Earlier this month corporate climateers including Nike and 3M were given awards — supposedly “the equivalent of an Oscar for the climate change mitigation world” — for their efforts to reduce their carbon emissions. The honors were bestowed by the Carbon War Room, which “harnesses the power of entrepreneurs to implement market-driven solutions to climate change.” The Virgin Group’s Richard Branson is one of the nonprofit’s co-founders.
The War Room gave Nike the Gigaton Award for the “consumer discretionary” category. The prize was named for a Clinton Global Initiative project called Gigaton Throwdown, which “encourages companies, entrepreneurs, policy makers, and investors to build big solutions to create climate stability and energy security.” Award winners are chosen by the Gigaton Academy, which consists of alarmist luminaries such as Branson, Ted Turner, UN IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri, Nicholas Stern, and a host of rent-seeking alternative energy industry leaders.
As reported earlier this month by NLPC, Nike also co-signed a letter to President Obama that called for U.S. leadership in an initiative to create and finance the Global Climate Fund, which was established at the UN climate talks in Cancun in early December. Similarly as part of the Business for Innovative Climate and Energy Policy — created by environmental pressure group Ceres — Nike endorsed a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and his colleagues to urge Congress to allow the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions:
We are writing as major US businesses to urge you to oppose all riders to the FY11 Interior Appropriations bill that would block or delay enforcement of the Clean Air Act and /or specifically curtail EPA’s ability to take action on the regulation of carbon.
For nearly two years, our coalition, Business for Innovative Climate and Energy Policy [BICEP] has worked with members of Congress toward passage of comprehensive climate and energy legislation because we believe it is critical to the health of our businesses and essential for job creation and innovation in the United States.
It is important to underscore that we have always believed strongly that Congress should lead on setting climate and energy policy for the United States. However, in lieu of Congress’s ability to pass a comprehensive bill we feel that EPA’s legitimate authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions should not be constrained at this time.
Other members of BICEP include Levi Strauss & Co., Starbucks, Timberland, Best Buy, Ben & Jerry’s, eBay, Gap Inc., The North Face, and Target Corporation. Mark them down as corporations who favor the circumvention of the peoples’ right to have their elected representatives make U.S. laws.