Greenhushing banks quieter on climate, but letting money talk

“Greenhushing” has replaced greenwashing in corporate climate action, the head of the country’s largest banks has said.

Greenhushing refers to companies deliberately downplaying or remaining silent about environmental actions, even when they are genuine

AIB chief executive Colin Hunt said many banks and businesses were talking less about climate because of political changes but were actually doing more.

“Businesses were far louder about this topic before January 2025 [when Donald Trump began his second term as US president],” he said.

“The fact of the matter is that in certain geographies people have stopped talking about transition and talking about the renewable energy opportunity, but the capital has been deployed at a pace that has never happened before.

“So we’ve moved from greenwashing to greenhushing. Nobody’s talking about it, but the critical thing is, don’t mind the talk, don’t mind the chat – is the capital being deployed?

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“The answer is yes, it is and it’s being deployed largely silently.”

Hunt, who is attending the Cop31 climate summit in Antalya, Turkey, was speaking as AIB announced a doubling of its green finance fund for 2030.

The company set a target in 2019 of lending €30 billion to green, energy-efficient and energy transition projects by 2030. It has already loaned €28 billion.

It has now set a target of €60 billion for 2030. The money is lent to a wide range of projects from retrofits under the low-interest home energy upgrade loan scheme and green mortgages to wind and solar projects valued at hundreds of millions of euros.

Hunt said this would be a floor rather than a ceiling and demand could well outstrip the target again.

He also said AIB was still committed to green lending making up 70 per cent of all new loans issued by the bank by 2030.

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“In the first three-quarters of this year, 43 per cent of our lending was green or transition in nature. We’ve got a very strong line of visibility now well into the 60 per cent and with a fair wind we will hit a target in 2030 that looked audaciously ambitious when we set it in 2019.”

During the Cop31 meeting, Hunt met former US vice-president Al Gore, who will be guest speaker at the bank’s annual sustainability conference in Dublin next February.

Hunt said Democrat victories in the US midterm elections could mean less need for greenhushing.

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“It might change the volume of the conversation, but the transition is happening. It is happening in front of our eyes; it’s just that people aren’t talking about it,” he said.

He said when it came to overseas loans for large renewable energy projects, the US was the fastest-growing market for AIB.

“I get a sense out of this Cop that I think there’s more optimism out there than I’ve detected in the past,” he said.