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ATLANTA (AP) — The second of two new nuclear reactors in Georgia has entered commercial operation, capping a project that cost billions more and took years longer than originally projected.
Georgia Power Co. and fellow owners announced the milestone Monday for Plant Vogtle’s Unit 4, which joins an earlier new reactor southeast of Augusta in splitting atoms to make carbon-free electricity.
Unit 3 began commercial operation last summer, joining two older reactors that have stood on the site for decades. They’re the first two nuclear reactors built in the United States in decades.
The new Vogtle reactors are currently projected to cost Georgia Power and three other owners $31 billion, according to calculations by The Associated Press. Add in $3.7 billion that original contractor Westinghouse paid Vogtle owners to walk away from construction, and the total nears $35 billion.
Electric customers in Georgia already have paid billions for what may be the most expensive power plant ever. The reactors were originally projected to cost $14 billion and be completed by 2017.
Utilities and their political supporters on Monday hailed the plant’s completion. Georgia Gov Brian Kemp proclaimed he was “thankful for this historic achievement by Georgia Power and its partners.” Chris Womack, CEO of Atlanta-based Southern Co., which owns Georgia Power, argues Vogtle will make the state’s electrical grid more reliable and resilient and help the utility meet its goal of zeroing out carbon emissions by 2050.
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Southern Company is promoting “propaganda” disguised as research — with help from a major media company
The utility is laundering strategic messaging about the energy transition through a partnership with The Atlantic's marketing team.
Emily Sanders
Oct 28
As I was writing about the first local government to sue a gas utility for climate deception, I received a message in my LinkedIn inbox from another major power provider — Southern Company, a utility holding company heavily invested in gas throughout the South.
The message promised “exclusive insights” about the clean energy transition, and it took me to a page titled “Why Net Zero isn’t Zero-Sum” on the website of The Atlantic, the Pulitzer Prize-winning magazine. Southern Company partnered with Atlantic Insights, the marketing research team at The Atlantic, for a downloadable “white paper” that quotes anonymous corporate executives, board members, and public sector leaders on their views about the energy transition. The paper argues that the lack of progress in addressing climate change can be attributed to “misalignment” between the public and private sectors, who “often point fingers at each other.” It promotes collaboration between governments and companies, who can work together to develop clean energy sources.
“It’s our responsibility, as individuals and organizations, to harness our own energy and map an actionable path forward, with an awareness that pointing fingers is an inexcusable form of inaction, and that net zero is a promise we must keep for the well-being of the planet’s citizens, communities, businesses, and economies,” the paper concludes.
The message behind the sponsored content is a common refrain among fossil fuel companies: don’t blame private industry for a lack of climate progress, because we are all responsible. It does not mention the swell of lawsuits that accuse fossil fuel companies, and most recently, a utility company, of deceiving the public and policymakers and obstructing climate action for decades, and of making false promises about their role in solutions today.
Instead, the partnership combines two tactics fossil fuel companies have long used to launder their image and promote their vision for the future: sponsoring research to redirect conversations about the energy transition (i.e. who should be involved, and what counts as clean energy), and sponsoring content in mainstream media outlets to disguise their messaging as journalistic and credible.
For decades, mainstream media outlets like The Washington Post and The New York Times ran fossil fuel industry “advertorials” — ads disguised as opinion pieces — that undercut and downplayed climate science. Today, leading outlets are creating branded content for fossil fuel companies that mislead readers about the companies’ commitments to the energy transition and industry-backed “solutions.” A report from DeSmog and Drilled, which analyzed sponsored content in major outlets between 2020 and 2023, found “a media industry that repeatedly helps fossil fuel companies contradict the information climate reporters are sharing with the public.”
Southern Company’s white paper is a “native advertisement that The Atlantic's in-house content studio has created on behalf of their client, Southern Company,” and “nothing more than a propaganda effort that The Atlantic name confers legitimacy to,” said Michelle Amazeen, an associate professor of journalism studies and advertising at Boston University who specializes in researching misinformation. “It is not independent, peer-reviewed research. It is marketing research which, fundamentally, is used to market products,” Amazeen said. The partnership “is in the best interest of Southern Company rather than the public interest.”
For its part, The Atlantic acknowledged that the collaboration with Southern Company was a marketing effort. Anna Bross, a senior vice president of communications at The Atlantic, told me that “Atlantic Insights is the marketing research division of The Atlantic. To be sure there is no confusion, Insights is part of our sales and marketing team, separate and independent from our editorial division.”
