A letter released today contains signatures from 530 companies including Campbell Soup and Johnson & Johnson, urging the president-elect to take action

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

More than 600 businesses and investors signed and released a letter on Tuesday urging president-elect Donald Trump to fight climate change – a move that coincides with the start of the Senate hearings to confirm his cabinet nominees, who are poised to gut existing climate policies.

The letter contains signatures from roughly 200 more companies and investors than when it was initially submitted after the election in November, including Campbell Soup, Johnson & Johnson and the New York State Retirement Fund. The previous plea was signed by companies like Monsanto, eBay, Levi Strauss and Staples.

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“We want the US economy to be energy efficient and powered by low-carbon energy ... Failure to build a low-carbon economy puts American prosperity at risk,” says the letter.

The letter urges Trump to continue policies that combat global warming, such as the Clean Power Plan created by the Obama administration to cut emissions from coal power plants. The letter also petitions Trump to invest in low-carbon energy at home and abroad and remain committed to the Paris agreement.

“As a utility, we are a critical infrastructure, so we make big investments in our system,” says Melissa Lavinson, chief sustainability officer for PG&E Corp, the parent of Pacific Gas and Electric Co in California that signed the letter. “Climate change can impact our ability to safely, affordably and reliably serve our customers. For example, more heat waves mean more cooling days, and sea level rise can affect coastal infrastructure. So for us taking action on climate change is very important.”

The letter reflects the hope that Trump, as a businessman, will heed the declaration of so many American companies that climate change is real and could pose a threat to their financial health.

Whether the petition will make any impression on the president-elect, who has claimed in the past that climate change is a hoax and wishes to disregard the Paris agreement, is unclear.

Since the letter was first released nearly three months ago, Trump has picked advisors and cabinet members who are largely hostile toward environmental regulations and have close ties to the fossil fuel industry.

For example, Trump nominated climate change denier Scott Pruitt, a former Oklahoma attorney general and a driving force behind the lawsuit against the Clean Power Plan, to head the Environmental Protection Agency.

The nominee for energy secretary, Rick Perry, was governor of Texas, the oil and wind energy capital of America. While he supported the expansion of the state’s wind energy development, he made climate change skepticism part of his platform during a failed bit for presidency in 2011. Perry also once said he wanted to eliminate the very department he’s now expected to lead.

Trump wants the outgoing ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson as secretary of state, a decision that’s led some environmentalists to dub it “an epic mistake”.

Representatives from Trump’s team did not respond to the Guardian’s requests for comment.

While environmental groups are gearing up for an intense fight with the new government, evidence continues to emerge that points to the substantial business risks posed by rising global temperatures, such as dwindling supplies of raw materials and water.

Extreme heat, for example, is bad for the economy, causing crop failure and reduced worker productivity, according to a new study from Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley.

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The Sustainability Accounting Standards Board, a nonprofit group that sets standards for corporate sustainability disclosures to investors and is chaired by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, estimates that significant climate risks – such as severe weather events – exist for most of the companies it tracks, which represent $27.5tn, or 93%, of US stocks as measured by market value.

There is also evidence that companies that embrace sustainability actually perform better financially than those that do not. A 2014 study by the nonprofit CDP, which provides environmental data and climate risk analysis, found that corporations that actively manage and plan for climate change achieved an 18% higher return on investment than companies that weren’t planning for climate change, and 67% higher than companies that refused to disclose their emissions.

Investors are increasingly seeing opportunities to address climate change. Nearly two dozen of the world’s most successful business leaders, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists such as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Virgin’s Richard Branson and Alibaba founder Jack Ma, plan to invest as much as $1bn in a fund called Breakthrough Energy Ventures, led by Bill Gates, that aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by financing clean energy technology.