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referred to as a virtuous cycle: if they could get
commitments from the private sector on climate
issues, they argued, it would theoretically push
government to do more, which in turn would push
companies to double down. In 2015, that approach
was put into practice as a group of business lead-
ers showed up in Paris to talk with government
officials. The result: CEOs declared their commit-
ment to reducing emissions, and the final text of
the Paris Agreement created a formalized frame-
work for involving private companies in the offi-
cial U.N. process.
Just a year later, the U.S. elected Donald Trump
as President and began to unravel the country’s
environmental rules. Five months into office, he
announced that he would take the U.S. out of the
Paris Agreement. Within hours, 20 Fortune 500
companies declared that they were “still in” the
global climate deal and would cut their emissions
in hopes of keeping the U.S. on track. By the time
Trump left office, more than 2,300 American com-
panies had joined the coalition. For many pushing
climate action, working with the private sector be-
came the best path forward.
The most important private-sector push came
from the institutional investors at the center of
the global economy, who control trillions of dol-
lars in assets and are invested in every sector and
essentially every publicly traded firm. When you
own a little bit of everything, the scenarios por-
tending climate-driven economic decline are ter-
rifying. “We’re too big to just take all of our hun-
dreds of billions and try to find a nice safe place
for that money,” Anne Simpson, then director of
board governance and sustainability at CalPERS,
California’s $500 billion state pension fund, told
me in 2019. “We’re exposed to these systemic risks,
so we have to fix things.”
With the U.S. government on the sidelines, these
investors joined together to send a signal. When
French President Emmanuel Macron hosted a cli-
mate summit in Paris in December 2017, he brought
together investors controlling $68 trillion in assets
to launch Climate Action 100+. In the beginning,
members of this consortium used their status as
high-profile investors to push emission reductions
in 100 publicly traded companies through one-
on-one engagements with high-level executives.
“All of this made for a reorganization of the
politics of climate,” says Laurence Tubiana, a key
framer of the Paris Agreement who now heads the
European Climate Foundation. “It has now crys-
tallized into something new: a strong coalition be-
tween business, financial institutions, investors,
and governments.”All these threAds came together last year in
Glasgow at the U.N. climate conference. Walking
around the Scottish Events Center last November,
it would have been easy to forget that the confer-
ence was ostensibly for government officials. An
observer could easily spot, among the 40,000 at-
tendees, high-profile business leaders mingling in
the hallway. And by many accounts, the most sig-
nificant news involved the private sector. Six major
automakers joined with national governments to
declare they would produce 100% zero- emissions
passenger vehicles no later than 2040. A group of
financial institutions representing $130 trillion in
assets committed to aligning its investments and
operations with the Paris Agreement.
But emissions are not the only concern. In
Glasgow, activists complained about being ex-
cluded from negotiating rooms while business
leaders were ushered onstage. “It now looks more
like a trade summit rather than a climate conven-
tion,” says Asad Rehman, who organized for COP26
Coalition, a climate-justice group. These activists
worry about what the resulting government deci-
sions look like when they’re made hand in hand
with businesses. “The very people who created
this crisis are now positioning themselves as the
people who will solve it,” says Rehman. “The de-
cisions being made seem very much to be locking
us into a particular approach to solve the crisis—
and, of course, that approach is not necessarily in
the best interest of the people.”
Last December, just a few weeks after returning
to the U.S. from Glasgow, I caught a flight from Chi-
cago to Washington, D.C., on what United Airlines
billed as the first flight operated with an engine
running only on a lower-carbon alternative to jet
fuel. As we approached Reagan airport, Scott Kirby,△
The launch of a key climate coalition for businesses in
2017 with Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, and others