The Atlantic has partnered with Southern Company on marketing before, including through The Atlantic Ideas Festival, which is billed as “addressing the most significant issues of our time with today’s boldest thinkers as we bring The Atlantic’s journalism to life onstage.” This year, Southern Company is an underwriter of the festival; in 2022 and 2023, The Atlantic’s CEO, Nicholas Thompson, interviewed the company’s CEOs about the transition to clean energy. Those interviews were “distinct and separate from the editorial interviews at the Festival, and clearly delineated, introduced, and labeled as such,” said Bross.
Bross also pointed me to guidelines that cover the outlet’s advertising, “including very clear labeling, fonts, and branding — so as to distinguish advertising from our journalism.” But while Amazeen said guidelines are an important first step, her research shows that such distinctions aren’t often appreciated — or even noticed — by the readers that sponsored content is intended to reach. “Publishers can (and do) say whatever they want about clear labeling,” she said. “What really matters is whether audiences can make this distinction.”
(When I asked Bross if blurred lines were a concern for The Atlantic, she responded that the outlet “fundamentally rejects” that characterization due to its labeling and that its audience is “incredibly sophisticated” and able to distinguish between the two.)
Southern Company’s “denial and delay”
Utilities like Southern Company — and the outlets that partner with them — have largely escaped criticism for greenwashing their role in the climate crisis. “What Southern Company is doing in terms of lobbying to fight this transition really deserves a lot more of a spotlight,” said Neil Sardana, an organizer at Georgia Conservation Voters.
For many advocates and researchers working in the states where it operates, Southern Company is one of the last entities you’d want to trust to deliver guidance on the clean energy transition. The company has a “long history in climate denial and delay,” said Daniel Tait, a research director at the Energy and Policy Institute, which published a report in 2022 documenting Southern Company’s early knowledge about the dangers of burning fossil fuels and decades-long disinformation campaigns to curb climate action. Tait, who is also the executive of Energy Alabama, a nonprofit that advocates for clean energy in the state, says Southern Company is still undermining the energy transition today.
They are building new gas-burning units, still rely on coal for power, and are actively blocking clean energy solutions like solar, he said.
Southern Company’s Alabama subsidiary, Alabama Power, has imposed a charge on rooftop solar panel owners, which is being challenged in court, as well as a tax on large-scale producers of solar energy. The company is also known by local advocates for its prolific dumping of toxic coal ash and for operating the most greenhouse gas-intensive power plant in the nation, located in West Jefferson, Alabama. Southern Company uses hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars to run a carbon capture testing and research center in Wilsonville, Alabama, even after the company was investigated for fraud, sued, and forced to refund $377 million to ratepayers for its failed carbon capture project at a coal plant in Kemper County, Mississippi.
Ramsey Sprague, President of the Alabama-based Mobile Environmental Justice Action Coalition, described Alabama Power as “vampiric,” and said it suppresses renewable energy generation in the state, pledges to mitigate its pollution via “unproven” carbon capture technologies, and “fleeces its customers” for the benefit of investors on Wall Street. A 2023 study found that Alabamians have the highest electricity bills in the United States.
Jilisa Milton, a co-director at the Greater-Birmingham Alliance to Stop Pollution, found Southern Company’s promotion of public-private partnerships around the energy transition ironic. “I don’t think they’ve ever invited us to have that conversation,” she said about Alabama Power. “We’ve tried to engage executives — there’s not really a channel for that.”
Southern Company has a very different version of its role in climate change, maintaining that gas is essential for a clean energy transition. “Natural gas and the infrastructure that transports it are foundational to achieving a sustainable future where energy is clean, safe, reliable and affordable,” reads its website. (Methane, the primary component of gas, is an even more potent greenhouse gas pollutant than carbon dioxide.)
Alabama Power says it gets nearly a third of its power from clean energy. But the Sierra Club gave Southern Company an “F” grade — zero out of 100 — in a report that scores utilities on their energy transition plans.
“The reality from their operating companies in Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia just does not match the rhetoric whatsoever,” said Sardana, who noted that Georgia Power is expanding fossil fuel generation in the state. “We see how much influence Southern Company has gained within our state and federally in terms of pushing back against climate regulations and protecting fossil fuels.”
After Hurricane Helene struck in September, thousands of Georgia residents went without power or running water for nearly three weeks. Southern Company has touted its recovery efforts in the area — but by keeping Georgia’s grid reliant on coal and gas infrastructure, Sardana said, the utility left residents more vulnerable to outages, not to mention that burning fossil fuels increases the damage caused by hurricanes like Helene.
