BIG BUSINESS WANTS CARBON CAP-AND-TRADE

Top US firms to urge Congress to fight global warming
January 22, 2007 (AFP via Yahoo News)
- Some of corporate America's biggest names, including Alcoa, General Electric and DuPont, will urge the US Congress next week to act swiftly to help offset global warming…The United States Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), of which the three corporations are key members, said its members would issue a call to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the findings of a year-long report…

- The USCAP report will be issued a day before US President George W. Bush delivers his annual State of the Union speech…
- The US president has said he does not support mandatory government emission caps on US industry and his administration withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol…
- The group said the cornerstone of its approach would be to recommend "a cap-and-trade program" to trim greenhouse gases "to a level that minimizes large-scale adverse impacts to humans and the natural environment."
- USCAP also groups BP America, Caterpillar, Duke Energy, FPL Group, Lehman Brothers, energy group PG and E, PNM Resources and the non-governmental Environmental Defense group, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Pew Center on Global Climate Change and the World Resources Institute.

- Large US corporations have begun showing heightened concerns about global warming in recent years, especially since Hurricane Katrina…
- US insurers State Farm and Allstate are not seeking new home insurance business along wide stretches of the US East Coast amid fears of bigger hurricanes…the chairman of the London-based Lloyd's insurance market, Peter Levene, urged governments and businesses to not delay acting on the threat of global warming.
- Levene said Lloyd's is planning for fresh disasters, but questioned whether US lawmakers were seriously heeding the dangers posed by climate change.