Carbon pricing has had broad business support for over a decade. As a market-based mechanism, this is often the private sector’s preferred approach in addressing climate change. Consequently, carbon pricing is a convenient mechanism to measure trade association support for climate change. Support for this mechanism is not a sufficient commitment to climate action alone, and any support that is tied to displacing other tools essential to necessary emissions reductions should be rejected as being inconsistent with support for solving the climate crisis. Still, carbon pricing can be a foundational first step for businesses and the trade associations that represent them.
The Business Roundtable (BRT), a sector-diverse coalition of CEOs, moved first. The group made waves in September 2020 with the public rollout of its principles and policies for addressing climate change. While these principles are not groundbreaking, they represent a good understanding of the policy portfolio needed to address climate change, explicitly endorse a price on carbon and break away from oppositional climate positioning that was common before the results of the 2020 election. This is a notable departure from BRT’s reported neutrality on the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade proposal and its 2007 stance on climate change, which acknowledged carbon pricing but noted that membership was divided on mandatory mechanisms.
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