“To me, you can’t completely divorce the issue of fueling climate change and then having to recover from the damage when climate devastation takes place,” Sardana said.
Media’s role
Its partnership with The Atlantic isn’t the first time Southern Company has used media funding to bolster its image. Floodlight News found that Southern Company subsidiary Alabama Power finances two news outlets in the state — a digital news service founded by the utility, and a Black newspaper bought by its philanthropic foundation. According to Floodlight’s analysis, the news center “publishes overwhelmingly positive stories about the power company,” while the newspaper's coverage of Alabama Power consists of reprinted stories from the news center and the utility’s own press releases.
Various fossil fuel and utility interests across the country are now funding struggling local news outlets to sway public opinion about their operations.
Sponsored content and advertising partnerships offer corporate interests a similar opportunity. According to Amazeen’s research, not only are readers often deceived by the advertisements news outlets create for brands, thinking they are legitimate news, but news outlets are also less likely to report on companies that paid them to create branded content.
In response to my questions about their partnership with Southern Company, The Atlantic’s Bross said their editorial team was fully independent from sponsored content — a standard practice in newsrooms — and that “advertising relationships do not affect how we cover any company.” But when I asked whether The Atlantic has ever reported on Southern Company outside of those partnerships, Bross did not provide any examples.
“It's difficult to hold powerful interests to account if news organizations won't report on them out of fear of losing an advertiser,” Amazeen told me. “At a time when facts are under siege, disinformation is ascendent, and when the public should be turning to traditional news sources for accurate, vetted information, I am concerned that news publishers are adding to the confusion and eroding their own legitimacy by blurring commercial and journalistic content.”
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Inside Trump’s plan to enforce amnesia by law - Alternet.org
Do you know about Donald J. Trump’s Executive Order 13950? If you don’t, be afraid. Be very afraid.
Just weeks before he was fired by America’s voters in 2020, President Trump issued this piece of nastiness which was quickly rescinded by just-inaugurated President Biden.
The Executive Order is a “DCL,” what the right-wing brilliantly calls a, “Divisive Concepts Law.” These DCL’s terrorize teachers with the threat of losing their jobs if they dare teach the truth of America’s racial history: That white people enslaved Africans, that the Klan enforced racial vote suppression with the hanging rope. And God forbid, they teach that women were banned from the vote until the 20th Century. The Executive Order bans teaching any historical facts if,
“….any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex….”
As a practical matter, it means teaching the truth of America’s racial stain will get you fired. In 2021, Tennessee high school teacher Matt Hawn lost his job because a student accused him of teaching—cover your children’s ears—“Critical Race Theory.” Hawn said he’d never heard of Critical Race Theory when he was canned.
(Critical Race Theory, taught in law schools, says many of America’s laws and their enforcement, contain a racial bias. Well, D’oh!].
On Thursday, Vice-President Harris told the American Federation of Teachers convention in Houston, epicenter of the anti-CRT hysteria,
“While you teach students about our nation's past, these extremists attack the freedom to learn and acknowledge our nation's true and full history; including book bans! Book bans — in this year 2024! Just think about it: we want to ban assault weapons and they want to ban books.”
It was a century ago, that Tennessee was the laughingstock of the nation for prosecuting a schoolteacher for telling his class about human evolution, a story recounted in the film, Inherit the Wind. Now, a hundred years later, Trumpsters are again passing wind over Tennessee.
And he’s baaaaack! Trump has put his fixation with censoring “divisive concepts” into the GOP platform. Details are provided in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 master plan for the master race.
This ill wind originated in Georgia when Gov. Brian Kemp signed HB1084, threatening the jobs of teachers for teaching ‘divisive concepts’ that could make a white child feel “discomfort.”
Who would feel “discomfort” about the uncensored history of Georgia? Well, maybe it’s Gov. Kemp himself. Because it was the Kemp family, then known as the Habershams, that first brought Africans in chains to Georgia.
Maybe Kemp and family should feel a bit of discomfort. I spoke with Janie Banse, who told me she is she is heartsick that her cousin, Gov. Kemp, won’t admit that their family’s wealth originated in the African slave trade. Kemp’s ancestors held the largest auction of human beings in American history, still remembered by Black Georgians today as “Weeping Time,” when 436 men, women and their children were separated and sold.
