A new report from the Energy and Policy Institute looks into the 10 top investor-owned electric utilities, and found that they all “use their charitable giving to manipulate politics, policies and regulations in ways designed to increase shareholder profits, often at the expense of low-income communities.”
In total, from 2013 to 2017, the 10 utilities gave over a billion dollars to charitable organizations. This is 13 times more than the $78 million the entire utility sector gave to federal elections, showing just how dramatic the difference is between disclosed political spending and this sort of covert charity effort.
The report also identifies four key ways that utilities are using philanthropy to buy influence. The first is the most obvious and most direct: utilities gave money to an organization, and then that organization supported the utility on an issue.
The second set of examples involve utilities giving to organizations that are affiliated with policymakers. For example, an anti-renewable energy portfolio legislator in Arizona has “received thousands of dollars in personal income for jobs he’d done for multiple organizations that receive charitable funding” from the utility. Since the utility is giving to the charitable group, and the group then pays the politician, apparently there is “no conflict of interest.”
The third way utilities are using charitable giving for uncharitable purposes is to basically buy off their opposition. The report uses FirstEnergy as an example, as it appears to have given $200,000 over two years to a church that was initially opposed to a FirstEnergy plan, but then changed their mind.
Finally, there are charitable donations to organizations focused on low-income residents or communities of color to try and buy their support and change the public perception of an issue, as exemplified by Michigan’s DTE Energy. DTE Energy faced stiff opposition to a plan that would pay solar panel owners less than they previously were being paid, and add a fee for those users. But then a new group comprised of churches, chambers of commerce, and groups advocating for communities of color called Michigan Energy Promise was created, and it came out in favor of the plan. EPI notes that “many of the groups had either received thousands of dollars from the DTE Energy Foundation over the past five years, list the utility as a corporate sponsor on organization websites, or include a utility employee as a member of the board.”
This co-option of groups representing marginalized people is particularly problematic, and as the report notes, is discussed in the NAACP’s “Fossil Fueled Foolery” report. It’s also something we’ve noticed before, and referred to as “corporate minstrelism.”
As EPI notes, these attempts to buy off support from communities of color are “particularly egregious given many of the companies’ track record of pushing for regressive rate structures that hurt low-income customers the worst, and of environmental injustice, including the siting of polluting power plants and waste facilities in poor communities and communities of color.”
So while everyone loves philanthropy, and it’s hard to get mad about charitable giving, it seems that there is more than just a desire to do good that’s motivating utility’s donations. In fact, it appears that for utilities, charity has utility.