GE Continues Work with USCAP to Advance U.S. Climate Policy

GE and its executives are active in numerous climate change initiatives around the world. The Company is a founding member of the United States Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), a group of businesses and leading environmental organizations that came together in 2008 to call on the federal government to enact strong national legislation requiring significant reductions of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

GE believes that an environmentally sound and economically clean energy and climate policy is essential to the future health of the U.S. economy, and ultimately of the world economy. Business depends on government to enact policies that will provide the strong and stable incentives needed to swiftly move the economy toward a clean energy future. This will enhance national and energy security, spur exports of cleaner and more efficient technologies, protect and create jobs, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and stimulate the economy.

USCAP has played a significant role in making climate change a priority issue in both houses of Congress. Together with other USCAP members, GE continues to call on the President and Congress to enact environmentally effective, economically sustainable and fair climate and energy legislation.

USCAP provides a unique forum, bringing business together with a wider group of stakeholders who are committed to moving this process forward. GE will continue to work with USCAP and this growing group of voices to support the Administration in achieving legislation that is environmentally effective and economically sustainable.

GE’s position continues to build off the Blueprint for Legislative Action on Climate, developed in 2009 as a catalyst for new public policy. The Blueprint calls for reductions between 14 and 20% of GHG by 2005 and 80% by 2020. It also recognizes that such a program must be affordable and economically sustainable, and consequently calls for reasonable cost containment provisions that buffer the impact to utilities and other energy-intensive industries in the early period of the program, to protect consumers from energy price shocks. To assure U.S. technology leadership, GE and USCAP also support the need for policies and incentives to drive deployment of cleaner, more efficient technologies in the interim period of any climate program when the “price for carbon” is likely to be inadequate to drive technology and U.S. energy technological leadership.

Members of USCAP are working together not because the group agrees on everything, but because we know there are tough technical challenges ahead, and these challenges will only be solved by finding common ground.