Utilities Leave Chamber Over Global Warming

by Deb Powers

Over the past week, something very interesting has started to happen in the highest echelon of US business supporters. The US Chamber of Commerce is one of the largest pro-business lobbying and PR groups on the national scene. It boasts hundreds of thousands of member businesses, from one person real estate offices to major department stores, and claims to represent the interests of US businesses, small and large. Among its wealthiest constituents are energy companies that provide public utilities - electric and gas companies with familiar names.

The US Chamber of Commerce routinely takes a pro-business stance on most national issues. They are for tort reform - often at the expense of individuals who have been harmed by industry - and often anti-environmental causes. Specifically, the Chamber opposes all cap and trade efforts, and most other regulations that would require their largest member businesses to change the way that they use energy. To that end, the Chamber made news this summer when it issued a demand that the US Environmental Protection Agency convene a series of public hearings to examine the science behind climate change theories, quite literally and openly calling for the climate change equivalent of the Scopes monkey trials.

 The Chamber's attempt to force the US government to hold open hearings on what is, throughout the world, accepted and established science, is little more than an attempt to ensure wider spread of the manufactured controversy. The evidence is there. The facts are clear. Every major scientific body in the world is in agreement that the planet is warming over time and that the warming trend is directly traceable to man's activities. More specifically, the warming trend has greatly accelerated in the period of time since man has been using fossil fuels in earnest. The only groups that dispute those facts are those who face the most loss if we shift to using other sources of energy generation - the coal and oil companies and those funded by the coal and oil industry.

Of course, it's all about money. Cap and trade policies will push the prices of energy generated by coal and oil higher and make energy from renewable energy sources more expensive. They would eventually reduce the need for coal-fired energy plants, which are the source of the majority of US energy. For that reason, utility companies - which have a hefty investment in owning and holding those coal-fired plants - have traditionally aligned themselves with the Chamber of Commerce against many major changes in energy policy. There are exceptions, of course. Utility companies have traditionally favored energy policies that encourage conservation of energy rather than those that represent a fundamental change in the way that energy is produced and distributed.

And yet last week, three major US utility companies very publicly canceled their memberships in the US Chamber of Commerce to protest the Chamber's "embarrassing" position on climage change and global warming science.

San Francisco's PG&E (Pacific Gas & Electric) led the revolt, publicly withdrawing from the Chamber because of its "extreme rhetoric and obstructionist tactics" in the public debate over the US climate change bill. In a two page letter, PG&E chairman Peter Darbee, called the Chamber's tactics "disingenuous" and "dismaying".

PG&E was followed closely by PNM, which provides power for New Mexico, and Chicago's Exelon. Word from inside the industry is that there is  growing pressure on other utility companies and major corporations to withdraw from the Chamber in protest.

What inspired the defection from the US Chamber?

A hint of the answer may be in a public comment made by Exelon CEO John Rowe. "The carbon-based free lunch is over", he said. While he may have have been referring to man's "free lunch" at the expense of the environment, he could just as easily have been referring to the free lunch that coal and oil companies have enjoyed for years, thanks to heavy government subsidies. Those subsidies have contributed to keeping the price of coal and oil energy affordable. New legislation that reduces those subsidies and imposes new fees, shifting the subsidies instead to renewable energy sources, is the writing on the wall. It's nice to know that some companies can actually read it.