it before they're asked are not victims of force. They are teachers. They are showing power what it is allowed to do.

The writer M. Gessen — who grew up inside Soviet totalitarianism and now writes about its echoes here — sharpened the point in a way I keep returning to. The trouble with "obeying in advance," Gessen observed, is that it sounds like a failure of nerve you could simply correct. It isn't. When people and institutions hand over power before they have to, they are almost never acting out of raw fear. They are acting on arguments that are completely, infuriatingly reasonable.

You can hear those arguments in any nonprofit conference room in the country. *We can't take the big swing — we have a staff who depend on these paychecks.* *If we lose the funding we can't do any of the good work, so we have to stay in the room.* *You pick your battles; you can't die on every hill.* *If we don't take the deal, someone worse will, and at least this way we keep a seat.* *The era has changed — we have to meet people where they are now.* Every one of these is true. That is the entire problem. There are many good reasons to accommodate a rising power and only one reason not to, and Gessen names it cleanly: the accommodation is itself the brick. Anticipatory obedience is not what happens after you lose. It is how the losing gets built, voluntarily, by sensible people, one prudent decision at a time.

The clearest portrait of the mechanism was drawn almost fifty years ago by a Czech dissident, Václav Havel, and it featured a greengrocer. The grocer puts the official slogan in his shop window — not because he believes it, but because that is simply what one does to be left in peace. Havel's point was not that the grocer is a villain. It was that the whole system runs on millions of grocers, each privately skeptical, each keeping his head down for perfectly understandable reasons, and that a regime built this way needs very little terror, because the compliance does the work for free. *Living within the lie,* he called it. The slogan in the window is not a small thing. It is the thing.

The room where caution feels like wisdom

So far this is a story about fear and incentive, which would be true but incomplete, because it doesn't explain the strangest part: why the caution feels not just safe but *obvious*. Why, in these rooms, the prudent course rarely even gets argued. It is simply assumed, the way water is assumed by fish.

The answer is sitting in the room, and it is the part of this that almost no one will say plainly.

These institutions will tell you, often and earnestly, that they speak for everyone — that nature belongs to all of us, that the cause is universal, that they are building the broadest possible coalition. Then look at who actually runs them, and who they actually reach. The leadership is drawn, with striking consistency, from one slice of the country: a particular set of schools, a particular career path, a particular and comfortable distance from the harms in question. The most recent industry counts show the sector's staff actually growing *less* diverse, not more, even as its assets balloon into the hundreds of billions. Of the philanthropic dollars that flow to this work, a vanishing fraction reaches organizations led by the communities living closest to the damage; the lion's share goes to a short list of large, established, overwhelmingly white-led groups. The rhetoric is universal. The body is narrow.

And here is the thing the establishment cannot see, because you cannot see it from inside: a body that narrow doesn't just produce a narrow set of faces. It produces a narrow set of *fears,* a single shared sense of what is realistic, one common-sense that feels like neutral reality only because everyone in the room happens to share it. A room that has everything in common cannot tell the difference between its own assumptions and the laws of physics. When everyone has the same things to lose, the instinct to protect them feels like wisdom rather than what it is — a class interest, dressed as strategy. There is no one at the table for whom the caution feels insane, because the people for whom it would feel insane were never hired, never funded, never given the microphone.

This is the deepest reason the establishment keeps surrendering. It is not only afraid. It is *homogeneous,* and homogeneity is what lets the fear masquerade as consensus.

I want to be careful and honest here, because the easy version of this argument has curdled into something I don't believe. The diversity push of the last decade overpromised and underdelivered; a great deal of it became ritual — the statement, the training, the carefully worded land acknowledgment — that left the actual distribution of power and money exactly where it was. The backlash now treats that failure as proof that the whole aim was a mistake. It was not. The aim was right, and the execution betrayed it. The point was never decoration or penance. The point was *durability:* an institution that draws its people, and therefore its instincts, from one narrow seam is not built broad — it is built brittle, and it will discover this at the worst possible moment.

Any ecologist can tell you why. A monoculture is the most efficient thing in the world right up until the morning it isn't. A field of identical plants grows fast and clean and orderly, and then one blight arrives that none of them can resist, and because they are all the same, they all fail at once. Resilience does not come from efficiency. It comes from difference — from having something in the system that survives the shock the rest of the system can't. A homogeneous institution is a monoculture, and a monoculture is not strong. It only looks strong, in the good weather, before the blight.

The weather has turned. And the establishment is responding exactly as a monoculture responds: uniformly, in one direction, all at once, toward the ground.

The cautious lose anyway

If the argument from resilience doesn't reach a risk-averse person, there is a blunter one, on the only ground such a person truly respects: caution does not even work.

Gessen tells the story of an editor in Russia who was warned that running a certain article would cost his whole staff their jobs. He killed it. He protected his people. He was responsible. He lives in exile now anyway — the obedience bought him nothing but a slightly later appointment with the same fate, and helped build the regime that kept the appointment. The bargain was a fiction. It always is.

The banks are the same story in a different currency. Look at what their prudence actually purchased. They kept the fossil lending — and with it the long-term risk of holding stranded assets when the transition arrives regardless, as it will. They bought no peace from their critics, who simply added hypocrisy to the charge. And they surrendered the one thing the coalition might have given them: a hand in writing the rules of the largest reallocation of capital in human history, a transition that is coming whether they help steer it or stand in front of it. They gave up their voice and kept their exposure. They lost the future and got nothing for the present.

This is the iron logic of the half-measure. It does not protect the institution. It makes the institution complicit *and* irrelevant — disgraced for what it permitted, forgotten for what it failed to attempt. The safe path turns out to be the dangerous one. The cautious leader is not buying security. He is paying down, in monthly installments, his own obsolescence.

