Philanthrocapitalism_ How Giving Can Save the World - Matthew Bishop [82]
Unfortunately, farm groups and even some charities opposed the idea at first and for two years it’s gone nowhere in Congress. Bread for the World hasn’t given up. It has already converted some of its opponents and will keep trying. I have always supported farm programs that enable us to compete with heavily subsidized farms from Europe, Canada, and elsewhere. And I support the American maritime industry. But in this case, with a small change in the law and minimal loss to American farmers and shippers, we can provide food to save more lives—perhaps as many as fifty thousand a year—and help farmers in poor countries feed their neighbors. If you agree, you should contact Bread for the World and offer to help.
Al Gore has been working for changes in policy on climate change for twenty years or more, in and out of government. His film, An Inconvenient Truth, makes it clear that we need both citizen action and better policies. A number of business leaders, including several utilities with coal-fired plants, have joined in the call for the United States to set limits on carbon emissions and set up a system to trade emissions credits so that firms who can cut their emissions more easily can sell their emissions reductions above the cap to those who are having more trouble making it. Ceres, a network of investors, environmental organizations, and public interest groups, is also calling on Congress to act. Large institutional investors—Wall Street firms, insurance and reinsurance companies, and big state employee retirement systems—are ready to invest in clean energy but they have a fiduciary responsibility to their clients that requires them to know what long-term government policy will be. Progressive church leaders have for years supported a more vigorous response to climate change. Now a good number of evangelicals are joining in. Last year more than thirty of them signed an ad in the New York Times calling for action. Major environmental groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club, Environmental Defense, Greenpeace, and others have been supporting a more aggressive approach for a long time. The new Congress is beginning to act. For example, it is working with environmentalists and manufacturers on a new lighting standard that would phase out common incandescent lightbulbs over the next ten years, a change that would bring major reductions in electric bills and greenhouse gas emissions. The reductions in electricity demand will be enormous, the equivalent of the power now supplied by eighty coal-fired generators! If you want to help in lobbying the White House or Congress, you can get involved through any of the organizations mentioned in this paragraph.
In early 2007, an unusual coalition of business and labor leaders called Better Health Care Together held a press conference in which they announced a set of principles supporting health-care reform, including universal coverage and measures to rein in excessive costs. The group included Wal-Mart, AT&T, Intel, Kelly Services, the Communications Workers of America union, the Service Employees International Union, the Howard H. Baker, Jr., Center for Public Policy, and the Center for American Progress, run by my former chief of staff John Podesta. Even some of the health insurance companies have expressed a willingness to be part of the solution. The combined impact of premiums rising almost 90 percent since 2000, the increase in working families without insurance and millions more underinsured, and the threat to our economy, especially to manufacturing, of spending 50 percent more on health care than any other nation and getting less for it, may have finally given us the opportunity to build the health-care system Americans need