(Headline USA) More than 300 far-left corporations and investors, including such giants as Apple, Google, Microsoft and Coca-Cola, are calling on the Biden administration to set an ambitious climate change goal that would cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50% below 2005 levels by 2030.
The target would nearly double the nation’s previous commitment and require dramatic changes in the power, transportation and other sectors.
It is unclear how such goals might affect their bottom lines, although doing so would certainly create dramatic paradigm shifts for the fossil-fuels and other energy industries, as well as likely impacting the everyday lives of Americans in unwelcome ways.
President Joe Biden is considering options for expected carbon reductions by 2030 ahead of a virtual climate summit the United States is hosting later this month.
The so-called Nationally Determined Contribution is a key milestone as Biden moves toward his ultimate goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Biden has promised to reveal the nonbinding but symbolically important 2030 goal before the Earth Day summit opens April 22.
“A bold 2030 target is needed to catalyze a zero-emissions future, spur a robust economic recovery, create millions of well-paying jobs and allow the U.S. to ‘build back better’ from the pandemic,” the businesses and investors said in a letter to Biden.
“New investment in clean energy, energy efficiency and clean transportation can build a strong, more equitable and more inclusive American economy,” they wrote.
An ambitious 2030 target would guide the federal government’s approach to sustainable and resilient infrastructure, as well as zero-emissions vehicles and buildings, and “would inspire other industrialized nations to set bold targets of their own,” the group wrote.
Besides the tech and consumer products giants, companies with major energy holdings, including Exelon, General Electric, PG&E and Edison International, also signed the letter.
Meanwhile, dozens of European lawmakers, business executives and union leaders on Tuesday also urged the United States to slash its greenhouse gas emissions in half in the coming decade.
They called for a trans-Atlantic alliance to tackle climate change and achieve a “just and sustainable transition” toward a low-carbon economy.
The letter from U.S. business leaders to the Democratic president comes as fissures between corporate America and the Republican Party have opened over corporate America’s embrace of a woke, globalist agenda driven largely by pressure from China and partisan neo-Marxist activist groups that have leveraged the propagandist mainstream media.
The most recent flashpoint was in Georgia, where a new Republican-backed law reasserted the state legislature’s authority to set voting law in the wake of controversy during the 2020 election.
Leftists launched a full-tilt pressure campaign in response, demanding denunciations from Delta Air Lines and Coca-Cola, whose headquarters are in the state, and resulting in Major League Baseball pulling the 2021 All-Star Game from Atlanta.
However, leaders including President Donald Trump have now urged counter-boycotts of the virtue-signaling corporations involved. And the MLB move is expected mainly to have an adverse impact on businesses and workers in Atlanta, which is heavily populated with minorities, thus undermining the claims that it was done in support and solidarity with the black community.
More than 100 business leaders participated in a Zoom call last weekend to discuss how to oppose the efforts being waged by GOP legislatures nationwide to prevent the “irregularities” that occurred under the auspices of pandemic emergencies from being codified into regular practice.
Those loosened restrictions, which often targeted battleground states won by Trump in 2016, resulted in reports of widespread vote fraud involving both mail-in absentee ballots and voting machines.
Options suggested by the woke companies included stopping political donations and holding off in investments in states that approve the laws.
Conservatives, already overwhelmed by the mass migration from blue states like California and New York to red ones like Georgia and Texas—accompanied by regular demands that they capitulate to the leftist agenda—may welcome the boycott effort if it prompts yet another left-wing exodus.
As with the climate policies, many corporations would do harm to their own profit margins by returning to states with less favorable tax policies.
However, multinational companies with heavy Chinese backing are likely to offset those losses by expanding outside the US.
A recent report revealed, in fact, that some US-based environmental activism groups have been linked to China, promoting policies that would be harmful to US economic interests but favorable to its chief economic rival.
On climate, the business leaders told Biden they “applaud your administration’s demonstrated commitment to address climate change head-on, and we stand in support of your efforts.”
They claimed that millions of Americans were already feeling the impacts of climate change, citing the severe winter storm that caused blackouts in Texas and other states, deadly wildfires in California and record-breaking hurricanes in the Southeast and Gulf Coast.
“The human and economic losses of the past 12 months alone are profound,” they wrote. “Tragically, these devastating climate impacts also disproportionately hit marginalized and low-income communities who are least able to withstand them. We must act now to slow and turn the tide.”
While Biden has reentered the U.S into the Paris climate accord and made climate action a pillar of his presidency, more action is needed, the corporate executives said. “An effective national climate strategy will require all of us,” they told Biden, but “you alone can set the course by swiftly establishing a bold U.S. 2030 target.”
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