Georgia’s HB 1084, passed in 2022,
Prohibit[s] the use of curricula that addresses the topics of slavery, racial oppression, racial segregation, or racial discrimination, including topics relating to the enactment and enforcement of laws resulting in racial oppression, segregation, and discrimination in a professionally and academically appropriate manner and without espousing personal political beliefs;
And what if a teacher expresses a personal distaste for slavery?
Since Georgia was among the first to pass a “DCL,” and at least 16 states have followed.
In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis, dubbed his DCL the “Stop WOKE Act.”
He banned the College Board’s AP African American Studies course and supported new Black history standards that include the requirement to teach, “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
I can’t make this up.
Since 2021, at least 27 states have imposed or proposed bans or restrictions on teaching topics related to race and gender. Mississippi, Alabama, Arizona and Oklahoma all passed these Divisive Concepts laws. What do these states have in common? According to rankings by US News and World Report, they are all in the nation’s bottom third in educational achievement. Apparently, they won’t teach uncensored history—but then, it’s not clear that they teach much history at all.
Trump’s DLC brigade is not just putting a blindfold over students regarding slavery and Jim Crow. Oklahoma’s Divisive Concepts Law has effectively silenced the true story of the state that was once known officially as, “Indian Territory.”
Jim Gray, former Principal Chief of the Osage Nation, told me that teachers throughout the state have been yanking copies of David Grann’s book Killers of the Flower Moon off their classroom shelves. Killers, on which the Martin Scorsese/Leonardo DiCaprio movie is based, tells the true story about how, in the 1920s, over 100 Oklahoma Osage were murdered for their oil rights.
The insidious brilliance of the Oklahoma law is that it has a fuzzy general prohibition on “divisive” concepts—with teachers facing loss of their teaching credentials and the entire school district losing funding. Because teachers have to guess which books or films will get them fired, the result is mass self-censorship, with Killers culled from classrooms across the state.
A RAND corporation study found that a breathtaking two out of three K-12 teachers, “have decided on their own to limit instruction about political and social issues in the classroom.” Can you blame them?
Any student or parent can put a legal gun to a school principal’s head. But when the law says, “students,” as a practical matter, they don’t mean young kids on the Reservation. Every year, on April 22, Oklahoma celebrates “Sooner Rush Day”, the day in 1889, when any white man could simply stand on a plot of land and seize the surrounding 160 acres of what was, by treaty, Indian Territory. Indigenous kids have to re-enact the theft of their property whether they feel discomfort or not.
I have included this story of the Sooner Rush land grab in my documentary, Long Knife: the Osage Nation, Koch Oil and the new Killers of the Flower Moon. And for that alone, says Chief Gray, the chance it will screen in an Oklahoma school, even a state university, is zilch.
But some states are not shy about creating Black Lists of books to ban. Assigning anti-racist classics Huckleberry Finn or To Kill a Mockingbird, could kill a teacher’s career. PEN America counted 3,132 books banned in nine states in the 2022-23 school year.
Cui Bono? Who benefits from historical amnesia? Kemp alone was not the only white boy to make his fortune from a slaver’s whip. Historic amnesia is a profit center covering many historic misdeeds from Jim Crow to union busting to corporate corruption.
I found this out when I was physically ejected from the Georgia Historical Society in Savannah. I was having a polite interview with the Society’s in-house historian, Dr. Stan Deaton, who was explaining that the Klan took over control of the South when, in 1876, Republicans lost both the popular vote and the Electoral vote—yet a pact between the Klan-backed Southern Democrats and northern Republicans used a sly maneuver to overturn the vote and install the GOP candidate as President. It came down to one official, Dr. Deaton noted, then added, “We saw Mike Pence in that situation recently.”
The second the historian uttered the words, “Mike Pence,” the door flew open and the Society’s PR man halted the interview and expelled me from the building, saying, “We have to protect the new corporate donors on our board.”
I was curious. Who were these “donors” needing protection from history? I found their gala dinner on YouTube with their tuxedoed corporate money men: Georgia Pacific (owned by Koch Industries), Home Depot (owned by right-wing union buster Ken Langone), and Southern Company, whom I investigated some years ago for racketeering and the inexplicable death of whistleblowers. And the Chairman of the Historical Society? Gov. Brian Kemp.
Just below Savannah, at the Kemp family’s old plantation, I spoke with caretaker and Councilman Griffin Lotson whose own great-grandmother was sold at Weeping Time by Kemp’s progenitors.
Lotson emphasizes the connection between this legally enforced historical amnesia and the fight for voting rights. He says, “Suppressing history is suppressing the vote.”
