Companies to make climate pledges at U.N. summit

NEW YORK — Touted as the world's largest gathering ever on climate change, this week's U.N. Climate Summit will be as much about business as politics.

Major companies, including Big Oil, will make pledges to help fight global warming by cutting their heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions, protecting the world's forests and reducing methane leakage from fossil fuel production.

They're getting nudged to act, not just by tens of thousands of climate marchers who clogged Manhattan streets Sunday — some dressed as polar bears and others carrying signs that read, "Go Solar," "Fracking=Death" and "There Is No Planet B" — but by investors demanding action.

The result will be a climate extravaganza unlike any before. "This is very different. It's not just policy leaders," says Mindy Lubber, president of Ceres, a non-profit group that promotes sustainability. There's an "unprecedented" number of companies, investors and finance ministers involved, she says.

"It's a very, very positive sign," Todd Stern, U.S. special envoy for climate change, said in a White House briefing last week. "Business is increasingly focused on trying to, in some cases, be part of the clean energy revolution."

Monday, one day before the summit, Archbishop Desmond Tutu is slated to announce new fossil fuel divestment. Hundreds of wealthy individuals and at least 50 foundations will pledge to divest any holdings in the world's top 200 oil and gas producers, including ExxonMobil, BP and Chevron.

"It's a snowballing movement," says Stephen Heintz, president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which is signing on. His fund is controlled by a family whose fortune was made in the oil industry.

That's not all.

•About two dozen large companies will join environmental groups and 24 countries to stop deforestation, which can exacerbate global warming by releasing more heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. They'll commit not to source products — including palm oil, soy and beef — from land where forests have been recently or illegally cut down. They'll join Nestle, Kellogg's, Hershey's and General Mills, which have already pledged action.

"It's a good news story I never would have predicted," says Charles McNeill, a senior policy adviser for the United Nations Development Program, adding that it brings together groups that don't usually partner. He says major companies are taking the lead, but smaller ones will follow.

•Six of the world's largest oil and gas companies will commit, via a new partnership with the Climate and Clean Air Coalition, to take steps to reduce methane leaks in fossil fuel production.

"This is an enormous opportunity" for the industry, says Nathaniel Keohane of the Environmental Defense Fund, a private group. He says emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, account for 25% of global warming.

•World Bank President Jim Yong Kim will unveil a growing list of companies and cities that, like his organization, support a price on carbon. Advocates say that taxing fossil fuels such as oil and coal, which emit carbon when burned, will increase investments in energy efficiency and renewable power.

Last week, more than 340 global institutional investors with at least $24 trillion in assets — including Swiss Re and the Unitarian Universalist Association — called on government leaders to adopt carbon pricing. The European Union has done so, but the United States has not.

•We Mean Business, a coalition working with thousands of companies and investors, will launch with a report on increasing business support for low-carbon energy. It holds a discussion Monday between top U.N. climate negotiator Christiana Figueres and the leaders of two companies that have pledged to get all their power from renewable sources: Apple's Tim Cook and Ikea's Peter Agnefjäll.

Dozens of climate-related events will take place this week in the Big Apple, but the summit itself occurs Tuesday at U.N. headquarters. President Obama and leaders from more than 120 countries are likely to announce climate initiatives, and company CEOs will participate in talks or make their own commitments.

"We're taking this summit seriously, both to show that the United States is committed to leading the fight against climate change and to call on other leaders to step up to the plate," says John Podesta, Obama's counselor.

He says Obama will outline U.S. efforts but will not make a new emissions-cutting pledge until early next year. In 2009, at U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen, Obama pledged to reduce U.S. emissions by 17%, from 2005 levels, by 2020 — a goal the country is largely on course to meet.

The leaders of China and India, the world's first- and third-largest emitters of carbon dioxide, will not attend. Podesta said, however, China will be represented at "a very high level" by its vice premier, and India's new prime minister, Narendra Modi, will be meeting with Obama a few days later in Washington, D.C.

The summit will get a dose of Hollywood. Actor and environmentalist Leonardo DiCaprio, chosen as a U.N. Messenger of Peace, will speak. "I feel a moral obligation to speak out at this key moment in human history," he said in a statement.

Though the event is not part of formal U.N. climate negotiations, it's aimed at creating momentum for a new global accord to be signed next year in Paris. Prior U.N. agreements have not reduced global carbon emissions, which continue to rise mostly because of economic development in Asia.

This time may be different, says Jennifer Morgan, who directs climate and energy programs at the World Resources Institute, a research group. She says there's a greater sense of urgency about climate change as its impacts — sea level rise, drought, wildfires — become more visible.

She says the cost of solutions, such as wind and solar power, has fallen as their use has expanded. She says more companies see global warming as a business risk and embrace sustainability, which is "not the bogeyman anymore."

Stern, the U.S. climate negotiator, says there may be more "realism as well as ambition" among countries to address climate change than occurred at the Copenhagen talks in 2009. Still, he says, "these negotiations are always difficult."

Figueres, the U.N. negotiator, says net carbon emissions will need to be slashed to zero in the second half of this century to keep a global temperature rise under 2 degrees Celsius (or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

Heintz says his fund, the legacy of John D. Rockefeller, may signal a shift in U.S. attitudes. It devotes half its grants to promoting renewable power and climate research.

He says Rockefeller believed in innovation and in founding Standard Oil, he put an older industry — whale oil — out of business. "I'm convinced that if he were alive today," Heintz says, "he'd be looking out to the future and investing in clean energy technology."