Resigning in protest is not in the American grain. Robert McNamara stuck around as Secretary of Defense even after he decided that the Vietnam War was a disaster; Colin Powell did the same during the Bush Administration’s push for war with Iraq; and in the lead-up to the financial crisis, few high-profile executives stepped down over disagreements in philosophy or tactics. But resigning in protest has gained popularity of late among an unlikely group: big corporations. Last Monday, Apple announced that it would be quitting the U.S. Chamber of Commerce because of the Chamber’s opposition to global-warming legislation. And that was just the latest in a series of defections: in the past few weeks, the public-utility companies Pacific Gas & Electric, PNM Resources, and Exelon all announced that they’d be leaving the Chamber, while Nike quit the organization’s board of directors. Historically speaking, this is a positive exodus.

Illustration by Christoph Niemann

The Chamber of Commerce won’t be going out of business anytime soon, of course: it still has three million members, mostly small businesses, and a gargantuan lobbying budget. Still, the decidedly public nature of these corporate departures—the companies made statements attacking the Chamber for obstructionism—complicates its claim to be representing the collective interests of American business. One of the great strengths of business lobbies in recent decades has been their ability to maintain a united front. Global warming has revealed fractures in that façade.

It’s no surprise that the climate-change debate has become a flashpoint for the Chamber, since it encompasses everything that the organization routinely opposes: regulation, taxation, and a bigger role for government. The Chamber was once considered more moderate than harder-line cousins like the National Association of Manufacturers. But that’s changed. Back in 1971, the future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell wrote a famous memo to the Chamber, arguing that the organization needed to become the center of an aggressive defense of the free-enterprise system, which Powell felt was under broad attack. How influential the memo was is still debated, but, over the years, the Chamber became the organization Powell wanted it to be, becoming more ideologically cohesive and playing a key role in blocking consumer-protection legislation, labor-law reform, and financial regulation. Its opposition to regulation now seems reflexive; at the moment, its legislative priorities include opposing a consumer financial-protection agency, opposing a shareholder bill of rights, and opposing “flawed health care proposals,” which seems to mean any health-care proposal made by a Democrat. And, while the Chamber does acknowledge that the threat of global warming is real, it has been unbending in its opposition to the current cap-and-trade proposal, and a senior official has called for a “Scopes monkey trial” to debate the science of climate change.

These stands may make most members of the Chamber happy: small business is the backbone of American conservatism, after all. But the hard line on global warming may also reflect dynamics that typically shape group behavior. In any large group, a few people do most of the work—usually those who are most ideologically committed or who have a direct stake in a particular outcome. So decisions often end up reflecting not the wishes of the group as a whole but those of its most engaged members. In the case of climate-change legislation like cap-and-trade, many of the companies on the Chamber’s board of directors actually support it. But among the few that publicly oppose it are coal companies, which have a huge stake in stopping any carbon-pricing system. So it’s not surprising that the Chamber’s general approach is closer to Massey Energy’s than to Nike’s.

These dynamics are familiar. But major companies’ leaving the Chamber rather than accept its policies is new. During the debate over health-care reform in the early nineties, for instance, the Chamber ended up coming out against the Clinton health plan without losing the support of companies like Ford—even though reform would have benefitted automakers, hobbled as they are by health-care costs. The recent resignations, and public dissent from companies that are still members, like Johnson & Johnson and G.E., suggest that, when it comes to global warming, companies are unwilling to sit quietly by.

Why the difference? Partly, it may be a matter of self-interest; Exelon, for instance, has big investments in renewable energy. But it may reflect a calculation that global warming is simply too big an issue to get wrong, both economically—few companies are really going to benefit from the melting of the polar ice caps—and from a public-relations point of view. It’s also probably no coincidence that these resignations have come at a time when the Chamber’s anti-regulatory zeal looks not just outmoded but self-defeating. Had the Chamber supported tougher regulation of financial and housing markets, after all, the myriad small businesses it represents would undoubtedly be better off today. And it’s far from clear that across-the-board hostility to regulation is really in the best interests of the free-enterprise system. We assume that lobbies always recognize what’s best for their members. But they don’t, and, in the case of climate change, they may very well be missing what the companies that have resigned in protest have seen: global warming isn’t just bad for the planet; it’s bad for business. ♦