At Davos, corporations pledge to buy “green”

WASHINGTON » More than 50 corporations have joined a global “buyers’ club” that pledges to purchase aluminum, steel and other commodities made from processes that emit little to no carbon, a move that will be announced Wednesday by leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

John Kerry, President Joe Biden’s special climate envoy, and a group of billionaire corporate titans — including Bill Gates, the cofounder of Microsoft, and Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce — are gathering at a Swiss Alps resort for the forum.

The idea behind the buyers’ club, known as the First Movers Coalition, is to stoke demand for green versions of materials that have proved difficult to manufacture without significant carbon dioxide emissions.

The group includes Ford Motor Co. and the Volvo Group, both of which have pledged that 10% of their primary aluminum purchases will be manufactured with little to no carbon emissions by 2030. Aluminum production is responsible for 2% of global emissions — and the advanced technologies needed to create it without releasing carbon dioxide are not yet commercially available.

Google’s parent company, Alphabet, and Microsoft and Salesforce have promised to spend $500 million on technology to capture and store carbon emissions. Three other companies — AES, an electric power distribution company headquartered in Virginia; Mitsui O.S.K. Lines, a Japanese transport company; and Swiss Re, a reinsurance company based in Switzerland — each committed to removing 50,000 tons of carbon from the atmosphere by 2030. The governments of India, Japan, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Norway, Singapore and Britain also have joined the coalition.

“We are creating a demand for low-carbon products,” particularly for nascent clean technologies in steel, aviation, aluminum, cement and chemicals, said Borge Brende, president of the World Economic Forum. Those sectors are responsible for about 30% of global emissions, but that figure is expected to rise to about 50% of emissions by midcentury.

Brende noted that with climate change having an impact in countries such as India and Pakistan, which have faced record-breaking heat for weeks, the human and economic toll of global warming is mounting.

“The price of inaction far exceeds the price of action when it comes to climate change,” Brende said.