sirenianshores

You know something is up when even the business community recognizes global warming as a serious problem.

FOR a country that is often cast as evil incarnate when it comes to the environment, America has amassed an impressive array of green credentials of late. Even the National Football League plans to offset the greenhouse gases generated by this year’s Super Bowl in February. The day before George Bush was due to use the state-of-the-union message to unveil his latest environmental measures, some of America’s biggest firms made their move. On Monday January 22nd, ten big corporations, including General Electric, Alcoa, DuPont and Duke Energy, in cahoots with leading environmental groups, called for measures to combat global warming.

America produces a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gases, the main causes of global warming. America refused to ratify the Kyoto protocol and so far efforts to regulate emissions have been piecemeal and usually at state level. The US Climate Action Partnership is seeking to change this. It wants a mandatory nationwide cap on emissions of carbon-dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, and reductions by as much as 30% from today’s levels, within the next 15 years. It also calls for a carbon-trading system and strongly discourages the building of coal-fired power stations, unless technology allows them to operate more cleanly. The latter belch out carbon dioxide at a significantly quicker pace than other electricity-generating plants.

The new formal rules would impose something of a burden on their proponents (though perhaps other sorts of business might suffer more). But there seem to be strong reasons why American firms would want to act now. In part it is becoming clear that mandatory federal controls over carbon emissions are on the cards anyway. Leading politicians have become more receptive to proposals to mitigate climate change in the past few years.

Why some firms want caps on emissions