Cooperation between Big Business and Environmental Groups
What do DuPont, National Resource Defense Council, and Lehmen Brothers have in common? Normally not too much…but now they make up 3 of the 14 member strong US Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), launched in January of this year. The Partnership was formed to address global warming and emissions where the Feds are not.
The US produces an estimated one quarter of the world’s greenhouse gases, but has failed to sign the Kyoto protocol, and has done little in the last 6 years, at the Federal level, to further regulate emissions.
The Partnership has produced a report “A Call for Action” that proposes an economically based plan to address emissions, especially carbon emissions. They have some comprehensive goals for emission reduction that include mandatory caps on emission, an aggressive approach not echoed in the White House.
The launch of this group is another encouraging step in a series of moves Big Business is making nation-wide to take climate change and global warming seriously, and propose to do something about it. Whether moves such as these are stunts to benefit some economic scheme or are legitimately concern for, and action to improve, the environment, is a question, but the results have the potential to benefit the planet.
Jennifer Veilleux
Dr. Jennifer Veilleux is a geographer, writer, and artist. For more than a decade, she has worked on scientific research and security issues facing water resources shared across political boundaries. Research and curiosity has taken her to more than 50 countries on 5 continents, often to remote locations and marginalized communities. Veilleux takes portraits of people she encounters in her field work and recently released a collection, Portraits from Rivers of Change, that can be viewed here: www.jenniferveilleux.com. These portraits highlight two separate communities, one on the Mekong River the other on the Blue Nile River, facing relocation due to dam development. Dr. Veilleux works for Florida International University as a post doctoral associate for the Institute of Water and Environment and manages SELVA, the Serengeti-Lake Victoria Sustainable Water Initiative, a research project on water security of the Mara River in the Upper Nile basin of Tanzania. She maintains a blog, The Way of Water, dedicated to news and commentary about development on the Nile and Mekong, general water resources issues, and special topics related to women in science. She lives in Miami with her cat Mr. FC Sweet Tea.
