Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
The two authors of the US bill to establish a cap-and-trade plan for greenhouse
gases: Henry A. Waxman of California and Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts,
both Democrats.
group called the Global Climate Coalition. This group's main function
was to stress and fund research that stressed the scientific uncertainty
about climate change.
But in 1996 BP, a UK oil major with a big North American presence,
quit this coalition, saying it could no longer deny the gathering evidence
about global warming and about the role of fossil fuels in climate change.
This was the first pro-climate stand by any oil major, and it led to defec-
tions from the Global Climate Coalition by other Europe-based oil
majors such as Shell and, eventually, the dissolution of the Global Climate
Coalition in 2002.
In 2007 the US Climate Action Partnership was formed among a vari-
ety of companies. Some of them were in the energy field: utilities such
as Duke Energy, NRG Energy and Exelon, and oil companies like BP
America, Shell and ConocoPhillips. As its name suggests, USCAP favours
action. In August 2009 - just as the API's Jack Gerard was sending out his
memo - USCAP had publicly reaffirmed the need for cleaner energy as “a
necessary investment in the future”. The Gerard memo being made public
came as an embarrassment to the two European oil-company members,
BP and Shell, which belong to USCAP as well as to the API. Subsequently
BP and ConocoPhillips quit USCAP, leaving only one oil major, Shell, as
a member.
