Why Isn't Anyone Lobbying For Climate Change?

In a recent week in Washington, I took lobbying meetings with TechNet, the lumber industry and the property casualty insurance industry. Let me give you a glimpse inside these meetings, because they help explain why so little progress is being made in Congress on climate change.

TechNet represents the technology giants like Apple and Google , among others, and also an array of clean and renewable energy companies. The tech companies tend to be forward-leaning on climate change and the interest of the clean energy sector is obvious. This group is big and powerful enough to lobby us in bulk, so there was a group meeting with many Senators in a big room. TechNet brought glossy materials listing the issues on which they wanted Congressional action. Climate change was not on the list.

A day or two later, two lumber dealers came to see me, and I stepped out of a hearing to talk with them. The western lumber industry is losing millions of acres of pine forest to the pine beetle, which thanks to climate change is now marauding into latitudes and altitudes from which cold temperatures had kept it before. The eastern hardwoods industry complains of its valuable stock being hard to regrow in warming northeastern forests. The lumber guys had a less glossy handout with their list of concerns for Congress. Again, climate change was not one of them.

Then the property casualty insurance folks met with me in my office. They had a list of issues to go over with me, too. Despite the fact that this industry writes the checks when extreme weather destroys homes and property, and despite rising claims as climate change and storms and damage all worsen, their list also did not include action on climate change.

Washington's dirty secret

I asked them all, if you are not going to lobby on climate change, who do you think will? If TechNet with its green energy firms, the lumber industry with its climate challenges, and the property casualty insurance industry paying for storm damage, all come to Washington and don't even have climate change on their lobbying portfolio, what do they expect from Congress?

Washington's dirty secret is that even the American companies that are really good on sustainability put net zero effort into lobbying Congress on climate change.

Here's one example of how that transpires: Coca-Cola and PepsiCo are terrific climate companies in virtually every way, but they lobby through the American Beverage Association, which is moribund on climate. When something important to the soda industry comes up, like killing a soda tax to pay for healthcare, the Association will lobby like crazy. But on climate—nothing.

Worse, the Association is a member of the board of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is such a relentless foe of any climate action that it should more properly be called the U.S. Chamber of Carbon. Thus the lobbying effect in Congress of these two otherwise terrific companies goes net negative; the lobbying they support actually runs against their stated positions on sustainability and climate. The major business lobby groups—the National Association of Manufacturers, the National Federation of Independent Businesses and the Farm Bureau—have all been coopted by fossil fuel interests, so any corporation with good climate policies lobbying through them has this same predicament.

Fear of retribution

Throughout the American corporate sector, corporate leaders I've talked to about this problem uniformly assert fear of retribution as a reason to stand clear. The Republican Party is now so intertwined with the fossil fuel industry, and so dependent on it for "dark money," that fossil fuel interests can deploy Republican politicians to exact retribution for lobbying on climate.

What's new is safety in numbers. One of the unheralded features of the Paris Accord effort was the impressive gathering of American corporate leaders that assembled to support a strong climate deal. Walmart and Target, Apple and Google, Unilever and General Mills, Mars and Nestle, Nike and VF Corporation, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs, and yes, Coke and Pepsi, all were among the iconic corporate leaders strongly engaged—154 in all. The breakthrough factor is that this assembled group is too big to punish.

In my experience, plenty of Republican members of Congress would like to get to work on climate change, for reasons of principle, or because of constituent demands, or from simple fear of being appallingly wrong on a vital issue. But their immediate calculation is that the fossil fuel industry will punish them if they dare, and they won't have a single trustworthy friend at their side. This is not an unreasonable fear after Citizens United, with groups like the Koch Brothers' network very publicly wielding a $750 million political spending cudgel, and warning of "political peril" to those who cross them.

We are far closer to getting something big done on climate in Congress than most people think, but the good guys in the corporate sector have to start showing up.