ASBC and BCL: Business Leaders Step Up on Climate Policy

Media Release

WASHINGTON, D.C — No matter the outcome of the November Elections, now is the critical time for business leaders to urge legislators to pass a comprehensive national climate policy. The Step Up, Speak Out: A Business Advocacy Guide for Climate Action created by the American Sustainable Business Council and Business Climate Leaders can help business leaders contribute. 

Increasingly a vast number of major industry leaders acknowledge the urgency of climate change and realize that delaying action will have catastrophic impacts, as has been recently recognized by major business and financial organizations:

  • On September 9, 2020, the U.S Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), a federal agency, issued a near 200-page report, Managing Climate Risk in the U.S. Financial System, detailing how climate change “poses a major risk to the stability of the U.S. financial system and to its ability to sustain the American economy.” 
  • On September 15, 2010, the Business Roundtable, a major trade association of CEOs of companies with collectively over $7 trillion in revenues, announced its endorsement of a “market-based mechanism” as part of the plan to curb greenhouse gas emissions with pricing carbon as an essential step in that plan.  

These critical business and financial leaders understand that failure to take immediate, effective climate action will result in catastrophic damage to the US economy. 

Moreover, the new House Select Committee’s majority staff report gives 500 unprioritized climate recommendations on how the US should deal with the current climate crisis. The voices of business are important in order to prioritize these recommendations, and they should be aligned with the proactive companies working for decarbonization of our economy. An effective price on carbon is a keystone policy, essential for building the bridge between an increasingly disruptive climate, supporting innovation and competitive advantage in a global economy where carbon tax is already being implemented elsewhere. 

To help companies use their power to affect climate advocacy, the American Sustainable Business Council (ASBC) and Business Climate Leaders (BCL), an action team of Citizens’ Climate Lobby, have co-produced a new advocacy guide, Step Up, Speak Out: A Business Advocacy Guide for Climate Action.

“The simple fact is the business case for tackling the climate crisis can be boiled down to this: there are no jobs on a dead planet,” said Thomas Oppel, ASBC Executive Vice President. “That’s why business leaders need to step up and speak out.” 

“The positioning and lobbying efforts businesses take can stifle climate legislation, as has often happened in the past, or it can be a catalyst for change – we are here to support companies that would like to lobby and the new policy guide by ASBC and BCL aids that mission  ” said Harold Hedelman, Co-founder of Business Climate Leaders.  

Business Climate Leaders (BCL) is an initiative of Citizens’ Climate Lobby (CCL), a nonpartisan grassroots advocacy group with nearly 200,000 supporters in over 500 local chapters. BCL helps American businesses understand and take action in shaping federal climate policy. Visit businessclimateleaders.org