LONDON: As the dust settles on the finance industry’s most ambitious climate coalition yet, some of the biggest names on Wall Street have remained conspicuously absent.

       Among key holdouts is the world’s No 1 private-equity firm, Blackstone Inc, which leads a parade of buyout behemoths, including Apollo Global Management Inc and KKR & Co Inc. None of the three has signed up to a pledge unveiled during COP26 to eliminate CO2 emissions and help avoid catastrophic planetary overheating.

       The Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) lists most of the titans of banking, insurance and asset management in the developed world. Still struggling to resurrect their images after the 2008 crisis, the biggest names in global finance lined up in early November to declare they’d do their bit to help fight climate change.

       JPMorgan Chase & Co, Citigroup Inc, BlackRock Inc and Goldman Sachs Group Inc were among the roughly 450 to add their names to the dotted line.

       The achievement was touted as a “watershed” moment by Mark Carney, the co-chair of GFANZ who spent the better part of a year trying to persuade as many finance bosses as possible that they couldn’t afford to ignore this movement.

       The group he managed to bring together represents a show-stopping US$130 trillion (RM551 trillion) in assets, proving, according to Carney, that global finance is positioning itself to land on the right side of history.

       The private-equity industry was also wooed by GFANZ, according to a spokeswoman for the alliance, which is co-chaired by Michael R Bloomberg, the owner of Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg LP.

       But as of late November, the biggest names in the industry hadn’t joined. Aside from Blackstone, Apollo and KKR, Carlyle Group Inc and TPG have also so far abstained.

       Ironically, private equity is better suited than most to live up to net-zero goals. The industry tends to hold “large or controlling ownership stakes,” which is a level of influence that is “much harder to achieve in the public markets,” said Mary Nicholson, head of responsible investments at Macquarie Asset Management.

       Representatives of private equity firms who spoke on condition of anonymity said the main thing holding them back was an inability so far to come up with credible plans to eliminate their carbon footprints by 2050. ― Bloomberg