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

Yet Nike is a chamber member, and James Carter, a Nike vice president and general counsel, sits on the chamber's 122-member board of directors, which sets policy for the group.

"How do you square that?" asks Bruce Freed, executive director of the Center for Political Accountability, which pushes big business to be more open about lobbying. "The chamber is aggressively lobbying against the company's position. A company has a responsibility to make sure that shareholder money isn't used in ways that are contrary to its business interests."

Nike would not make Carter available for an interview. Kate Myers, a Nike spokeswoman, did say that the company helped form BICEP to make its climate change position clear. "We have advocated for the chamber to be more progressive on climate change issues," she said.

It's not just Nike. Klaus Kleinfeld is the president and CEO of Alcoa, which says on its Web site, "We believe that reducing greenhouse gases is a win-win." He, too, sits on the chamber board. So does David Kepler, the chief sustainability officer of Dow Chemical, which promises to "advocate for an international framework that establishes clear pathways to slow, stop, and reverse emissions by all major carbon dioxide-emitting countries." Another chamber director is Jeffrey E. Sterba, the CEO of PNM Resources (PNM), an energy holding company based in Albuquerque, N.M. Testifying before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in January, Sterba said, "We need a federal mandate for addressing climate change that will create national and international markets, a price for carbon, and incentives for low-cost and clean technologies."

In fact, executives of nine companies that are members of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, the most important Washington lobby group in favor of climate change regulation, also sit on the board of the chamber. For the record, they are Alcoa, Caterpillar, Deere, Dow Chemical, Duke Energy (DUK), PepsiCo (PEP), PNM, Siemens (SI), and Xerox (XRX). IBM (IBM), News Corp. (NWS.A), PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Toyota, all of which have called for action on climate change, also have executives on the chamber board.

It's hard to know what's going on here because most companies don't want to talk about why they are financing two sides of the climate change debate. One exception is Xerox, whose manager of government policy, Alex Rogers, told me by e-mail: