NEW YORK—In a sombre press conference held Friday, a coalition of major financial institutions announced that after a grueling six-year experiment, they have officially crunched the numbers and determined that the continued existence of the human species offers a “negligible” return on investment.

“We really gave it the old college try,” said Goldman Sachs analyst Derek Hunsaker, gesturing to a line graph showing the cost of renewable energy briefly intersecting with the cost of a new super-yacht. “Back in 2018, we pledged trillions to reshape finance because it seemed like a trendy PR move. But when we looked at the Q3 projections, we realized that saving the planet requires a lot of overhead, whereas letting the oceans boil is actually strictly pure profit for our energy futures division.”

According to the report, the industry’s “Net Zero” initiatives have been formally rebranded as “Net Zero Interest In This Anymore.” Major firms confirmed that while they enjoy the concept of breathable air, they have a fiduciary duty to prioritize short-term quarterly gains over the long-term structural integrity of civilization.

“Look, we’ll still print brochures with pictures of wind turbines on them,” Hunsaker added while dumping a barrel of crude oil into a decorative fern planter. “But ultimately, if the market wanted us to stop the climate apocalypse, the apocalypse shouldn’t have been so profitable.”