Business Action On Climate Change - Overview

Overview

In 1989 in the US, the petroleum and automotive industries and the National Association of Manufacturers created the Global Climate Coalition (GCC) to oppose mandatory actions to address global warming. In 1997, when the US Senate overwhelmingly passed a resolution against ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, the industry funded a $13 million industry advertising blitz in the run-up to the vote.

In 1998 the New York Times published an American Petroleum Institute (API) memo outlining a strategy aiming to make "recognition of uncertainty ... part of the 'conventional wisdom.'" The memo has been compared to a late 1960s memo by tobacco company Brown and Williamson, which observed: "Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact' that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy." Those involved in the memo included Jeffrey Salmon, then executive director of the George C. Marshall Institute, Steven Milloy, a prominent skeptic commentator, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute's Myron Ebell. In June 2005 a former API lawyer, Philip Cooney, resigned his White House post after accusations of politically motivated tampering with scientific reports.

In 2002 the GCC considered its work in the US against regulation on global warming to have been so successful that it "deactivated" itself, although the loss of some leading members may also have been a factor.

At the same time, since 1989 many previously skeptical petroleum and automobile industry corporations have changed their position as the political and scientific consensus has grown, with the creation of the Kyoto Protocol and the publication of the International Panel on Climate Change's Second and Third Assessment Reports. These corporations include major petroleum companies like Royal Dutch Shell, Texaco, and BP, as well as automobile manufacturers like Ford, General Motors, and DaimlerChrysler. Some of these have joined with the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (formerly the Pew Center on Global Climate Change), a non-profit organization aiming to support efforts to address global climate change.

Since 2000, the Carbon Disclosure Project has been working with major corporations and investors to disclose the emissions of the largest companies. By 2007, the CDP published the emissions data for 2400 of the largest corporations in the world, and represented major institutional investors with $41 trillion combined assets under management. The pressure from these investors had had some success in working with companies to reduce emissions.

The World Business Council for Sustainable Development, a CEO-led association of some 200 multinational companies, has called on governments to agree on a global targets, and suggests that it is necessary to cut emissions by 60-80 percent from current levels by 2050.