The US chamber of Commerce -Inside the Chamber of Carbon

[Ichingcarpenter]

In embracing this aggressively narrow climate policy, the Chamber appears to have gone around its usual policy-making process. According to the Chamber's internal rules, its policies and positions are developed by committees and then approved or rejected by its board of directors. But Donald J. Sterhan, chair of the Chamber’s energy and environment committee, says that its board of directors and its committees never formally endorsed the climate stance. "There was no vote taken," he says. He adds that his committee held "really more of an information discussion" than a policy debate on the issue. The final decision to challenge the EPA's regulation of greenhouse gasses, he explains, was "Bill position on this, and his finding." Still, Sterhan says that the energy committee could have voted to change the policy if any of its 60 members had filed a motion to do so.

One Chamber member disputes that claim, however. "Several members raised the issue of how they could influence or change the Chamber's policy," says a spokesman for a company that participated in the energy committee meetings and had also worked with the US Climate Action Partnership to craft what became the Waxman-Markey bill. He asked that his company not be named because it was concerned about the Chamber's response to its criticism. Members of the energy committee that questioned the Chamber's climate stance "were told that basically this was not the forum to do it," he says. "There's basically no outlet for changing the policy."

Several Chamber members representing USCAP recently met with president Tom Donohue to request that he alter the group's climate stance, according to the spokesman. "They were totally rebuffed," he says. Donohue "said that they should continue the dialogue, but offered no methods or avenues for changing the Chamber's position."

In an interview with Greenwire published yesterday, Nike backed other board members who say they never voted to approve the Chamber's climate policies. "We just weren't clear in how decisions on climate and energy were being made," said Brad Figel, Nike's director of government relations. "They're not being made at the board-of-director level, because we're a member of the board of directors. We were not consulted. We're convinced that's not really where the action on climate change is being made."

The Chamber declined to respond to most questions for this story, but spokesman Eric Wohlschlegel says, "The Chamber's polices are developed by its members through numerous policy committees in a democratic process. The committees make recommendations to the full board, who then formalize policies based on a majority vote."

On its website, the Chamber says that it asks for the views of its members "on certain key issues through meetings, mailings, and surveys." But most important decisions are supposed to go through its board and policy committees. New members of the board must be selected by the board's nominating committee and and approved by its sitting members. Though the board officially strives for a diverse membership, of its 118 members, only 1 represents a local chamber and only 6 are from small businesses. The rest are highly capitalized regional, national, or international corporations.

An unusually large portion of the more than 100 board members come from companies tied to the production or burning of fossil fuels. At least 49 of 118 board members represent oil and gas companies, chemical companies, utilities, transportation companies, the construction industry, or companies that build machines that burn large amounts of petroleum. Three of the five members of the board's senior council represent such interests. Only two board member companies, Siemens and Alpha Technologies, earn a significant portion of their revenues from alternative energy technologies.


http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2009/10/chamber-commerce-vs-climate-change

[hatrack]

1. Shocked, shocked!

Who'da thunkit?