Ten major business operations have joined with four non-governmental organizations to call for action on carbon emissions. The coalition, entitled the United States Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), includes businesses that run the gamut from manufacturing and energy to financial organizations.

Business members include Alcoa, BP America, Caterpillar Inc., Duke Energy, DuPont, FPL Group, General Electric, Lehman Brothers, PG&E Corporation and PNM Resources. Joining the team is a group of environmentally concerned organizations: the Environmental Defense, Natural Resources Defense Council, Pew Center on Global Climate Change and the World Resources Institute.

USCAP has published a document entitled, A Call for Action, which can be downloaded from their website at www.us-cap.org. The group believes that business needs to get ahead of increasing political pressures to take action in order to avoid having a confused mess of various state requirements. They further believe that such action would be good for the economy and to wait for a new group of legislators in 2008 could result in a less business-friendly environment.

While the group did not come out with suggested legislation, they did make suggestions on various methods of controlling carbon emissions and strongly discouraged further construction of stationary sources that cannot easily capture CO₂ emissions. Such a move likely would cause nearly all of the coal-fired power plants currently on the drawing boards to be halted for re-engineering.