As the New York Times writes, among those defeated by Bush’s anti-Kyoto policy are “those companies that support a government action in the fight to global warming and have already spent millions of dollars in voluntary projects aimed to greenhouse gas reduction”.

Among the companies that want ''the United States to adopt some sort of greenhouse gas reduction policy'' there are important petrol groups such as Royal Dutch/Shell group and Bp, writes the Times, and electric energy providers such as Cinergy, Aep and Entergy. These are all groups, the New York newspaper point out, which have voluntarily adopted measures to reduce their emissions, considered responsible for the greenhouse effect and the consequent climate changes. In the group, the Enron corporation from Texas, whose president Kenneth Lay is a personal friend of Bush’s and one of the major givers to the Republican party.

Feeling ignored by the White House, these companies are giving their attention and their lobbying operations towards Congress, hoping that Capitol Hill will yield the impulse to an American law on the emissions cut.

The democratic majority in the Senate considers ''global warming'' a ''top priority'', as the president of the Energy commission said, Jim Jeffords, the ex republican whom, leaving the party, has given the majority to democrats.

It’s not that the ''executives'' of these companies do not share Bush’s negative judgement on the Kyoto protocol, considering it potentially dangerous for American economy and unfair when it does not impose reductions to developing countries. However, as they have already convinced themselves that greenhouse gases reduction is by now “inevitable”, they consider wrong the total refusal line chosen by the president after his ''Kyoto is dead'' last March, without trying to “fix the mistakes” obtaining, in exchange for the reductions, ''concessions on other environmental regulations''.

Bush’s maximalist approach has taken the United States to remain on the outside. ''What the business world wants is the certainty of a policy, Bush only brought in a turbulence factor'' explains an environment expert working for one of these multinationals.

This is not all, however. These companies lament the fact that they were completely excluded from the White House’s decisional process, the Times reveals again, where instead only the ideas of those companies which totally oppose emissions reduction were heard. This is something the White House completely denies: ''we are examining the matter very seriously and we are heeding the groups that represent all views''.

October.2001