The new research looked at 188 speeches, memos, articles, ads, and other industry documents from 1968 to 2019 that mentioned climate change, carbon dioxide, or other climate-related keywords. Some utilities are regulated monopolies, generating their own electricity and selling it to captive customers, while others work as middlemen in a deregulated electricity market.īut all stripes of utilities fought climate policy aggressively and enduringly, the study finds. There are investor-owned utilities, publicly owned utilities, and utilities that are somewhere in between. Yet utilities are so complicated-and, truth be told, so straight-up boring-that they escape public scrutiny. They count almost every American as a customer, and they bring in more revenue combined each year than Apple does. “We can’t do this without utilities onboard, honestly,” Stokes said.Įlectric utilities might be some of the most powerful and least understood companies in America. In many scenarios where America has a zero-carbon economy, utilities play a larger role, generating, distributing, and transmitting far more electricity than they do today. Yet utilities remain crucial to fighting climate change. Many utilities still operate damaging, debt-ridden coal plants today because of the decisions that they made decades ago. But utilities’ legacy of denial, doubt, and dawdling continues to hold back the country’s energy transition, Leah Stokes, an author of the study and a political scientist at UC Santa Barbara, told me. In the aftermath of the Inflation Reduction Act, the country’s first comprehensive climate law, much of this may seem like academic history. The study, published this month in Environmental Research Letters, reveals the half-century arc that took electric utilities from feting the country’s top climate scientists in the 1960s to denouncing the importance of their research in the 1990s to reluctantly undertaking efforts to decarbonize their own grids in the 2010s. Years after scientists had reached a consensus that global warming was real, dangerous, and caused by fossil fuels, utilities sold climate half-truths and untruths to policy makers and the public. “Utilities were also in the room,” Emily Williams, a researcher at UC Santa Barbara and a co-author of a new study about the electricity industry’s role in spreading climate denial, told me. Why has it taken so long for the United States to treat climate change seriously, much less adopt serious efforts to stop it? Over the past few years, the public has come to understand at least one cause: A handful of oil companies understood the reality of climate change years before the general public, but waged an expensive and secretive campaign through the 1990s and 2000s to muddy the science and play down the dangers.īut oil companies did not act alone. In 1992, an EEI article said that global warming would not portend disaster, but bring “cooler days, warmer nights, and better vegetables.” Yet scarcely two decades later, virtually the entire electric-utility industry-including the Edison Electric Institute, its flagship lobbying group, and the Electric Power Research Institute, its leading R&D alliance-united against any effort to understand or stop climate change. And the conference’s organizer, the Edison Electric Institute, seemed keen to get the best climate research in front of its members, even if it had radical implications for their business. Although he said that global warming wasn’t yet a scientific certainty-which was true in those days-he was clear that it needed to be taken seriously. His speech was as up-to-date a discussion of climate science as you could find in the early 1970s. He was talking to a room full of engineers and businessmen who had gathered in Cleveland, Ohio, for the electricity industry’s annual conference. Wilson, a management professor, wasn’t speaking at an environmental rally or a scientific meeting. The world would have to adopt nuclear energy en masse and perhaps even turn to “electric motor vehicles.” “If we had to stop producing CO₂, no coal, oil, or gas could be burned,” Carroll Wilson declared.
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