Having seen the health care industry's triumph in scuttling fast action on reform with the use of crude myths and scare tactics, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce hopes to create its own spectacle to sabotage global warming legislation moving through Congress.
With a straight face, the Washington-based chamber is demanding that the Environmental Protection Agency stage a debate to determine whether climate change exists. If the EPA refuses to join in this carnival, the chamber threatens to sue the government to force a debate.
Perhaps a more productive debate would be on the question of whether Wall Street can be trusted.
EPA quite properly calls the chamber's theatrics "a waste of time." Decades of data, not to mention graphic photos, have provided irrefutable evidence that man-made air pollution is poisoning the planet's air and damaging wildlife as well as glaciers and water.
The U.S. Chamber comes to the climate change debate without clean hands.
It has ardently opposed measures to increase automotive fuel mileage and just as ferociously opposes bold anti-pollution measures as "flawed," claiming corporate costs take precedence over environmental needs. Thanks to such opposition, Detroit has lost major market shares to Japan's more fuel-efficient vehicles.
While the chamber lives in the past fighting the inevitable, forward-thinking corporations have joined the climate-change movement by converting offices and industries to "green" technologies.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce should turn its energies from perpetuating the problem to finding a solution.
