Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Friday, July 16th.

And this is your FT News Briefing.

US banks are scaling back on brick-and-mortar branches after the pandemic accelerated a trend

towards online banking, and the EU's historic climate change plan already faces stiff opposition.

Plus, the FT's business columnist, Polita Clark, talks about her picks for best new books on the

environment. Is it a lot of them are basically trying to tell people what they can do individually?

There's a lot of focus on telling people that they don't need to feel too hopeless.

There are things that they can do.

I'm Mark Filipino, and here's the news you need to start your day.

It's been a big week for bank earnings. The FT's US banking correspondent,

Imani Moise, has been following it all and says the key story from the second quarter is all

about the strength of investment banking, which rose to save the day as the trading boom faded.

What you really saw was the benefit of these banks having so many diverse business lines because

just as one kind of peters out, another business could rise up and kind of boost the bottom line.

Imani, when we spoke earlier this week, you mentioned you were watching out for announcements

regarding bank closures. What did you hear?

Definitely saw banks starting to close branches at an accelerated pace to kick off the year.

I think some of that had slowed down during the pandemic as a lot of banks kind of stopped to freeze

and take stock and certain strategic decisions got delayed, but now it was certainly accelerated

and potentially more so than it would have been prior to the pandemic just because so much of

the foot traffic in branches has not come back. Even as the economy starts to open back up,

people start going back outside, which you're seeing as a lot of customers are a lot more comfortable

...