Richard Tafoya
Jun 1st, 2006, 02:14 AM
USA Today:
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/2006-05-31-business-globalwarming_x.htm
Corporate leaders don't normally invite the federal government to raise their taxes. But that's exactly what Paul Anderson is doing.
Anderson, the chairman of Charlotte-based Duke Energy, wants the federal government to fight global warming by taxing companies based on the "greenhouse gases" they pump into the atmosphere — just the sort of big-government remedy the Bush administration says would hobble the economy.
...
But Anderson, 61, is no closet left-winger. He's a registered Republican, Bush backer and member of the president's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. That such a Big Business stalwart is demanding federal action on climate change illustrates an unmistakable evolution in corporate thinking, motivated both by evidence that global warming already is affecting the economy and by the prospect of fat profits from new environment-friendly products.
...
Corporate America, which once regarded cries of "global warming" about as favorably as The Communist Manifesto, increasingly is embracing the need for reducing human contributions to the planet's rising temperatures. Forty companies — including Boeing, IBM, John Hancock and Whirlpool — have publicly endorsed the notion that climate change is real by joining a business council organized by the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.
Electric power companies are the single largest industrial emitter of carbon dioxide, the chief chemical culprit in "global warming." But Duke Energy on the East Coast, California's PG&E on the West Coast, and other utilities see mandatory federal emission caps as preferable to the current patchwork of state regulations they confront. A uniform national standard would eliminate costly uncertainties hanging over investment decisions on new multibillion-dollar power plants, they say.
It's not just power companies that are agitating for action. Institutional investors are demanding that companies disclose their financial exposure to future climate changes. Insurers are abandoning underwriting in coastal areas threatened by costly Hurricane Katrina clones, and companies such as General Electric and DuPont are gearing up to prosper from the transition to a carbon-constrained world. Last year, Goldman Sachs Chairman Henry Paulson, now Treasury secretary-designate, warned that the time needed to address climate change was running out.
"There's a sea change underway in American business," says Al Gore, the former vice president. "What's different in business audiences in the past year or so is a new and widespread receptivity, a keen awareness, an eagerness on the part of large numbers to find out how they can take a leadership position. And a recognition, too, that there are profits to be made."
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/2006-05-31-business-globalwarming_x.htm
Corporate leaders don't normally invite the federal government to raise their taxes. But that's exactly what Paul Anderson is doing.
Anderson, the chairman of Charlotte-based Duke Energy, wants the federal government to fight global warming by taxing companies based on the "greenhouse gases" they pump into the atmosphere — just the sort of big-government remedy the Bush administration says would hobble the economy.
...
But Anderson, 61, is no closet left-winger. He's a registered Republican, Bush backer and member of the president's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. That such a Big Business stalwart is demanding federal action on climate change illustrates an unmistakable evolution in corporate thinking, motivated both by evidence that global warming already is affecting the economy and by the prospect of fat profits from new environment-friendly products.
...
Corporate America, which once regarded cries of "global warming" about as favorably as The Communist Manifesto, increasingly is embracing the need for reducing human contributions to the planet's rising temperatures. Forty companies — including Boeing, IBM, John Hancock and Whirlpool — have publicly endorsed the notion that climate change is real by joining a business council organized by the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.
Electric power companies are the single largest industrial emitter of carbon dioxide, the chief chemical culprit in "global warming." But Duke Energy on the East Coast, California's PG&E on the West Coast, and other utilities see mandatory federal emission caps as preferable to the current patchwork of state regulations they confront. A uniform national standard would eliminate costly uncertainties hanging over investment decisions on new multibillion-dollar power plants, they say.
It's not just power companies that are agitating for action. Institutional investors are demanding that companies disclose their financial exposure to future climate changes. Insurers are abandoning underwriting in coastal areas threatened by costly Hurricane Katrina clones, and companies such as General Electric and DuPont are gearing up to prosper from the transition to a carbon-constrained world. Last year, Goldman Sachs Chairman Henry Paulson, now Treasury secretary-designate, warned that the time needed to address climate change was running out.
"There's a sea change underway in American business," says Al Gore, the former vice president. "What's different in business audiences in the past year or so is a new and widespread receptivity, a keen awareness, an eagerness on the part of large numbers to find out how they can take a leadership position. And a recognition, too, that there are profits to be made."