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Action Alert: Power companies across the U.S. are using ratepayer money to undermine climate action. In their mission statements and climate pledges, these utilities brag about transforming the power industry toward a clean energy future, but behind the scenes, they’re hiding behind their lobbying organization—Edison Electric Institute (EEI)—to block climate action. If you’re like the tens of thousands of Americans who don’t want your monthly energy bills to support this type of dangerous lobbying, demand your utility company stand up for climate action. |
We know that Big Oil is holding back climate progress and our path to clean, reliable energy, but did you know that dirty utilities are often just as bad?
One of the worst offenders is Edison Electric Institute (EEI)—a dangerous and influential lobbying group representing utilities across the U.S., which can use dollars from your power bills to fund its own fossil fuel agenda—unless we take action.
The power sector is the second largest contributor to the greenhouse gas pollution that is driving climate change. Consequently, utility companies (also referred to as power companies) have a choice to make: They can either be part of the climate problem or part of the solution.
That’s because they decide how and where they get the power they provide to customers. They can choose to prioritize clean energy like wind and solar like the vast majority of voters want. Or they can choose to cling to polluting and expensive sources like coal- and gas-fired power plants that drive climate change and public health risks for the indefinite future.
Recently, EEI made a choice—and not the right one. Despite its clean energy rhetoric, it chose to double down on dirty fossil fuels by filing hundreds of pages of misinformation attacking the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) proposed carbon pollution standards on power plants.
On August 16, EEI named Trump-appointed Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette as the new president and CEO.
If they had their way, existing coal and gas power plants would continue polluting for years to come—time that we simply do not have. EPA’s common sense rules are one of the most powerful tools we have to ramp down carbon pollution, and if anything, they don’t go far enough.
That’s why we, along with a coalition of climate advocacy groups, sent a letter to EEI’s member utilities demanding they stand by their climate commitments and these carbon pollution regulations—not with EEI. And thanks in part to a growing wave of public pressure, utilities are on the defensive as the gap between their rhetoric and the reality is exposed.
However, many utility companies chose to maintain support of EEI’s short-sighted and harmful lobbying effort—for now. As a ratepayer, and with these companies spending your money to attack your climate future, you can hold them accountable for that choice. Tell your utility to stop using your money to kneecap climate action, support EPA’s commonsense limits on power plants, and leave EEI.
Utilities truly committed to decarbonization cannot continue to hide behind or associate themselves with lobbying groups actively blocking policies to decarbonize. Fundamentally, utilities only get their power to run the electrical sector because they are supposed to serve the public interest; they must not use their power to hurt the public response to the climate crisis. Undermining these policies hurts our economy, public health, and communities.
Shareholders, ratepayers, and the public want to see a cleaner electricity system as the climate crisis continues to unfold in front of their eyes—from wildfires in Hawai’i to scorching heat in Arizona to rising ocean temperatures in Florida. But many of these very same people demanding climate action are unwittingly funding climate delay. That’s because utilities in nearly all states use ratepayers’ monthly utility bills to fund shadowy lobbying efforts and membership fees for EEI.
All the while, companies like Southern California Edison (SCE), whose CEO was recently elected as EEI’s board chair, continue to mislead their customers by boasting they are “leading the transformation of the electric power industry toward a clean energy future.”
Their actions say otherwise. SCE, along with these other utility companies, chose to hide behind their lobbyists at EEI instead of standing up for their customers’ interests:
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These companies continue to cry wolf, alleging that the proposed standards are unrealistic—despite the rules being based on the very technologies industry spent millions of dollars in public money to develop. Bottom line, these claims are tired and unsubstantiated. In fact, the proposed rules give utilities decades to fully comply with the rules, and they can do so with ever-more-economic renewable energy. Utilities can certainly either retrofit or replace their remaining, aging, dirty fossil fleet with years of lead time—and the climate crisis demands action.
The growing divide among utilities shows that EEI’s backward stance on power plant regulations does not represent utility companies across the board. It’s time for our power companies to serve the public, not fossil interests.