Top US Firms To Urge Congress To Fight Global Warming

CLIMATE SCIENCE

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. Photo courtesy AFP.

by Staff Writers
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.

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

CLIMATE SCIENCE

Deep In Arctic Mud And Geologists Find Strong Evidence Of Climate Change

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Jason P. Briner is looking for an answer buried deep in mud dozens of feet below the surface of lakes in the frigid Canadian Arctic. His group is gathering the first quantitative temperature data over the last millennium from areas in extreme northeastern sections of the Canadian Arctic, such as Baffin Island. Every spring, Briner, Ph.D., assistant professor of geology in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University at Buffalo, travels to the region to sample Arctic lake sediments and glaciers and analyzes them to reconstruct past climates.

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