Tuesday’s look at the issue of energy access abroad, in India and Africa, may make it seem like it’s a foreign issue, but unfortunately the industry is “wokewashing” in the US, too.
It’s not universal, yet. For example, the goofballs at Heartland are sticking to their traditional tin foil hattery during their multi-state tours, as an email we have obtained claims. That’s in addition to what Politico recently reported on the effort to recruit states to boycott banks that don’t do business with fossil fuel losers. Similarly, CNN recently covered a more sophisticated multi-state campaign to prevent local policymakers from protecting their residents from methane gas stoves.
And while “working families” are often used as human shields, going deep into one state-level fight, InsideClimate News looked at the new twists in the California rooftop solar story. They expose efforts by one astroturf group to sabotage solar for the benefit of its dirty energy backers, like Pacific Gas and Electric Company, and Southern California Edison.
What sets this story apart, though, is that the group, Affordable Clean Energy for All, is attacking subsidies for rooftop solar as poor people’s taxes supporting rich solar homeowner’s expensive luxury solar panels, using an equity argument that makes it appear progressive when talking about a “cost shift”. Of course numerous studies have shown that rooftop solar provides a net-benefit to other, non-solar customers, but that’s not stopping them!
It’s part of at least a decade’s worth of careful strategic planning. In 2012, the industry group EEI rolled out an “action plan” to use the cost shift argument to protect its profits from the increased uptake of renewables.
By 2014, ALEC had its model legislation ready to present to groups of Black public officials with a history of funding from EEI, like the National Black Caucus of State Legislators, National Organization of Black Elected Legislative Women and the National Policy Alliance.
Reverend Ambrose Carroll, though, an Oakland pastor and executive director of Green the Church, told ICN the astroturf effort was “poppycock” and “very disingenuous”, “a move of power to, on a whim, decide to co-sign for the name of equity.”
In an op-ed for the San Jose Mercury, Rev. Carroll explained how “powerful special interests have changed their vocabulary to keep up with higher standards of accountability” and “ have begun to use catchphrases like equity, social justice and equal outcomes.”
But of course, “often that rhetoric is nothing more than a fancy public relations spin as the economically and politically powerful continue to advance policies that are not actually in the interests of equal outcomes.”
Rev. Carroll called out the “cost shift” argument for being dishonest, because “solar panels generate more efficient local energy, help decarbonize the grid, prevent blackouts and significantly lower people’s monthly utility bills.” That’s why he doesn’t “believe the big utilities or their allies when they say making everyone, especially working families, pay the highest rooftop solar fees in the nation is in the best interests of equity.”
Fortunately, in light of opposition by actual local grassroots campaigners like Rev. Carroll, as well as some other notable names chiming up, California regulators are doing a deeper dive into the issue before voting on rooftop solar rates.
But we’re not off the hook yet. “Like the mortgage industry claiming redlining stabilizes the housing market or the private prison industry claiming mass incarceration makes society safer,” Rev. Carroll concluded, “the big utilities are not being socially responsible.”
We couldn’t say it better ourselves, so we’ll give Rev. Carroll the last word on it:
Worse, they’re exploiting the very communities that they claim they’re helping by arguing that these fees are equalizers when they are blatantly profit makers. If frontline communities were truly their concern, then the big utilities and their allies at the CPUC would be bolstering clean and affordable local power, not destroying the very regulation that makes on-site and rooftop solar more affordable for working communities.
