Apple’s Out – Latest To Quit US Chamber of Commerce
Apple is leaving the US Chamber of Commerce, effective immediately. It’s the biggest company, and the first in the tech sector, to jump ship, but it’s also just the latest in an expanding group of companies that have quit, or publicly criticized, the Chamber.
The cause of all the controversy is the Chamber’s position on climate change and their persistence in resisting plans to reduce US industry’s greenhouse gas emissions. The Chamber recently expressed opposition to a plan to allow the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants. It also opposed the energy bill that the House passed in June and called for a new “Scopes monkey trial” to decide the legitimacy of climate change science.
“Apple supports regulating greenhouse gas emissions, and it is frustrating to find the chamber at odds with us in this effort,” wrote Catherine A. Novelli, the vice president of worldwide government affairs at Apple, in a letter to the Chamber.
Apple also recently created a life cycle impact section on its Web site that accounts for its total carbon footprint. "We believe it has resulted in the broadest possible measure of the carbon footprint for each of our new products," Apple told the Carbon Disclosure Project, which publishes emissions data for corporations. "No other electronics company reports this information at the product level, but we think they should."
Chamber President Thomas J. Donohue has said his group does support "strong federal legislation" to protect the climate, but legislation passed by the House was flawed because it did not require other polluting countries to act and did too little to spur U.S. investment in green technologies.
Meanwhile, a spokesman for the Chamber, Eric Wohlschlegel, seemed to dismiss critics in an e-mail statement: "While we'll continue to represent the broad majority of our membership on this goal, we recognize that there are some companies who stand to gain more than others with the current options on the table."
-- Suzanne Bopp
