Many may recall that several months ago major American Business’s went to the Bush administration demanding something be done now about global warming.

The chief executives of 10 major corporations, on the eve of the State of the Union address, urged President Bush on Monday to support mandatory reductions in climate-changing pollution and establish reductions targets.

“We can and must take prompt action to establish a coordinated, economywide market-driven approach to climate protection,” the executives from a broad range of industries said in a letter to the president.

…

Members of the group, called the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, include chief executives of Alcoa Inc., BP America Inc., DuPont Co., Caterpillar Inc., General Electric Co. and Duke Energy Corp.

At a news conference, the executives said that mandatory reductions of heat-trapping emissions can be imposed without economic harm and would lead to economic opportunities if done economywide and with provisions to mitigate costs.

Many of the companies already have voluntarily moved to curb greenhouse pollution, they said. But the executives also said they do not believe voluntary efforts will suffice.

When some of the largest corporations in the world call for mandatory limits to green house gasses you know something big is going on. Most corportion will do anything they can to avoid mandatory government regulation. The story told me a couple of things. The major corporations of the world realize that if they do not get ahead of the coming bad PR storm, they are going to be blamed for global warming (many of the companies making the call are horrible polluters). It tells me that they have run the numbers and are worried about the bottom line, namely they are afraid that if something is not done about global warming soon they are going to lose a lot of money. It also shows that people who do not think humans cause global warming, are being pushed further and further into the fringes (along with people who think the earth is flat).

Now there are some nice videos summarising the events around that story put out by the Sea Studios Foundation.

I tend to take a hard look at these sorts of things, but all in all I am pleased that big business is starting to get serious about this problem.