Back in Oklahoma, the current Principal Chief of the Osage, Geoffrey Standing Bear, explained that if Oklahoma were to admit that its “Sooner Rush” was simply theft from the indigenous owners of the land, then it would force open eyes to what he calls, the “military occupation [of Native land] that continues today.”
Napoleon famously said, “History is a set of lies agreed upon.” Trump’s DCL crusade sees history as a set of truths silenced.
*Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers including The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. His latest film is Vigilantes Inc.: America’s New Vote Suppression Hitmen to be released in September. GregPalast.com
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2/18 budget
In addition, the legislation extends tax credits to makers of biodiesel and "renewable diesel," and pushes back the deadline for nuclear facilities to qualify for credits. The nuclear provision would benefit the only plant in the works, under construction by Southern Company, in Georgia.
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https://www.ecowatch.com/vogtle-nuclear-plant-2519385301.html
Betraying Ratepayers and Clean Energy Future, Georgia Panel Approves Vogtle Nuclear Reactors
By Jessica Corbett
Georgia's public utility commission voted 5-0 on Thursday to continue construction on two half-finished nuclear reactors that will cost an estimated $25 billion,even though the project is now "more than $10 billion over budget and five years late."
Opponents of nuclear power were disappointed by the unanimous decision, which the Wall Street Journal noted was considered "a victory forSouthern Co., whose subsidiary Georgia Power is the primary owner of the Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant, which has two existing reactors." The project has faced opposition from local residents as well as national groups that emphasize the long-term risks of nuclear power.
"Georgia Power should scrap this disaster immediately and instead transition away from dangerous nuclear and fossil fuel-based electric generation and toward a 100 percent clean energy economy that creates good jobs, protects our environment, and shields our communities from the gross financial risks associated with bad bets like Vogtle," said Ted Terry, director of the Sierra Club's Georgia Chapter, after the vote.
"Georgia Power's profits have soared because they've been allowed to pick the pockets of families, schools and churches for a boondoggle that even the [public utility commission's] staff has called too uneconomic to continue—yet today commissioners chose not to stop it," Terry added. "The commission has failed Georgia's hard-working families and businesses today by choosing to be lapdogs for Georgia Power instead of watchdogs for the people of Georgia."
Construction on the reactors "has been plagued by delays and spiraling costs, compounded when the main contractor filed for bankruptcy" in March, the Associated Press reported.
"Most people have to pay for their mistakes, but Georgia Power is still profiting from theirs," said Kurt Ebersbach, senior attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center. "There's something wrong with a system that rewards this kind of failure."
The decision will likely "shape the future of the nation's nuclear industry, partly because the reactors at Plant Vogtle were the first new ones to be licensed and to begin construction in the U.S. since 1978," the AP noted—all while consumers of power in Georgia pay the price.
"Under state law, Georgia Power's 2.4 million customers will ultimately reimburse the state-regulated monopoly for the flagship plant as they pay their monthly electricity bills," the AP explained. "That law allows Georgia Power to charge its customers now for the interest it pays on the borrowed money needed for the project. Under an older law, the utility had to wait until the plant was operating to collect those interest charges from its customers, a practice that meant the interest owed grew during the construction period."
"Even though customers had no control over Georgia Power's mistakes, they're going to be the ones footing the bill," said Nathaniel Smith, chief equity officer at the Atlanta-based nonprofit Partnership for Southern Equity. "These impacts will be especially difficult on the most vulnerable Georgians who are already struggling to put food on the table."
However, there may still be hope for cancelling the project. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Georgia utility regulators "conditioned their approval of the Vogtle nuclear project on no small caveat: that Congress approves roughly $800 million worth of tax credits"—meaning that if federal lawmakers don't approve the tax credits, the state regulators may reconsider their decision.
Reposted with permission from our media associate Common Dreams.
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https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/08/08/southern-company-fraud-allegations-kemper-clean-coal-project
Southern Co. is accused of fraudulently misrepresenting the prospects for its troubled “clean coal” project in Kemper County, Mississippi in several legal filings this summer.
Southern announced in late July that it was shuttering the troubled “clean coal” part of Kemper after construction ran years behind schedule and the company spent $7.5 billion on the 582 megawatt power plant — over $5 billion more than it first projected.
