Enterprise Rent-A-Car becomes paid Alec member despite green efforts

Source: The Guardian

Enterprise Rent-A-Car becomes paid Alec member despite green efforts

Car rental company has joined conservative organization
that fights environmental rules with prewritten legislation,
the Guardian has learned

Sam Thielman
Monday 22 August 2016 14.00 BST

It’s not easy enough being green for Enterprise Rent-A-Car.

Though the auto rental service has trumpeted tree-planting initiatives and its fleet of hybrid vehicles, the Guardian has learned that Enterprise recently became a paying member of the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), the business consortium that sends legislators prefabricated drafts of laws tailored to obscure scientific discovery that might damage its members’ revenues, and help those members avoid environmental regulations.

The Center for Media and Democracy’s Nick Surgey brought Enterprise’s membership in Alec to the Guardian’s attention. Surgey said that Enterprise initially claimed not to know about Alec’s positions on renewable energy and that he found those claims “frankly implausible”.

“For us, the argument over whether global warming is a problem or not is over,” said Andy Taylor, at the time Enterprise’s CEO, in 2007. By contrast, the group of conservative businesses published an article called “A Review of Global Warming Science” expressing skepticism and promoted an article by the Competitive Enterprise Institute that same year that said there was “no ‘scientific consensus’ [quotes theirs] that global warming will cause damaging climate change.”

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/aug/22/alec-enterprise-car-rental-environmental-laws