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.
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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 asking questions is criminal, then I guess I could understand the actions taken, but I don’t think that asking questions and asking for transparency should be treated as, like, a criminal act.“If we had to stop producing CO₂, no coal, oil, or gas could be burned,” Carroll Wilson declared. “It was really disconcerting to see a private gas company using our police force against neighbors who were trying to speak reason to folks who didn’t want to hear it,” she said. (Kim Hairston/Baltimore Sun )Ĭlaudia Towles was one of three protesters arrested Friday evening on charges of interfering with material equipment and facilities belonging to BGE.Īlthough she said she can’t comment on the details of the arrest, she said the 20-hour detainment “wasn’t a pleasant experience.”
Residents are angry that BGE has switched from interior regulators and is installing equipment on the front exteriors of brick rowhouses, a change they believe is unsafe, unsightly and unnecessary. BGE has been replacing "regulators" that control gas pressure in Fells Point, Washington Hill, Butchers Hill and other dense, urban neighborhoods.
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