In a lawsuit filed today, Brett Wingo, a former Southern Company engineer, alleges he warned the company's top executives that it would not be possible to meet key construction deadlines. Management responded by retaliating against him, the complaint asserts, and Southern continued to assure investors and the public that Kemper's schedule and budget targets would be met, then blamed unpredictable factors like the weather when those goals were missed.
Wingo’s claim that Southern misled investors by concealing construction-related problems drew national attention in a front page New York Times investigation last year. In January, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) concluded that Wingo had suffered a “continuing pattern of retaliatory treatment” and ordered Southern to reinstate Wingo, but the company has refused, according to a statement accompanying the lawsuit. (The case is “Brett Wingo v. The Southern Company, et al.,” Case No. 2:17-cv-01328-MHH in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama, Southern Division.)
A second less-noticed legal filing with Mississippi state regulators accuses Southern of misrepresenting Kemper's prospects right from the outset, before construction even began. Those claims center on Southern's projections for what it would cost to operate and maintain the plant once it was up and running, which the filing asserts were so low they were “indefensible”.
In an email to DeSmog, Wingo seconds those claims, saying that he believes management knew back in 2012 that its “operation and maintenance” (O&M) projections were off — but kept the accurate numbers under wraps for years.
“By hiding the true O& M costs for so long, apparently since 2012 and likely longer, Fanning basically ensured shareholders would be forced to absorb $6 billion in losses,” Wingo told DeSmog.
“In 2012, sunk costs on Kemper were only around $1 billion and the natural gas part of the plant substantially complete. It would have been a perfect time to stop a runaway train from running off the end of the tracks,” he added. “But history shows, that’s not what Fanning and Southern Company chose to do.”
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a historic vote this morning, Mississippi state regulators slammed the brakes on the Kemper coal power plant, saying they will refuse to ask utility customers to pay anything for Kemper's non-functional multi-billion dollar “clean coal” gasification technology and will re-designate the plant as a natural gas facility.
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/utilities-climate-change_us_597673e0e4b0c95f375dd60d
Oil giants like Exxon Mobil Corp. and Royal Dutch Shell aren’t the only corporations that understood what was happening to the climate decades ago and covered that knowledge up.
Utility companies recognized that emissions from burning fossil fuels warmed the planet as far back as 1968, according to a report released Tuesday.
That year, a top science adviser to President Lyndon B. Johnson warned utility executives gathered at an industry conference that the federal government feared the projected increase in carbon dioxide emissions over the coming decades could wreak havoc on the environment.
“Carbon dioxide is not toxic, but it is the chief heat-absorbing component of the atmosphere,” Donald F. Hornig said at the 1968 annual convention of the Edison Electric Institute, according to the trade group’s newsletter from that year. “Such a change in the carbon dioxide level might, therefore, produce major consequences on the climate ― possibly even triggering catastrophic effects such as have occurred from time to time in the past.”
The new report, published by the watchdog Energy & Policy Institute, contains dozens of internal documents unearthed from the archives of utility industry associations that initially funded research into climate change, but later opposed efforts to stop it. The research paints a picture of how the utility sector transformed from financier to foe of climate science at a critical point when carbon emissions could have been addressed.
Less than two years ago, documents unearthed by InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times similarly revealed that Exxon Mobil had understood climate change in the late 1970s. But by the late 1980s, the oil company deliberately covered up the evidence to protect its financial interests, funding a Big Tobacco-style disinformation campaign to discredit climate scientists with a network of research institutes pumping out pseudoscience. State attorneys general are now investigating Exxon Mobil for allegedly fraudulently misleading its investors about the risks posed by climate change.
A spokesman for Exxon Mobil insisted in an email to HuffPost that the reporting on the company’s climate record “is not credible” and an “easily discredited talking point.”
Earlier this year, Shell was dragged into the controversy when an internal corporate film from 1991 was surfaced by the Dutch news outlet The Correspondent. It demonstrated Shell’s long-ago grasp of the science behind climate change.
Utilities followed a similar arc. By the 1970s and ’80s, the Edison Electric Institute and the industry-backed Electric Power Research Institute had sponsored cutting-edge climate research looking at the surge of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the rise in global temperatures and the risk that melting polar ice caps would flood coastal cities. In 1988, the two organizations co-sponsored research into “the potential effects of climate change on electric utilities.” In a report released that April, the Electric Power Research Institute concluded that “climate changes possible over the next 30 years may significantly affect the electric utility industry.”
There are “striking parallels” between the recent investigations of the oil industry and the utility companies, Dave Anderson, a researcher at the Energy & Policy Institute who uncovered the documents, told HuffPost. “We can now show utilities knew about climate change as far back as the oil industry did.”
