Sweden and California, along with 24 companies, joined an international alliance whose goal is to move away from coal-fired power generation.
The Powering Past Coal Alliance, launched by Canada and the U.K. in November with 27 founding partners, announced it doubled in size in the past month, with the governments of Ethiopia, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Tuvalu and Vanuatu also joining during the One Planet Summit held Dec. 12 in Paris.
The new business members include Richard Branson's Virgin Group, Marks and Spencer, Unilever and Salesforce and represent a combined wealth of more than $170 billion.
"I'm thrilled to see so many business leaders commit today to moving away from a source of power that is choking cities and causing close to a million premature deaths per year," Catherine McKenna, Canada's minister of environment and climate change, said in a Dec. 12 release.
"The market has moved on, and coal is not coming back," she added.
To meet the Paris Agreement on climate change goal of limiting the global temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius, coal needs to be phased out by 2030 in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development and in the European Union, by 2040 in China and by 2050 in the rest of the world, the release said, citing an analysis by Climate Analytics.
