We recently came across a real “genius” ad campaign by the American Public Gas Association. According to APGA’s program page — where you can watch a video that gives a surprising amount of behind-the-scenes info on their design process and the funding for the three-year campaign — the ad effort "speaks from the heart and mind of today’s homebuyer/remodeler" and praises the "genius" of switching from electric cooking and heating to gas.
Because yes, committing yourself and your family to an energy source that pollutes not just the climate but the air in your home that your family breathes every day, and is therefore increasingly being banned because of that pollution, is definitely a real “genius” move.
To be fair though, as far as industry trade groups go, APGA’s “genius” campaign seems pretty clever in comparison to a week-long training camp the Edison Electric Institute hosted last December. According to recent reporting by David Pomerantz at the Energy and Policy Institute, the curriculum included boasting about two recent case studies where utility companies successfully lobbied for their interests.
One of EEI's case studies examined the Arizona Public Service’s defeat of a 2018 ballot initiative that would’ve required the state’s utilities to be 50% clean by 2030. APS successfully sunk the initiative, but a year and a half later the company committed to a clean energy plan nearly identical to the plan they’d spent $40 million opposing, and their CEO was forced to resign.
A second case study of how EEI suggested utilities fight clean energy was the House Bill 6 in Ohio. If that sounds familiar, it's probably because that legislation was the center of a massive corruption scheme that has recently come to light. Pomerantz points out that in the presentation praising the effort to get a billion-plus dollar bailout, “the slides did not reference the payment by FirstEnergy and its subsidiaries of over $60 million to a 501(c)(4) dark money group that formed the slush fund at the root of the federal bribery charges, but they did include a snapshot of the Ohioans for Energy Security website with the identifying domain name.” (For those not intimately well-versed in Ohio energy scandals, that's the group federal investigators charge was the front company used for the racketeering effort.)
So in essence, the dirty energy lobby is telling its members that two of the best ways to forestall the necessary transition to renewable energy is to spend $40 million pointlessly swinging a vote, or $60 million on a front group for bribing state officials to pass a bill to bail out your company.
There’s just one word for it: Genius.
[Editor’s Note: The Climate Denier Roundup is taking an extended Labor Day break. We’ll be back in a week!]