China's local nancial expansion, represented by the development of urban commercial banks, is an important factor affecting the environmental behavior of enterprises, but previous studies have paid less attention to this.We found that both the marginal expansion and the scale expansion of local nance in China help to reduce the sulfur dioxide emission intensity and improve the environmental performance of enterprises, which indicates that there is a green gospel effect of local nancial expansion in China. In terms of the impact path, local nancial expansion can not only reduce the sulfur dioxide generation intensity, improve the front environmental performance of enterprises; but also increase the sulfur dioxide removal intensity and improve the terminal environmental performance. However, in the context of high scal pressure on local governments, local nancial expansion exacerbates sulfur dioxide emission and generation intensity of enterprises, worsening environmental performance and creating a green curse effect. Further study nds that the cross-regional expansion of urban commercial banks can strengthen the green gospel effect; the improvement of enterprises' environmental performance by local nancial expansion is mainly found in polluting industries and non-SOEs.