- Feeling the heat on global warming, sentiment in U.S. business and industry is beginning to shift in favor of action to address carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

At home, major corporations are under mounting pressure from shareholder activists who want companies to assess the financial risks posed by climate change and the likelihood of future restrictions on carbon emissions in the United States.

President Bush pulled the United States out of the Kyoto treaty and remains opposed to mandatory curbs on greenhouse gases, saying they are too expensive for the U.S. economy. But more than two dozen states have moved to fill in the void, adopting regulations and policies designed to discourage emissions or encourage the use of renewable energy.

There is also a sense that by delaying action, U.S. companies will be left behind in the competition for green energy and energy-efficient technologies, business leaders said.

"Some companies feel that if we don't act soon in the United States, we may be missing out on opportunities to innovate and to develop the technologies that will address these problems in the future," said Steve Percy, former chief executive officer of BP America.

"On top of that, I think there is a recognition on the part of some of these leading companies that public opinion is slowly beginning to shift on these issues," Percy said. "They want to be able to say in the future that they were progressive on this issue."

Big companies are also coming to the conclusion that reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by becoming more energy efficient "adds value to your business," said Mark Chatelain, energy and environment director at Johnson Controls of Milwaukee, a $27 billion-a-year auto-parts and energy-systems company that ranks 71st in the Fortune 500.

Cost savings usually accompany improvements in efficiency, "but there are intangibles as well, including customer satisfaction and a license to operate in a lot of countries where, if you had a bad reputation, you might not get work," said Chatelain, who heads a Johnson division that advises other companies on how to improve their energy efficiency and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. "It definitely adds to your reputation and brand image."

Another concern, particularly for energy companies and their directors, is that they may be vulnerable in the future to lawsuits seeking compensation for damage caused by climate change similar to the litigation faced by the tobacco industry over the past decade.

"Some of the global insurers are starting to ask companies about the risk they face long-term," Percy said.

Some of America's top corporate leaders are starting to talk about tax increases and caps on emissions, a sharp contrast to the stance of U.S. business and industry just a few years ago, when the emphasis was on delaying mandatory restrictions as long as possible.

Last month, Paul Anderson, chief executive officer of Duke Energy, an electric utility and natural-gas pipeline company that ranks 86th in the Fortune 500, called for a federal tax to discourage emissions of carbon dioxide, the chief greenhouse gas scientists say is driving global warming.

Saying "there is no free lunch," Anderson warned in a speech to Charlotte, N.C., business leaders that Americans may have to get used to paying more for energy in order to tackle global warming.

Anderson complained that concern about climate change has led to a costly "patchwork" of local, state and regional policies.

"Duke Energy ... believes that a mandatory, federal, economy-wide policy response - for example, a carbon tax - is preferable to this patchwork, as it would be less costly to society and more effective in managing greenhouse gas emissions," said a company policy statement that accompanied Anderson's speech. "A national approach would also be easier to integrate into a comprehensive global response, which the U.S. and other countries should continue to pursue."

Such perceived heresy infuriated climate skeptics. "The overwhelming amount of new science is moving in the opposite direction of the scaremongers who claim that man is the cause of any warming - if warming exists at all," Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said in a statement responding to Anderson's speech.

"Duke's new position in the face of these facts will do nothing to help the environment," Inhofe said. "It will only hurt their ratepayers, who are already being stung by rising power costs and escalating gas prices at the pump."

Anderson, however, is not alone. Exelon Corp. Chairman and CEO John Rowe, for example, has also called for mandatory constraints on carbon dioxide.

"The science on carbon and climate change has become overwhelming," Rowe said last fall at a news conference of the bipartisan National Commission on Energy Policy, which he co-chaired. "The United States must take responsibility for addressing its contribution to the risks of climate change."

Exelon, an electricity company with more than $14 billion in annual revenues, generates more nuclear power than any other U.S. company and might benefit from an industry shift away from coal, which is high in carbon, to nuclear power, which does not produce greenhouse gases.

Wielding increasing financial clout, shareholder activists who press climate-change-related resolutions at annual stockholder meetings have also forced the issue in front of corporate directors.

For example, the Investor Network on Climate Risk, one of the shareholder groups backing the climate resolutions, includes three dozen leading U.S. institutional investors and investment funds with more than $1.5 trillion in assets, including the California, New York state, New York City and Connecticut public pension funds.

In response to shareholder pressure and environmental protests, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., the nation's third-largest bank, this week announced an aggressive climate policy, including assessing the financial risks of greenhouse-gas emissions in its loan evaluations. Besides the threat of legal liability, companies and their lenders and insurers could face increased costs from future government regulation and from environmental changes related to global warming. Citigroup and Bank of America Corp. have made similar pledges in recent years.

Last year, two of the nation's largest electric-power generators, American Electric Power and Cinergy, agreed to study and publicly report on the financial risks posed by climate change and on their efforts to reduce emissions.

The power companies "didn't come out with reports that said, 'Never mind, this is a silly issue or ... it's an environmental issue that doesn't come to fruition for the next 20 years, so go away,' " said Mindy Lubber, president of Ceres, a Boston-based investor coalition that has helped coordinate shareholder resolution filings. "They came out with hundred-page reports that documented page-by-page the financial risk to them as companies and as an industry if they don't act."

"Change is slow, painfully slow, so we have a long way to go, but progress is unquestionably being made," Lubber said. "I am heartened by the fact that this is no longer seen as a long-term, off-in-the-distance environmental issue that can be ignored."

On the Net: www.ceres.org; www.energycommission.org

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(E-mail Joan Lowy at LowyJ(at)shns.com.)