“Everybody likes their Chamber of commerce back home. They do good work. They represent local businesses. But the National Chamber of Commerce has been honestly terrible when it comes to climate action in particular. They actually oppose action that would cause 2 or 3 million jobs to be created, new careers, a national power grid. [...] All this economic leadership that America could display, and the Chamber is opposed to.”
Misinformation
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has recently adopted a number of positive climate change positions on their website:
supporting the US pledges made during the Paris Agreement (Note: they published this paper
attacking the Agreement),
highlighting the need for increased energy efficiency,
the importance of multi-lateral climate-science research forums, and
stressing that “Inaction is not an option: We call on policymakers to seize on an approach that rises to the challenge of climate change.”
These are all just great words. The Chamber continues to muddy the waters and underplay the urgent need for climate action.
2019
The Chamber remains strongly opposed to regulating coal, praising it as the cheapest, securest, and most abundant source of energy.
Coal producessignificantly more CO2 per kW/hr than other fossil fuels.
2019
The Chamber praised the Trump administration’s revision of the EPA “Clean Water Rule," which governs national water use, relaxing standards for water pollution and endangering the legal guarantee to clean drinking water for approximately 117 million Americans.
2019
Through its affiliate, the Global Energy Institute, the Chamber announced a new agenda: “American Energy: Cleaner Stronger.”
This agenda refers vaguely to the promise to “innovation and technology,” crucially dismisses the idea of regulating greenhouse gas emissions, and gives a raft of misleading polling that is supposed to show that there is no majority in favor of scientifically responsible climate action.
2018
The Chamber published a report making the ludicrous claims that ‘Keep it In Ground’ activists had cost the American economy $91.1 billion and destroyed around 730,000 job opportunities.
2017
In the “U.S. Chamber Policy Priorities for 2017,” the group made it a goal to prevent the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions.
Under the “Air Quality Regulation” category, you can find the goal: “Oppose efforts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions through existing environmental statutes, including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act.”
2017
The U.S. Chamber sponsored a report by the National Economic Research Associates (NERA), which was cited by President Trump in his decision to quit the Paris Climate Agreement.
The report does not hold up to scrutiny. It was debunked.
The report concludes that “Regulatory measures are an inefficient way to achieve climate goals.”
The Chamber repeated these talkingpoints in 2019 to aCongressional Hearing on the necessity for climate action.
2016
The Chamber put out anti-solar messaging. One newsletter attacked net metering, a key policy that pays households for selling their solar panels’ surplus energy to the grid:
“While your neighbor is receiving a credit (in the form of a reduced electricity bill) for putting excess energy back on the electricity grid, these outdated net metering policies overlook the costs to use, maintain, and update the grid. So, who is actually paying those costs? You — and everyone else!”
They also released this video attacking net metering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nThXBaI4ouk
Net metering is a key policy for encouraging the rapid spread of solar energy. The Chamber was joining in on the effort to kneecap the solar industry.
2016
The Chamber was listed as a creditor in the 2016 bankruptcy filings of Peabody Energy, a coal company which regularly publishes climate-change-skeptical policy recommendations.
The documents also showed links with prominent climate deniers,Willie Soon,Richard Lindzen, Roy Spencer, and Richard Berman, as well as links to sixty prominent climate-denying organizations.
2016
The Chamber made it an aim to defend coal. On the Institute for 21st Century Energy website:
“Coal is an indispensable foundation of the U.S. energy mix. But the EPA has begun issuing a rash of new regulations that are making it difficult to operate coal plants and virtually impossible to build a new ones. […] Steps should be taken to limit the harm from new and proposed rules that aim to curtail the use of one of our most abundant and secure sources of energy, ultimately harming businesses, consumers and the overall economy.”
2016
The Chamber also made it an aim to get rid of subsidies for renewable energy, claiming that these subsidies and other policies were somehow out of line with the “realities” of the market. On the Institute for 21st Century Energy website:
“While these forms of energy face challenges of cost and reliability, over time, additional research and development will bring prices down and deliver more reliable power—ultimately providing more clean energy to Americans. The government must phase out subsidies and reform its policies, which have fallen out of sync with the realities of their supply and the operation of power markets.”
This is a bad faith position: markets are formed and governed by laws. Congress must subsidize renewable energy technologies to ensure the safety of citizens and communities and prevent the worst effects of climate change.
2014
Testifying in a hearing held by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Karen Harbert, then president and CEO of the Chamber’s Institute for 21st Century Energy, said:
“[Climate change] is caused by lots of different things, and you can't say that climate change is only caused by humans. I think the science is what you're pointing to, and we have a robust debate going on in this country, as we should, and those that would say everything is settled sort of undercut the integrity of science. It's an ongoing discussion."
Multiple peer-reviewed studies show that 97% or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree that climate warming is extremely likely due to human activities.
2014
The Chamber started its “Keystone XL Pipeline Lost Opportunity Tour,” in Montana at the starting point of the proposed pipeline, ending in Nebraska, the final state on the pipeline route. The Chamber claimed to have met with “economic development leaders and a small business eagerly awaiting the construction.”
2014
The Chamber’s Institute for 21st Century Energy released a report finding that the “EPA’s plans to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from power plants will cost America’s economy over $50 billion a year between now and 2030.”
The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCC)reviewed the report, and found that the “widely cited report by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce contains no mention of the benefits of reducing carbon emissions and falsely inflates the costs of the proposed standards using what the EPA dubbed 'unfounded assumptions' about the then unpublished Clean Power Plan proposal.”
2010
The Chamber partnered with Scholastic books to distribute approximately 100,000 textbooks to middle schools across America as part of its “Shedding Light on Energy” campaign. The books included sections which played up the fears surrounding phasing out coal-powered stations.
2009
The Chamber submitted comments to the EPA, questioning the science behind climate change. They wrote that their “analyses” show that:
“a warming of even 3 [degrees] C in the next 100 years would, on balance, be beneficial to humans because the reduction of wintertime mortality/morbidity would be several times larger than the increase in summertime heat stress-related mortality/morbidity.”
1989
The Chamber helped found the Global Climate Coalition, together with Exxon, Texaco, the American Petroleum Institute, Shell Oil, and more than 40 other trade associations. The GCC led an aggressive lobbying and advertising campaign to spread the idea that the science around climate change was filled with uncertainties.
For example, in 1992, the group produced and disseminated a 28 minute long film, The Greening of Planet Earth, which suggested that increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide could boost crop yields and solve world hunger.