Why do corporations support regulating greenhouse gas but fund a lobby that opposes it?

A recent luncheon of the Washington Coal Club was a low-key affair—ham and turkey sandwiches, buffet-style, eaten off paper plates and washed down with soda in a basement room of the Rayburn House Office Building. Congress was in recess, so there was not a power broker in sight. But the speaker, Karen Harbert—who is CEO of the Institute for 21^st Century Energy, an arm of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—did not disappoint. Harbert served up a litany of reasons for why it would be a terrible idea for Congress to enact a law to regulate the greenhouse gases that cause global warming-legislation aimed squarely at coal, the dirtiest of all fuels.

That the coal industry opposes climate change legislation, a top priority of the Obama administration, is no surprise. But why is the chamber taking sides in this battle? That's a mystery.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce was founded in 1912 and last year spent about $62 million lobbying Congress on behalf of what it says are 3 million businesses that belong to national, state, or local chambers or affiliated groups. Not surprisingly, the chamber calls itself "the voice of business." But these days, it's hard to find a major U.S. corporation that shares its voice on the issue of federal regulation of greenhouse gases. General Electric (GE), General Motors (GM), Ford (F), Shell (RDS.A), ConocoPhillips (COP), Dow Chemical (DOW), DuPont (DD), Alcoa (AA), American Electric Power (AEP), Caterpillar (CAT), John Deere (DE), Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), and Nike (NKE) all support mandatory controls on greenhouse gas emissions. Even ExxonMobil (XOM) favors a carbon tax to discourage the burning of fossil fuels.

But the chamber, to which every one of those companies belongs, is preparing to fight draft legislation put forward by Reps. Henry Waxman and Ed Markey that supporters say will lead to a climate change law this year. "We don't intend to be silent," Harbert said, after ticking off a slew of arguments against Waxman-Markey.

The unlikely result is that dozens of important companies are financing both sides of the climate debate-either unavoidably because they support the chamber for other reasons or, if you choose to take a cynical view, by design.

Take Nike. The company would like you to believe that it is going the extra mile to fight global warming. Nike has promised to make all of its facilities "climate neutral" by 2011. It installed wind turbines at a distribution center in Belgium and phased out SF6, a potent greenhouse gas, from its air-cushioned shoes. What's more, Nike—along with Starbucks (SBUX), Levi Strauss, and Timberland (TBL)—helped form a green-business coalition to lobby for strong federal actions on climate. The coalition is called BICEP: Business for Innovative Climate and Energy Policy.