The Wonk Room

PG&E CEO: We Left The U.S. Chamber Of Commerce Because They Lied To Us About Climate Policy

Tom Donohue, the embattled president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, today defiantly defended the attacks on clean energy legislation and climate science that have caused a mass exodus of companies from his organization. Donohue told reporters, “We’re not changing where we are,” saying of critics, “Bring ‘em on.” One of the chamber’s sharpest critics is Peter Darbee, chairman, president, and CEO of electric utility Pacific Gas & Electric, which was the first company to quit the chamber after they called for “monkey trials” on climate science. In a recent interview with E&E News, Darbee explained that his company quit the chamber after they repeatedly lied about their approach to climate policy:

The reason for our departure from the chamber is that we had repeated discussions with the chamber about how the direction they were on was not consistent with our position, in fact, very much at odds. And their response was, “We’ll take care of it. Really, our position and yours, PG&E, are much closer than you believe them to be, and don’t be concerned about that.” And we went down a road over several years, and there was fact after fact, development after development that caused us to believe that fundamentally we had entirely different positions.

Watch the video at E&E News.

The Chamber claims that federal regulation to limit global warming pollution would “strangle the economy.” and has even called for a “Scopes monkey trial” on the science of global warming. Darbee, not surprisingly, called that “extreme language, certainly not language that we at PG&E were comfortable with.”