Loyalty is not silence

There is an old map for this, drawn by an economist no institution could call a radical. Albert Hirschman observed that when something you belong to starts to fail, you have three moves. You can leave. You can stay quiet and loyal. Or you can stay and raise hell — what he called *voice* — precisely because you refuse to walk away. His central finding ran against intuition: silent loyalty is how good institutions rot. The members who care the most but say the least are the ones who let the decline happen, because their silence registers as consent and removes the only pressure that might have forced a correction.

The cautious leader has confused loyalty with silence. He believes that protecting the institution means not making trouble for it, and he has it precisely backward. Voice is the loyal act. You raise hell *because* you love the thing and refuse to watch it hollow into a logo with no one home. The person quietly managing the decline — smoothing every edge, deleting the inconvenient words, refining the campaign into harmlessness — is not the institution's protector. He is its embalmer, and he has mistaken the stillness of the body for peace.

Which turns the usual accusation inside out. In a moment like this one, the people counseling retreat are not the conservatives in the room. They are the radicals — presiding over an irreversible transformation, accepting as temporary a set of losses that compound into permanence. Courage is the conservative act. It is what you do when you actually mean to *conserve* something. Caution, now, is just slow surrender with better manners. The honest question for anyone who loves these institutions is not *am I being brave* but a quieter one: when this period is written down, and it will be, which sentence has my name in it — the one about the people who used their standing while they still had it, or the one about the reasonable, credentialed, responsible people who kept the slogan in the window until there was nothing left to protect?

What I can see from here

I can write this from a particular angle, and I should say where I'm standing.

I did not come from the seam these institutions recruit from. I came from a poor and modest place — the kind of place these grand environmental bargains were always *about* and almost never made *in.* My family's history is, in part, a ledger of the costs that somebody else's celebrated victories were quietly built on: the uranium, the coal, the land that became another organization's success story. I have spent a career inside and alongside these institutions anyway, because I happen to believe in them — I think a well-built institution is one of the most generous things people make, a machine for keeping a promise across time, longer than any single person's nerve. I am not an arsonist. I want these things to last.

But because I am not from the room, I can see the thing the room can't. I can see that the caution which feels like physics in there is just the shape of a particular set of fears. And I can tell you something about the fall that everyone in that room is so afraid of — the lost grant, the cold donor, the year spent rebuilding — because I started at the bottom of it. It is real. It is also survivable. The catastrophe being quietly catastrophized is, in fact, *bearable* — and the fear of it is already costing far more than the fall ever could. That is not a moral failing. It is a failure of imagination, which is a more hopeful diagnosis, because imagination can be repaired.

The renovation

A crisis is not only a danger to an institution. It is the rare moment one gets to become more than it was.

Good weather lets organizations calcify — around their donors, their comfort, their founding blind spots, the quiet narrowness no one has had to confront because nothing forced the question. A crisis forces the question. It is the one moment when the people the establishment has spent decades failing to reach will actually listen, because they can feel the ground moving too — and they are not waiting for moderation. They are waiting for someone with standing and a microphone to say plainly what is happening to them. They do not want consensus. They want a witness.

That is the opening, and it is also the way out of the monoculture. The brave version of this work does not spend the crisis protecting what the institution already is. It spends the crisis making the institution broader, and therefore sturdier, than it has ever been — drawing in the people and the instincts and the fears it has always lacked, which is the only thing that has ever made any living system survive a shock. Courage and durability are not in tension here. In this moment they are the same act.

I learned most of what I know about persistence from a river. The one I have spent my life on does not check your credentials and does not wait for your nerve. It moves whether anyone is brave or not, and it carves the canyon either way. The only real choice on offer is whether you are part of the force that shapes the country the water runs through — or one more thing it routes around, on its way to a future that has stopped including you.

The water is rising. It would be a terrible thing to have spent these years standing guard at the door, with our backs turned, while the thing we loved was carried quietly out the back.

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Notes & sources

-Net-Zero Banking Alliance — founding (Glasgow, COP26, 2021), membership and assets, dissolution (suspended Aug. 27, 2025; wound down into a non-binding framework early Oct. 2025):** Guardian / fintech trade coverage (Oct. 2025); The Conversation / phys.org, "Banks retreat from climate change commitments" (Sept. 25, 2025). Confirm current membership/asset figures, which shifted repeatedly.

- Six largest U.S. banks departing (late 2024–early 2025); Wells Fargo dropping its 2030 and 2050 targets (Feb. 28, 2025):** Sierra Club, "US Banks Quit Climate Alliances and Targets" (Mar. 20, 2025). Verify the exact sequence/dates of departures before asserting them.

- ~$869B in fossil-fuel financing by the largest banks in 2024:** *Banking on Climate Chaos 2025* (Rainforest Action Network, Sierra Club, et al.).

- State AG pressure / anti-ESG legal climate:** widely reported; 23 Republican AGs opened inquiries into climate target-setting bodies (2024).

- "Do not obey in advance":** Timothy Snyder, *On Tyranny* (2017), Lesson 1.

- The five reasonable arguments; the editor in exile:** M. Gessen, "The Chilling Consequences of Going Along With Trump," *The New York Times* (Feb. 8, 2025); part of the collection awarded the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Opinion Writing.

- “Living within the lie" / the greengrocer:** Václav Havel, *The Power of the Powerless* (1978).

- Exit, voice, and loyalty:** Albert O. Hirschman, *Exit, Voice, and Loyalty* (1970).

- Sector diversity declining; philanthropic distribution skewed to large, mostly white-led groups:** Green 2.0 annual NGO diversity reporting; your own figures from the prior essay (≈1.3% of $1.34B to BIPOC-led groups; roughly half of climate philanthropy to ~20 organizations) — re-confirm against the latest reports before publishing.