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In 2023, China Hongqiao Group, one of the world's largest aluminum producers, will shut down 1.5 million tons of smelting capacity, stop supplying electricity from coal electricity, and instead connect to cleaner hydropower across the country. Moved. This move alone is expected to reduce carbon pollution from these smelters by 30%.
This is the kind of business decision that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, and is a dramatic example of a nascent but important trend of companies taking direct action to combat climate change.
Solving climate change requires a bold new style of business leadership. And huge amounts of capital (recent estimates vary from $3 trillion to $5 trillion per year over the next 10 years) to fund practical solutions that reduce emissions, restore nature, and improve quality of life. We also need to mobilize. Scientists can identify problems and evaluate our options. Activists and organizers can expand the conversation. But companies are often in the best position to actually deploy solutions at scale.
This is starting to happen. The U.S. Inflation Control Act is considered the most important climate bill in history, with approximately $370 billion invested over the next decade, and a new generation of business leaders using the incentives to create better products. , services, and building services. companies. Unfortunately, business is still moving very slowly, and most people are unaware of these changes occurring in commerce, law, policy, technology, community leadership, and science.
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In fact, the so-called green hash effect (where companies deliberately remain silent about their efforts on climate change and nature out of fear of public scrutiny) is more powerful than we expected when we created this list. was. Even among climate change experts, examples of concrete business activities were not a top priority. But when we looked, we found countless hopeful examples of how business leaders are now driving positive action, even in some of the world's most polluting industries, including shipping, manufacturing, agriculture, and energy. Ta.
To identify the real change-makers, TIME editors worked with TIME CO2's in-house climate change experts: Isabella Acker, Bee Hui Ye, Simon Mulcahy, Shaila Raghav, Andrew Wu, and myself. We spent months vetting candidates from across the business community. In line with the latest scientific and economic thinking, we prioritized candidates from the five systems where change is most important: energy, nature, finance, culture, and health. We focused on measurable and scalable outcomes over promises and announcements. We supported more recent actions. Ultimately, his original TIME100 climate list did not produce a single perfect example of complete climate action, but many that made significant progress in the fight against climate change by creating business value. individuals were selected. We asked them to talk about it. We hope their words will inspire others to do the same.
