8/14/2019 BP Deals Blow to Obama Fight on Climate

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BP deals blow to Obama fight on climateBy Sheila McNulty in Houston and Anna Fifield in Washington

Published: February 16 2010 20:48 | Last updated: February 16 2010 23:37

The Obama administration’s faltering efforts to pass climate change legislation suffered

another blow on Tuesday when BP  and ConocoPhillips  abruptly pulled out of the leading

business group lobbying for curbs on US greenhouse gas emissions.

By withdrawing from the United States Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), the oil groups,together with Caterpillar, the heavy machinery company, signalled that they would take a

more focused approach to the issue by pushing for specific policies that would benefit them,

rather than the principle of reducing emissions.

BP has pulled out of the leading business group lobbying for curbs on US greenhouse gas

emissions

“It’s really important that we get climate change legislation...but it’s about what’s in the bill,

not just about getting a bill,” Red Cavaney senior vice-president of government affairs at

Conoco, said. “We need to spend time addressing the issues that impact our shareholders and

consumers.” 

BP and Conoco on Tuesday said the proposed energy legislation that has stalled in the

Congress would impose an unfair burden on the oil industry.

“We will continue to work for passage of federal legislation that... is environmentally

effective, reduces emissions across the US economy in a measured and affordable way and

which treats all energy consumers and producers in a fair and equitable manner,” BP,

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Europe’s biggest oil company, said. “We don’t believe legislation currently pending in the

Congress achieves these objectives.” 

The two oil majors have been work ing together to propose a “linked fee” –  something

between a tax and a full-blown cap-and-trade system for reducing carbon emissions  –  that

they say would provide more predictability for consumers.

The House of Representatives has passed a cap-and-trade bill but efforts to get similar

legislation through the Senate have ground to a halt as healthcare reform and jobs have taken

priority. The Obama administration has instead increasingly turned to regulation to impose

limits on carbon emissions.

Royal Dutch Shell is now the only large oil company still a member of USCAP, which was

founded in 2007 to set out a plan for a limit on greenhouse gases and tradeable emissions

permits. The group played down the departures, saying that its membership was constantly

changing. Three companies – AES, Alstom and Honeywell – joined in October.

Daniel Weiss, a climate change analyst at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think-

tank, said the companies’ were now more interested in lobbying for policies that affected

them directly.

“They are now at the stage where they are interested in cutting deals that benefit their specific

companies, rather than supporting the overall architecture,” Mr Weiss said.