companies with higher energy costs, stunting growth.
The chamber said in a news release Friday that its message to climate delegates is "businesses are committed to continuing to improve their environmental stewardship to address climate change ... (but) any agreement must not undermine economic competitiveness or shed jobs."
When international leaders first gathered to discuss global warming, in Rio de Janeiro in 1991, only a few corporate chiefs joined them, said Norine Kennedy, vice president for energy and environment affairs for the United States Council for International Business. Last week, hundreds and perhaps thousands made the trip to Copenhagen.
"Our thinking has evolved as the treaty has evolved, as it has grown into new areas," said Kennedy, whose group represents 300 companies and is pushing for a more active business role in climate negotiations. "We see a larger and larger range of companies _ not just in terms of their sectors, but sizes and nationalities _ participating."
A combination of responsibility and opportunity has driven the shift, according to several of the executives who swung through the conference to lobby for an agreement.
"What has changed in the last 10 years is that businesses have understood that to be sustainable is a must, and there is no future without concern for the environment," said Philippe Joubert, president of Paris-based Alstom Power, which operates power plants around the globe and recently opened the world's first pilot-scale plant for capturing and storing carbon dioxide emissions from coal.
Joubert and several other business leaders here all said they want the Copenhagen talks to yield long-term rules that will set a price on greenhouse gas emissions. The sentiment, oddly enough, echoes the consensus of oil and gas executives who gathered for a conference in Houston early this year.
"There's one point which the whole energy sector agrees upon, which is, the need to make a decision on the future price of carbon," said Peter Brun, senior vice president for government relations at Vestas, the Danish wind company whose blue logo graces the giant turbine spinning outside the Bella Center.
Companies are also watching closely to see if various pledges to reduce emissions could, in the short run at least, change the dynamics of global supply chains by, say, making energy sufficiently cheaper in Cambodia than in China to lure manufacturing across borders.
U.S. companies have raised the issues of energy costs and competitiveness with Locke, the commerce secretary. On Friday morning, he sat for an hourlong chat _ over water, no coffee _ with representatives from Intel, Microsoft, GE, FedEx and two dozen other companies. Locke said the conversation revolved around the opportunities of emissions reduction.
If the world keeps cutting emissions and the United States doesn't follow suit, Locke said the executives told him, those companies "will establish plants in other countries to meet their changing (energy) needs."
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