But in 1989, the industry’s response to the emerging science took a turn. That year, investor-owned utilities backed the formation of the Global Climate Coalition, a lobbying group that sought to torpedo any governmental action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The coalitiondisbanded in 2001 after successfully pressuring President George W. Bush to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol,the United Nations-brokered deal to reduce planet-warming emissions in rich countries.
“The evidence suggests they were very much involved in the deliberate deception [about the dangers of carbon emissions] going on at that time,” said Anderson, who previously worked on the Greenpeace-led Exxon Knew campaign. “Scientists had been warning for years that they could be a problem, and by the late 1980s, it was pretty clear there was an emerging consensus among scientists.”
Anderson noted that the Edison Electric Institute’s website traces the industry’s involvement in climate change issues back only 30 years, to 1987, and that details of the institute’s current work on the issue are locked in a password-protected “Climate Workshop.”
In a short statement, Edison Electric Institute said the industry has slashed its carbon footprint.
“The electric power industry has reduced carbon emissions by 25 percent below 2005 levels as of the end of 2016,” Jeffrey Ostermayer, an EEI spokesperson, told HuffPost in an email.
The Electric Power Research Institute did not respond to a request for comment.
Industry efforts to undermine regulations on carbon emissions had real impact. In 2015, utility sector emissions were higher than in 1989, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration data. Totals fell slightly in 2016, although they are likely to increase again as coal use ticks up in response to rising natural gas prices.
To be sure, utilities have made strides in recent years by building up their renewable energy infrastructure and converting smog-spewing coal plants to natural gas, which burns cleaner. But corporations like Atlanta-basedSouthern Company, a $49 billion giant with more than 9 million customers, continue to publicly deny the basic science behind climate change.
Asked on CNBC in March if carbon dioxide is the primary cause of climate change, Southern Company CEO Tom Fanning said, “No, certainly not.”
“Is climate change happening? Certainly. It’s been happening for millennia,” Fanning said, promoting a :{commonly used, albeit widely debunked, argument}: by climate science deniers that the warming seen in the last few decades is a mostly natural occurrence.
In a brief phone interview, a Southern Company spokesman said: “We’re meeting or exceeding all regulations in terms of climate.”
“Southern Company is committed to a leadership role in finding solutions that make technological, environmental and economic sense,” he added in an email. “The focus of this effort must be on developing and deploying technologies that reduce [greenhouse gases] while making sure that energy remains reliable and affordable.”
The utility has urged the Trump administration to reverse power plant rules enacted by President Barack Obama to cut back emissions. It funds groups like the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, which argues that the benefits of carbon dioxide outweigh the environmental costs.
“Southern Company would seem to be the individual company that’s the most Exxon-like,”Anderson said. “The move Trump is making is very much in line with what lobbyists at that company have been doing in recent years.”
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http://www.alternet.org/environment/heres-what-you-need-know-about-americas-biggest-greenhouse-gas-polluter
Up close, the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases in the U.S. isn't as big as you'd expect it to be. From most angles, you can't even see it until you're right on top of it.
But hit the right gap in the rolling hills of north-central Alabama, and the James H. Miller Jr. Electric Generating Plant looms large even from miles away. Nestled on about 800 acres on the Locust Fork of the Black Warrior River, the plant is one of Alabama Power's coal-burning workhorses, putting out enough electricity to power about a million homes. It virtually never stops running—and never stops producing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
As the view shifts, so does public opinion.
From certain angles, the plant is a pollution-belching monster harming both the environment and the health of communities. Change your perspective a bit, and Miller is a source of good-paying jobs, a means to raise a family in an area where economic opportunities are thin.
Paul Dollar, 75, who has lived just a few hundred yards from the plant property for more than 30 years, sees Miller both ways. On one hand, there's dust and noise: "This thing I believe is getting my health and it's bothering me." On the other, Dollar and his daughter Tammy can name a dozen friends, relatives and neighbors who work for the plant, its contractors, or in one of the related service industries.
"To their credit, Alabama Power is a good corporate citizen. They provide good jobs. They do a lot in the community for charity and such," said Scotty Colson, a lawyer in Birmingham, 16 miles southeast of the plant. But "you don't get the impression that [pollution] is a high priority. They're pretty much OK with shifting the cost onto people who have a problem with what their byproduct is."
