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Top US Firms To Urge Congress To Fight Global Warming
Washington (AFP) Jan 19, 2007 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, an environment partnership said Friday. 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 on Monday in Washington. The USCAP report will be issued a day before US President George W. Bush delivers his annual State of the Union speech. Some commentators believe Bush will address climate change during his remarks. The US president has said he does not support mandatory government emission caps on US industry and his administration withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol, which seeks to curb greenhouse gases, in 2001. "After a year of collaboration and dialogue, our organizations have arrived at a set of principles and policy recommendations to address global warming," USCAP said in a statement. 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 obliterated the Gulf coast city of New Orleans and wide swathes of Louisiana and Mississippi in August 2005. 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, which some scientists have attributed to climate change. And a week ago, 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.
Source: Agence France-Presse Related Links Learn about Climate Science at TerraDaily.com Climate Science News - Modeling, Mitigation Adaptation
Climate Change Could Amplify Drought In East Indian Ocean And Australasia
Paris (AFP) Jan 17, 2007Climate change could worsen the impact of an El Nino-like weather system in the Indian Ocean, bring brutal droughts to parts of Indonesia and Australasia, a study published on Thursday says. The weather system is called the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD), a recently-discovered phenomenon that strikes the tropical Indian Ocean at various intervals, usually several years apart. |
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