The US Chamber of Commerce, which represents major industrial polluters (and not your local mom and pop), has spent the last few years trying to rehabilitate its image as a climate villain.
It hasn’t been going great for them, but mostly because they seem to think that putting up a webpage claiming to totally take climate seriously and definitely really support a carbon tax will make people simply forget their decades of denial and delay. And to be fair, it does seem to work on some.
But not everyone is so forgiving, and the student-led organization, Change the Chamber, is not buying the Chamber’s conversion story. And not because they’re cold-hearted cynics, but because they simply watched the Chamber of Commerce's actions.
For example, in an update documenting anti-climate lobbying from the Chamber in early 2021, they have a new report on the organization’s continued denial and destruction. From filing amicus briefs in support of the Line 5 pipeline, to opposing efforts to limit a carcinogenic chemical, to working hand-in-hand with the American Petroleum Institute to try and keep a Trump-era rule, and trying to undercut the Biden administration’s Social Cost of Carbon and Methane accounting, just the month of June 2021 was packed with examples of how the Chamber is still nothing more than a hired gun for polluters.
It’s their opposition to the Budget Reconciliation package, though, that Change the Chamber is targeting. Because accompanying the report is a letter from Change the Chamber and a coalition of over 100+ student groups and green groups like the Sierra Club and League of Conservation Voters, calling on the Chamber’s member companies to live up to their (greenwashing) rhetoric and force the organization to stop trying to tank the budget reconciliation package.
In a press release, student activist Nina Jacobs explained that as “the largest dark money, pro-fossil fuel trade association in the country,” the US Chamber of Commerce “has an extensive history of problematic behavior, including lobbying against climate legislation, supporting climate deniers, backing the fossil fuel industry, and spreading misinformation about climate change. During the 2019-2020 election cycle alone, the group spent nearly $160 million on congressional lobbying.”
But, she continued, “Youth are fighting back with Change the Chamber. We are calling on companies who claim to care about the future of our climate to break with the Chamber’s climate obstruction and push for climate policies in Congress at the scale that science demands.”