Alabama Power is a subsidiary of the Southern Company, which owns 11 utilities in nine states.Southern has spent nearly $12 billion on pollution controls at its plants since 1990 and "is committed to comply with all environmental laws and regulations," spokesman Terrell McCollum wrote in a statement for this article.
But Colson, a clean-air advocate, said those costs have been passed on to customers—both directly on their utility bills and indirectly through impacts on health and climate.
"They start putting the onus on everybody else," he said, "when in fact they have spent quite a lot with lobbying to fight regulations and delay regulations." Southern spent more than all but a dozen other U.S. companies on federal lobbying during the 2016 election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics—nearly $14 million.
Colson has lived in the Birmingham area for all of his 58 years and fought asthma for most of them. Miller's discharges of greenhouse gases and noxious substances have taken a toll, he said, not only on the environment but also on his lungs.
"You rationalize it by saying, 'I'm taking care of my family first,'" he said. "You rationalize it by saying, 'Oh, it really doesn't do any harm.' That's your basic climate denial and science denial, which is epidemic in some areas here."
But the science doesn't lie. Researchers around the world have repeatedly offered proof that climate change is happening and that humans are causing it....
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tax dodger:
n Mike Pence, Donald Trump has picked a running mate who could be relied on to take a chainsaw to President Obama’s signature environmental policy.
In 2015 the Indiana governor toldObama in no uncertain terms that his state would not be complying with the Clean Power Plan, which sets targets for reducing power plant emissions in each state. Pence joined a lawsuit that has succeeded in tying up the plan in court.
He and other climate crisis-denying policymakers have benefited from a well-coordinated network of industry front groups, conservative think tanks and law firms bent on blocking the Clean Power Plan. A good chunk of the funding for this cabal comes from some of the country’s largest electrical utilities companies.
Where do they get all that extra spending money? It turns out public utilities are champion tax dodgers—the dodgiest of all U.S. business sectors, in fact.
According to a new report by the Institute for Policy Studies, 23 of the 40 publicly held utilities that were profitable in 2015 paid no federal taxes that year. Sixteen of them paid no state income taxes. The most extreme example last year was Southern Company, which reaped $210 million in federal and state tax refunds, despite $3.6 billion in pre-tax income.
This Georgia-based firm, with nine million customers in the southeastern United States, is a fierce Clean Power Plan opponent. In comments to the Environmental Protection Agency, the firm warned the plan would result in “a complete deconstruction of the nation’s electric sector.”
Southern officials also did their best to make their customers’ hair stand on end by claiming the CPP would put $35 billion in upward pressure on their rates over the next 15 years. By contrast, the administration forecasts $80 per year in average savings per household through increased efficiency.
Southern CEO Tom Fanning pocketed $11.8 million in compensation last year and steered a good share of the rest of the proceeds from tax-dodging into blocking the Clean Power Plan through various industry groups, such as the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity. That outfit is in turn a member of the Utility Air Regulatory Group, a petitioner along with Pence’s state of Indiana in the lawsuit to overturn the Clean Power Plan. The company is also a major Capitol Hill presence in its own right, having spent more than $25 million in federal lobbying in 2013-2014.
Pence and his utility industry partners against the CPP say they’re looking out for the public interest. They claim the EPA’s rules will be expensive for ratepayers and cost jobs. And yet if they were truly interested in what’s best for ordinary Americans, they would be investing much more in energy efficiency, the cheapest and fastest route to reducing carbon emissions.
Utilities are required by law to invest in “demand-side” energy efficiency at the consumer end, but the patchwork of state and federal programs have not gone nearly far enough to mitigate climate change and move the country toward a clean energy future.
Most of these programs also require home and building owners to invest significant upfront capital and so poor households often cannot participate. And since such programs potentially reduce utilities’ profits by reducing energy demand, the firms have had little incentive to do more.
It would make far more sense to plug the loopholes that have allowed these highly profitable utilities get away without paying their fair share of taxes. Then invest the revenue in projects that would benefit everyday Americans, especially low-income and communities of color. If Southern had paid the full statutory federal and state tax rates last year, for example, they would’ve contributed nearly $1.5 billion to public coffers—enough to fund 9,000 good jobs for people in retrofitting homes or building wind turbines.
If all 40 profitable utilities had paid their fair share at the state and federal levels in 2015, they would’ve paid about of $14 billion in additional revenue. That would’ve been enough to create 88,000 energy efficiency jobs or weatherize homes for up to three million low-income families.
http://www.alternet.org/environment/pences-partners-against-climate-regs-tax-dodging-utilities
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