One of the biggest opponents of climate change legislation has been the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the “world’s largest business federation” that calls itself the “voice of business.” The Chamber has claimed the Obama administration is secretly hiding evidence that climate change isn’t a real threat, claimed that global warming regulations would “strangle the economy,” and even called for a new “Scopes trial” to call into question the science of global warming.

Today, Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) announced that it is quitting the Chamber over its “extreme position” on climate change:

PG&E Corp. (PCG) said Tuesday it is leaving the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over objections to what its top executive called the chamber’s “extreme position on climate change.”

In a letter to the U.S. Chamber published on PG&E’s blog, www.next100.com, PG& E Chairman and Chief Executive Peter Darbee wrote that company employees “find it dismaying that the Chamber neglects the indisputable fact that a decisive majority of experts have said the data on global warming are compelling and point to a threat that cannot be ignored.”

PG&E isn’t the only company the Chamber has angered with its global warming denialist views. Yesterday, Nike, one of the co-founders of the climate change action coalition Business for Innovative Climate & Energy Policy (BICEP), circulated a statement denouncing the Chamber’s efforts to attack the science surrounding climate change:

Nike fundamentally disagrees with the US Chamber of Commerce’s position on climate change and is concerned and deeply disappointed with the US Chamber’s recently filed petition challenging the EPA’s administrative authority and action on this critically important issue.

Nike believes that climate change is an urgent issue affecting the world today and that businesses and their representative associations need to take an active role to invest in sustainable business practices and innovative solutions to address the issue. It is not a time for debate but instead a time for action and we believe the Chamber’s recent petition sets back important work currently being undertaken by EPA on this issue.

The right-wing trade organization National Association of Manufacturers has similarly experienced a disbandment of its membership over the climate change issue. It remains to be seen whether the discontent among their members will change these organizations’ extremist views on global warming.

Michael Moore’s next documentary is “Capitalism: A Love Story,” a film which attacks the U.S. economic system as fundamentally unjust and declares, “Capitalism is an evil, and you cannot regulate evil. You have to eliminate it and replace it with something that is good for all people and that something is democracy.”

Although the movie is not set to open nationwide until Oct. 2, Moore has been premiering a number of sneak preview screenings for Detroit residents in his home state of Michigan. But, as Michigan Live reports, Moore ran into problems when it turned out one of the theaters he rented for the screenings was owned by General Motors (GM) — which Moore famously skewered for its anti-worker policies in his 1989 film Roger & Me.

GM agreed to run the movie only if both Moore and the local press were locked out. Essentially, GM banned Moore from his own screening. A local Detroit news station interviewed Moore about the incident. He said GM should “get over” its grudge against him and be more accountable to citizens, especially in light of the billions of dollars the government has loaned it:

MOORE: General Motors said that I could not be on the premises doing any interviews or press. … I would get over it if I were them. … In the movie I actually try to attempt to see the new chairman to share my ideas about mass transit and other things that the General Motors factories could be building that would benefit about society. … We have 50 billion dollars of our money sitting over there. That is owned by us now. And the de facto CEO is President Barack Obama. I legally rented the four theaters to have my Detroit premiere, and yet somehow they’re able to ban me from my own premiere here? What country are we living in?

Watch it:

In addition to the over 1,000 theater opening Oct. 2, Moore plans to screen the film for free on Oct. 1 in some of the poorest parts of the country.

Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) has surprised a lot of people by proposing to consolidate all of the banking regulators into one new super-regulator, which is an idea that goes much further than any of the Obama administration’s proposed regulatory reforms. And it has the banks concerned:

“It’s the wrong way to go,” said Steve Verdier, senior vice president for the Independent Community Bankers of America [ICBA]. “We don’t think that as far as regulation of banks is concerned, that solves any problems we had. The checks and balances under the current system are pretty good.”

Edward Yingling, president of the American Bankers Association, added that complete consolidation “hasn’t worked in other countries that have tried it and it faces plenty of opposition in Congress.” But it’s an idea worth exploring, as it would definitely cut down on one of the bigger problems with the current regulatory system — regulator shopping.

Far from having a system of “checks and balances,” as the ICBA described it, the current system pits regulators against each other, in an attempt to woo banks (and the lucrative fees that they pay to their regulators). This leads to a race to the bottom, which was most apparent in the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS), which regulated the likes of AIG, Countrywide, Washington Mutual and IndyMac, all of which suffered from what Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner called a lack of “adult supervision.”

As Lucas Puentes put it, “with their future growth (or shrinkage) more or less tied to the number of banks they regulate, today’s regulators have an unmistakable incentive to provide a permissive regulatory environment that favors the banks. Under this perverse system, it’s simply not in their best interest to crack down on the banks they regulate.” With one super-regulator, this problem would effectively be done away with.

As Tim Fernholz pointed out, Dodd may just be “starting off with his maximal demands, intending to negotiate from there, rather than presenting a prepackaged compromise, the latter of which has become a White House standby in the past year and hasn’t seemed like the most effective legislative strategy.” And it’s not like a single regulator would be devoid of its own set of problems. The UK, for instance, has one single bank regulator, and it didn’t weather the economic crisis much better than the U.S. But the proposal should not be dismissed out of hand, and if nothing else, seriously considering the idea would send a message to the banks that serious reform is on the table.

Editor’s note: The Wonk Room is reporting from the Clinton Global Initiative conference this week. This is our first post.

This week, the fifth annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) — a movement by former President Bill Clinton to bring together businesses, world leaders and a variety of NGO’s — is taking place in New York City. Prior to the meeting’s official kickoff today, I took part in a briefing with Clinton and ten or so other progressive bloggers, to discuss CGI and a wide range of policy questions — from the best way to encourage sustainable farming in Africa to besting China in electric car development.

One of the main thrusts of this year’s CGI conference is discussing ways to build up human capital through public and private investments. This is particularly important here in America, as our educational attainment has stagnated, and we have lost the competitive academic edge that we used to hold over the rest of the world. Clinton touched on this, lamenting our falling academic standing:

In the last eight years, we went from first to tenth in terms of the percentage of 25-34 year olds holding a bachelor’s degree. That’s the most important unknown statistic out there…We are headed into long-term economic decline if we don’t do something about it.

He added that prohibitive tuition at college is contributing toward this problem, as “higher education institutions are pricing themselves into America’s decline.” Indeed, this is a real problem. As Michael Mandel at Economics Unbound pointed out, “college costs are up by 23 percent since 2000. But real pay for young college grads is down 11% over the same period.” Meanwhile, two-thirds of today’s college students borrow to pay for tuition, and their average debt load is $23,186.

“We’re soon going to have to change the delivery system in higher education,” Clinton said, noting that 17 states have authorized community college to offer four-year college courses and credits. The Senate passing the student loan reform package that the House approved last week would also be helpful (although that doesn’t get at the root cause of the problem, which is the price increase in the colleges themselves, which consistently grows faster than the rate of inflation).

We currently have a higher education system that is delivering less and less, but costing more and more. And if that trend continues, America can only continue to lose ground on the rest of the world.