U.S. Chamber bleeding members, keeps yelling at cloud

Poor U.S. Chamber of Commerce...it can't seem to hold on to a friend these days. First Pacific Gas & Electric walked out on it. A few days later, PNM Resources followed PG&E out the door. And yesterday:

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s opposition to climate-change legislation has cost it another member. Exelon, one of the biggest utilities in the U.S., said this morning it will leave the business lobby because of the latter’s increasingly strident opposition to climate legislation.

The announcement came as chairman and chief executive John Rowe spoke to the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy about the importance of jumpstarting investment in energy efficiency.

Just how "increasingly strident" has the Chamber's position on climate become? This much:

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce — the 97-year-old organization that bills itself as the “voice of business” — wants to put climate science on trial. As the Environmental Protection Agency nears a final ruling that manmade global warming endangers the public health and welfare, “the chamber will tell the EPA in a filing today that a trial-style public hearing” on the science of climate change is needed to “make a fully informed, transparent decision with scientific integrity based on the actual record of the science.” William Kovacs, the chamber’s senior vice president for environment, technology and regulatory affairs, told the Los Angeles Times this hearing would be “the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century“:

It would be evolution versus creationism. It would be the science of climate change on trial.

Does that mean that Mr. Kovacs thinks the right side won the Scopes monkey trial? Or is he making a preposterous analogy between creationism and climate change science? Either way, the Chamber is clearly on the wrong side of history on this one -- which is why it's losing members at an alarming rate. The Chamber can keep yelling at clouds all it wants, but that won't change the fact that the climate debate is over, which is why more and more of its members are leaving it behind.

Poor, poor Chamber...