Bank of America reported record profits last year even as it upped spending on employee day care and mental health. You regularly award stock to rank-and-file employees — at a cost of $3.3 billion so far — and your hourly minimum wage is now $21, up from $15 in 2017. What’s the thinking?

I’m just trying to get the work done. We’ve been investing in teammates, so it probably came up as a number one priority, frankly, in 2020, to keep the teammate safe and do everything we could to enable them to be safe.

You’re hearing about turnover rates and the great resignation. Our turnover rate in 2021 was basically the same as it was in 2019. We started this a long time ago to drop employee churn and have people be more career-oriented.

The company went from like a 20 percent down to 15 percent turnover. And now it’s 10 percent, 12 percent.

We’re not seeing the kind of turnover that you read about because of a long-term investment. We have a more stable workforce. That means we can do a better job for customers.

So, looking through an ESG lens, Bank of America has seen the light?

We talk about delivering on the genius of the “and,” which is we have to deliver for our shareholders and for society.

As corporate America moves deeper into stakeholder capitalism, there’s political and economic pushback: How is this good for the bottom line? How is this capitalism?

I’ve been asked if I’m a capitalist at congressional hearings and things like that. The answer is, absolutely.

On a one-, three-, five-, 10-year stock price performance basis, we have produced for the shareholder at the same time we’ve produced for our communities and our employees and our customers. The idea is to produce for all of them. It’s a virtuous circle.

The opposite of the genius of the “and” is being the chairman of the “or” — profits or, shareholders or. We believe in the and. Whether it’s the work we do on a just transition, the work we do on the employee stuff, there has to be an economic model that sustains it.

Bank of America said it would begin reporting its financed emissions as soon as this year. Is that still on track?

By year end this year, we’re supposed to do it. We’ll be doing that the next few months. Our basic viewpoint, and I think the right basic viewpoint, is two or three things. Number one, our clients are making this transition and our job is to help them make it.

Is that really a bank’s job?

It is and it isn’t. If you’re in the supply chain for an auto company and you make wheels for the car, at some point those buyers say I’m net-zero.

Net-zero for them doesn’t mean the car’s emissions. The issue is how the car is built. So our clients are at risk if they make that wheel unless they understand how they make the transition so they can be in that supply chain. ...

We’re going to advise those companies. Ultimately, if they’re facing a business challenge that they haven’t faced the past, who better educate them than their bank for 30 years, saying here’s what’s coming, here’s how to think about it?

Banks and investors take heat for not simply cutting polluters loose.

Simply saying we’re not going to hold X or Y in our portfolio does not mean X or Y doesn’t keep going on. Getting X or Y to get greener on their steel production every year, or commitments made by the oil and gas industry — not only their operations, but with carbon capture and storage and things that offset their emissions — their change is actually the great change.

The binary decision of invest-not invest, lend-not lend, do business with or not do business with — that doesn’t change the behavior of those companies. You want those companies to declare net-zero, put a plan on the table. Then society wants to hold them accountable.

How do we get to accountability?

If you make metrics part of the official sector, then you can see who’s making progress. Then the decision isn’t, “Yep, there’s 12 companies in this industry, let me get out of all 12.” It’s, “These 10 are making progress, I’ll stay with them and those two will start to suffer from investors and others.” That’s played out in the oil and gas industry in the last couple years.

Now you’re working across sectors to get the various metrics to converge.

Remember this key thing, if you believe that changes need to happen, it isn’t going to happen by charity. There’s just not enough money. There $6 trillion or $7 trillion per year required to make these changes happen. All the foundations of the world have a couple trillion dollars in them or less.

What you’re doing is putting a perpetual motion machine called capitalism to drive this change. It will not happen otherwise. It just won’t happen. Governments could try to regulate it. But as you know, the sticking power of those regulations ebb and flow.

Are our current environmental and equality woes a failing of capitalism?

No. We are worried about the environment, you’ve seen massive movements of people out of poverty worldwide. Capitalism, development, yes, it’s good. It just has to now be aligned more to make sure we’re achieving that in a balanced way.

In the environmental world, it has to be a just transition, we have to have energy so all countries can grow and prosper. We’ve got to say it isn’t fair for developed countries to say, “Hey, we did this by fossil fuel burning to make electricity so we can become a prosperous nation.” You can’t do that. That’s not fair.

So capitalism didn’t fail, because it’s produced all these wonderful things. It’s been unbelievable. It has to now be aligned to what the world needs it to do in the next stage.

Some politicians and governments just don’t buy that.

We don’t need money from governments, frankly. What we need is some help. Take sustainable aviation fuel. The industry wants a mandate for sustainable aviation fuel as a percentage of total fuel used. That can create the market to create the factories to produce the SAF.

If governments would put a line or two into these communiqués — SAF at 10 percent — that would create an industry which frankly would go right through that 10 percent. That’s a modest mandate.

We asked them to put a price on carbon, to say it’s X, so we can all shoot at X, as opposed to now where one person says it’s this, one person says it’s that, how much capture is worth, or offsets or reduction. We need to have a standardized cost of carbon.

Then governments have to use their purchasing power.

Carbon pricing is dead in Congress and President Joe Biden’s social cost of carbon is being challenged in court. Yet corporations, including yours, are putting their own prices on carbon to guide decision making.

When we say we’re net-zero, that effectively is an internal tax on our carbon usage. Every company has said that. That calculation uses the social cost of carbon in our case.

We are saying a flight that our investment banker or our commercial banker takes is a cost. We’re saying that if we’re net-zero, that that is a cost. We’ve got to ensure the planes are flying on SAF or buy equivalents, which is what we’re doing.

It’s not even an offset. We’re actually buying directly fuel that is zero emissions to replace fuel that would otherwise be burned for our teammate’s flight. So the cost of carbon enables you to value that internal tax.

Effectively, a carbon tax is going around the world through all these commitments. Because at the end of the day, if you can’t reduce your usage, you’re going to have to pay your way out of the rough, so to speak.

This seems like a failure of government, carbon pricing. It seems like a simple thing.

We have said it’s a straightforward thing. Nothing’s ever simple.

Let’s talk about diversity and inclusion. Your bank and other large companies are spending gigantic sums of money to get capital into underserved communities. Are we seeing change?

A lot of people who want a loan from us actually need equity. And if you look at the small private equity firms, even larger ones, there are two basic holes. The people who ran the private equity firms are the people who form them, which means they generally aren’t diverse.

The second thing is diverse companies weren’t getting the capital. So we said let’s fix that. We went out to solicit local markets and said, give us funds that are run by diverse entrepreneurs, women, Asian, Black, Hispanic, Native American.

We found 100 of them, we did $300-plus million in commitments to those funds. That’s enabled those people to get funds from other people because people said if it’s good enough for Bank of America, we’ll come in and help.

You and others have been doing this sort of thing for some time. Why have we not seen better results?

The efforts have doubled down. The issue is also the diversity of purchasing power. Our diverse supply chain buying produces contracts for diverse suppliers, $2 billion-plus a year now. All companies are doing that and that’s starting to take hold.

But there are certain industries that didn’t have the diversity record of the financial services industry, for example. They’re changing as fast as they can and the efforts are genuine and they come to a lot of us and say give us your best practices, and we give it to them.