Greenhouse gas emitted by coal plants like this one could be regulated. And that has businesses getting ready for a fight—with each other.

If you think the fight over health care legislation has been something to behold, just wait until debate over climate-change legislation gets under way in earnest.

Businesses are already dividing, and some of the biggest are taking some pretty large steps to stake out positions on legislation or regulations that would cap emissions of greenhouse gasses and set up a market to trade among corporations the rights to pollute.

“Energy, at this early stage—it’s an area where there’s just sharper cleavages among companies,” said Matthew J. Slaughter, associate dean of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. “And that’s different from many business issues.”

So far, it’s the utilities that are making the most noise. And they’re not on the side you may think they would be. These utilities favor legislation that has passed the House of Representatives and is sitting in the Senate awaiting the end of the health care debate. They’re voicing their concern by walking away from big business lobbies that don’t support climate-change action.

John Rowe, CEO of Exelon Corporation, one of the nation’s largest electric utilities, became the latest in a string of CEOs to say his company would quit the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—one of the biggest business lobbying groups with, over 3 million members—over positions the Chamber has taken toward climate change.

The Chamber has said it doesn’t oppose the principle of tackling global warming, but is concerned about the cost of such a change. And it has been particularly vocal in opposing an Environmental Protection Agency finding that, if Congress doesn’t act on climate change, the agency has the authority to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions. That finding arose from a Supreme Court ruling giving the EPA the order to treat greenhouse gasses as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. The Supreme Court ruling was made during the Bush era, but the EPA didn’t make its finding until the beginning of the Obama administration.

What set off the latest wave of anger was a Chamber official’s call for a “Scopes Monkey Trial” about the science of climate change, a statement that Chamber officials have since repudiated.

Exelon’s CEO begged to differ with the Chamber’s position. “The carbon-based free lunch is over,” Rowe said. “Breakthroughs on climate change and improving our society’s energy efficiency are within reach.”

Rowe’s Chicago-based company is the nation’s largest provider of nuclear power, and a large portion of its electricity also comes from natural-gas plants. Natural gas is the cleanest burning of the fossil fuels, and nuclear power doesn’t emit any greenhouse gasses. So it’s not as much of a stretch as it may seem for Exelon to support a lower-carbon society. It could conceivably be a winner in such a society—able to trade emissions permits for a profit with heavier greenhouse-gas emitters.

But Exelon wasn’t the first of the big utilities to depart the Chamber.

PG&E Corp. CEO Peter Darbee last week launched a letter to Chamber CEO Thomas Donahue criticizing the Chamber’s recent positions on climate change and announcing that his company was leaving the organization. “Extreme rhetoric and obstructionist tactics seem increasingly to mark the Chamber’s public stance on this issue,” Darbee wrote. “PG&E considers climate change to be among the most serious issues ever for our company, our country, and the world. With this in mind, after careful consideration, we have come to the difficult conclusion that our differences over this issue have grown so significant that we will not renew PG&E’s Chamber membership next year.”

“Over time as we’ve watched the Chamber take its positions, it was just increasingly clear that we were on different paths,” said Brian Hertzog, spokesman for the Northern California utility.

PNM Resources, the electric utility company for New Mexico, has also pulled out of the Chamber.

“At PNM Resources, we see climate change as the most pressing environmental and economic issue of our time. Given that view, and a natural limit on both company time and resources, we have decided that we can be most productive by working with organizations that share our view on the need for thoughtful, reasonable climate-change legislation and want to push that agenda forward in Congress,” the company said in a statement.

It’s not just the utilities, though. Nike came out with a statement last week blasting the Chamber’s position on climate change. "Nike fundamentally disagrees with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's position on climate change,” the company said in a release. But the company stopped short of quitting the Chamber.

Hertzog of PG&E said his company respects other organizations’ rights to continue to work within the Chamber.

“It’s really just a reflection of each company having to take a look at all of the issues that are in front of it,” he said. “For us, climate change is certainly one of, if not the, most important issues that we’re looking at the federal level. This is an issue that’s significant enough that a difference of opinion is enough for us to go in a different direction.”

President Obama has said he wants to cut greenhouse-gas emissions and return the United States to a position of world leadership in the fight against global warming. He is supporting legislation to that end and so are a number of businesses. Some 25 large companies—including DuPont, BP America, Ford Motor Company, and General Motors—have joined the United States Climate Action Partnership, a group focused on supporting cap-and-trade legislation.

Duke Energy, the nation’s second-largest burner of coal, and therefore one of the country’s biggest greenhouse-gas polluters, is a member of that coalition. The utility, which provides electricity in parts of the Southeast and the Midwest, isn’t going to quit the Chamber anytime soon. But it has left other organizations opposed to climate-change legislation.

In April, Duke CEO Jim Rogers said his company wouldn’t renew its membership in the National Association of Manufacturers after that group published a study saying the climate-change bill would cost 2.4 million jobs and add 50 percent to the cost of electricity.

“We want to invest in associations that are pulling in the same direction we are,” Rogers told Bloomberg at the time.

This summer, Duke abandoned its position as a member of the Clean Coal Coalition after learning that organization was going to be a dedicated opponent of capping greenhouse gasses.

“It became clear that there were certain members of the group that weren’t going to support climate legislation no matter how it was worded,” said Tom Williams, director of external relations for Duke Energy. That isn’t where his company is at, he said. “It’s not a perfect bill, but it came a long way,” he said of the pending legislation. – Portfolio.com

Related Posts

1. Exelon quits Chamber over climate change
2. Apple Walks Away, U.S. Chamber Of Commerce Fires Back
3. Business group demands new climate deal
4. Mohawk Fine Papers Resigns from U.S. Chamber of Commerce Over Climate Policy
5. US Chamber of Commerce Takes A Bite out of Apple
6. EFF defends Yes Men from business rage over climate hoax
7. Apple Becomes Latest Company to Abandon U.S. Chamber Over Climate
8. Climate experts accuse Ottawa of 'foot-dragging'
9. The Climate Bill Is Doomed
10. Energy Secretary applauds Apple leaving Chamber of Commerce