United Airlines quits WEF-backed corporate climate coalition

Founding member of the First Movers Coalition quietly exits 

United Airlines has quietly withdrawn from a corporate initiative dedicated to scaling green technologies in hard-to-abate sectors. 

The First Movers Coalition was launched by the World Economic Forum (WEF) at COP26 in 2021. 

It had the backing of the Biden administration in the US, and its 30 founding members included United Airlines, Amazon, Airbus and Boeing.  

Each pledged to drive demand for low-carbon solutions in at least one of the target areas: aluminium, aviation, cement and concrete, shipping, steel, trucking and carbon removal. 

There are now more than 100 firms involved in the initiative, but United Airlines is the only founding member no longer among them. 

A spokesperson for WEF confirmed to Real Economy Progress that the airline had left the coalition, but declined to provide any further information.   

United Airlines did not respond to a request for comment.  

The firm has regularly noted its participation in the First Movers Coalition over the past five years, and just before President Trump’s inauguration in January, the US Department of Energy namechecked United Airlines’ membership of the group in a report on Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF).

However, such references had stopped by the time the company published its most recent sustainability report, in July.   

Instead, United Airlines raised doubts about the potential for commercial-scale SAF to meet its needs. 

“[D]ue to a limited global feedstock supply today’s most mature SAF pathways cannot be relied upon in full to meet our SAF demand through 2050,” it wrote in the document, predicting that SAF made from non-food-biomass, such as forestry and municipal waste, will account for the lion’s share of its SAF mix by 2050, if commercialised.  

The head of airline trade association Iata recently flagged concerns about the supply of SAF in an interview with the Guardian.  

Willie Walsh expressed frustration about the lack of progress that’s been made so far on achieving the industry’s goal of 5% SAF by 2030, saying he did “not believe that target can be achieved given where we are in terms of SAF production”.