Washington

The Global Climate Coalition (GCC), the main US lobby group opposed to mandatory cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions, has shut up shop.

In a statement on its website, the GCC says that, in effect, it is declaring victory and going home. With the Bush administration rejecting the Kyoto Protocol on climate change and instead backing a national strategy that relies on technology, rather than regulation, to cut greenhouse-gas emissions, the GCC claims to have achieved its main objectives.

But critics of the GCC point out that it has lost many of its best-known members — including DuPont, Shell, Texaco, Ford and General Motors — in the past two years. Many of these corporations have publicly acknowledged the dangers of global warming, which the GCC played down for the 13 years of its existence.

“After a while, there weren't many leading companies left that wanted to be associated with the view the GCC was advancing,” says Lester Brown, founder and former chairman of the Washington-based Worldwatch Institute, an environmental lobby group.

Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, a Washington-based group that works with industrial companies that believe climate change to be a problem, says that the United States is still likely to take various actions to reduce emissions, and that the GCC's talk of victory is premature.

→ http://www.globalclimate.org