From the private collection of Nicky Sundt, a Washington-based climate change science, policy and communications expert, this November 1996 memo to Global Climate Coalition’s (GCC) Board of Directors outlined the coalition’s 1997 strategy. The GCC opposed greenhouse gas regulations through direct engagement and collaboration with affiliated climate deniers from 1989 to 2002. Its membership spanned across the automotive, utility, manufacturing, petroleum, and mining industries.
Having just released a series of position reports on climate, the GCC identified multiple challenges in advocating for its members in the evolving public policy field. For instance, the GCC feared that “the Administration [was] likely to play the health card- an unfounded argument that climate change will cause an increase in diseases,” and “the challenge of changing the mischaracterization of our positions as a negative approach to the issues.”
The GCC hoped to combat these headwinds with direct engagement with policymakers, making “[e]ducation of congressional staff and members of congress … an important part of the GCC strategy as will monitoring legislative and regulatory actions with coalition participation as appropriate.” On an international level, the GCC continued to closely monitor multi-national climate negotiations, saying that the “GCC must participate in”: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rio Earth Summit, UN Commission on Sustainable Development, and Agenda 21’s G-7 Economic Summit follow-up.
Beyond the policy space, the GCC bolstered its efforts to engage the public by writing, “GCC strategy must include broad based grassroots effort designed to present a balanced view on the climate issue an the state and local levels. The Coalition has formed a new State and Local Committee to monitor activities now occurring in individual states, to coordinate the state/local activities of all GCC committees, and to serve as a liaison with other business and public interest groups with similar views on climate change.”
Interested in more GCC documents? See more in the full Global Climate Coalition collection.