Business leaders passionate about America’s clean energy economy converged in Washington today for the final stretch of advocacy group We Can Lead’s “Race for American Jobs: Clean Energy Leadership”. Participants along the way have included Fortune 500 executives (Best Buy, Nike, Starbucks, Levi Strauss, Jones Lang LaSalle and Stonyfield) as well as leaders from the clean energy industry.

The month-long “race” went through Oregon, Ohio, Colorado and New Hampshire before wrapping up in Washington, DC. A baton symbolizing the group’s call for fast action on climate change legislation was hand delivered today to Congress. The message was, we can imagine, the same as We Can Lead’s letter to President Obama and Congress in January, which said:

We need strong policies and clear market signals that support the transition to a low-carbon economy and reward companies that innovate. With certainty, clear rules of the road, and a level playing field, US businesses will deploy capital, plan, build, innovate and compete successfully in the global marketplace.
The January 21, 2010 letter was signed by a slew of CEOs and presidents of companies including Virgin America, Gap, Seventh Generation, Timberland and National Grid as well as by numerous solar installers and other clean energy professionals. The letter and the race have been two of the more visible efforts of We Can Lead to push the good business sense of a cleaner economy. The organization supports a price on carbon, an issue that has become nearly too hot to handle of late for legislators (see our piece, “To Cap or Not to Cap” for background).
Jim Hanna, the director of environmental impact for corporate heavy-hitter Starbucks, said: “The sooner we develop national climate policies, the better equipped we’ll be to compete in the global race for clean energy and create new jobs here at home,“ while CEO Gary Hirshberg of Stonyfield Farm “rejects the notion that climate and energy legislation is going to be costly…We either get into this now, with the right policies, or we’ll find ourselves sitting on the sidelines losing our economic competitiveness.”