Earth Equity News

USCAP Corporate Members Donate to Deniers. By Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker, March 22, 2009. "There's green and then, of course, there's green. Two years ago, a dozen of the country's major corporations, including Caterpillar, Duke Energy, and Dow Chemical, banded together with several of the nation's leading environmental groups to form a group called the United States Climate Action Partnership. According to the group's Web site, USCAP's mission is to encourage 'the federal government to enact legislation requiring significant reductions of greenhouse gas emissions.' That's a nice thought and by signing onto it USCAP's members got a lot of nice press (including in The New Yorker). But a recent analysis of campaign giving by the non-profit group Clean Air Watch suggests that USCAP's corporate members do not take USCAP's goals terribly seriously. In fact, they seem to be devoting considerable resources to undermining them... 'USCAP has made a lot of noise about, Oh, it's very progressive; it wants to do this, it wants to do that,' Frank O'Donnell, the president of Clean Air Watch, told me. 'So we looked at: what did they give to the perceived leaders in Congress for taking action on global warming and what did they give to the people who are probably most likely to be in opposition to action? And we found that the contributions were substantially higher to the opponents of global warming legislation. This smacks of hypocrisy on a pretty big scale.'"