David Pomerantz
@DavidPomerantz
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Exposing efforts by utilities and fossil fuel interests to undermine clean energy with @energyandpolicy . Personal account. DM for Signal info to chat securely.
Joined August 2008
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Last Seen Profiles
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Grateful to
@nytopinion
for sharing my essay on how utilities are using our money to slow down the clean energy transition, and how we can stop them.
And thank you to my colleagues at
@EnergyandPolicy
for their years of digging up the dirt utilities try to keep hidden from us!
Our very own
@DavidPomerantz
has a new Guest Essay in
@nytimes
today about how to stop utilities from using ratepayer dollars to prolong the era of dirty energy. Please read and share!
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Imagine getting to be alive during the vanishingly thin slice of history where we understand the full gravity of the climate crisis and still have time to do something about it.
Feeling grateful, fired up and ready to do the damn thing.
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**ARIZONA** will have 100% carbon-free electricity by 2050, with interim targets in '32 and '40, per a bipartisan vote by the Arizona Corporation Commission today.
The ACC will need to finalize it next year, but the votes should be there, based on what went down today.
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Whispers: There's a commission in your state of 3 - 5 people who can shut down all the fossil plants and pipelines and replace them with clean electricity, and SCOTUS can't stop them no matter how much money the oil/gas industry gives to the Federalist Society.
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If you’re the kind of person who is concerned about climate change and dismayed by today’s court decision, tomorrow’s a great day to find an organization in your state that’s working at the legislature or Public Utility Commission to speed up the transition to clean energy.
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If only - and hear me out on this, please - if only there were an issue that Biden could place at the very center of his campaign to woo young voters.
Something that young voters care about more than anything, because it imperils our future.
Hmmm...
HMMMMM...
HMMMMMMMMMMM...
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Most people don't understand that if gas stoves turn into weaponized political symbols such that conservatives decide gas stoves are Good, and that reinforces for liberals that gas stoves are Bad... this is like a death blow for the gas industry.
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Was just happily reminded that virtually no one is fully pricing in the generational tsunami that is hitting HR departments as they cope with the fact that very few talented young people want to go work for corporations that are causing climate change.
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Whoa. Dewey Square Group, the lobbyist firm arguing against a
#climatedebate
at DNC today, was paid over $800,000 to successfully lobby for a coal bailout in Ohio by utility FirstEnergy. WTF?
@cleantechfacts
@leahstokes
@drvox
@Tinapo
@DNC
first opposition speaker is Maria Cardona, who works at Dewey Square Group, a public affairs group (aka lobbyist).
#ClimateDebate
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What fresh hell is this now? Dearest
@HuffPost
: Letting Shell use your platform to shift blame for climate change to pet owners for using plastic poop bags made from Shell's product is... not good. And it's not the values you espouse.
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Entergy lied to New Orleans, promising their new gas plants would keep the lights on in a storm.
Then they fought community groups who pleaded with officials to instead prioritize more resilient solutions like rooftop solar, batteries and microgrids.
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A thread of people all saying Holy Shit at once in response to DeSantis veto of the FPL-written solar attack bill:
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For a number of reasons that have become increasingly clear in the past few months, I don’t think I’ve ever been so confident in the massive role that customer-owned energy like rooftop solar is going to play in powering this country.
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Antonin Scalia making martinis out of ice from glaciers that will soon be melted due in no small part to his judicial activism, and then throwing 'em back with his conservative benefactors, is just a bit too much for me to take tonight.
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Just to be clear: customers in Ohio didn't get robbed of $60 million in this FirstEnergy-funded corruption scheme. They got robbed of *several billion dollars.* The $60 million is just what greased the wheels for it all.
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Some people responding to this with comments about how their PUC is captured by utilities and believe me, I am aware of the challenges. But if it were easy, we'd have done it already. Pretty much everything worth doing on climate is hard.
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Multiple climate and energy dissertations neatly captured in 23 seconds of video.
DANGEROUS WAVES: Don't let this happen to you. Strong winds are causing high waves to pound the shoreline along Lake Michigan. Stay off the the lakefront trail.
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If you are a climate advocate, then today is a good day to remember the old campaigning adage of seeking change where you have the most power, and your opponent has the least.
The answer to that is going to be something like City Hall or a Public Utility Commission. Not SCOTUS.
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Too much focus from the baby industrial complex on how laying newborns on the wrong kind of surface for 4 seconds has a minuscule chance of hurting them and not enough on how continued burning of coal gas and oil is certain to do so, imho.
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Utility tried to quit on Connecticut because the regulator there had the audacity to try to actually do her job.
It backfired spectacularly.
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People may be underestimating the impact of the Exxon news. Shareholders didn't just rebuke mgmt over climate. That's becoming increasingly common (good!)
Shareholders won a *corporate control* battle over climate. This is a different universe of threat that just became real.
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Repeat after me, until you're so tired of saying it your brain is melting:
When school districts go solar, that means more $ goes to teachers and kids instead of corrupt monopoly utilities.
Very cool to see so many beautiful examples laid out here:
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First they ignore you.
Then they laugh at you.
Then they set a sketchy carbon goal that relies on offsets to obscure their ongoing investment in fossil fuels in a last-ditch effort to preserve their dwindling social license.
Then you win.
- Gandhi on oil/gas & utility co’s
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When congressional climate action appeared dead, I suggested climate activists should look to PUCs.
Now that congressional climate action is on the verge of passage (knock wood) I… still think climate activists should look to PUCs (maybe even more so!)
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In 14 years of working around climate/energy, I haven't seen a cohort as blindly certain about something that they're demonstrably wrong about as the "Bitcoin is green" twitter crowd.
Up there with climate deniers in their commitment to reject anything that contradicts priors.
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I was happy to buy an induction cooktop this week for all the reasons (health, climate, etc.) One thing I did not expect, that I can happily report:
HOLY MOLY it is a more enjoyable cooking experience than gas. Like, by leaps and bounds.
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The difference with PUCs is there are ways that people can weigh in on the process, and countless examples of where it's worked. It's not easy, but possible. You can't say that of SCOTUS (or almost anything federal right now.)
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As someone who's walking every day between 7 and 8 am w/ a dog and stroller, it is impossible for me to overstate how freaking awesome electric school buses are now that I'm seeing them in the wild more and more.
The pollution reductions (fumes, but also noise!!) are amazing.
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Disappointing.
The housing crisis is caused by the fact that in too many American cities, it's impossible to build new homes.
Reich ought to know this. He fought to stop a 10-unit building in his Berkeley neighborhood.
Rent is skyrocketing and home buying is out of reach for millions. One big reason why? Wall Street. Let me explain.
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I am thinking today of all the people I have been lucky enough to meet over the last 15 years who have dedicated their lives to pushing for climate action. I am so deeply grateful to all of them.
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Somehow everyone red-pilled themselves into thinking that the biggest obstacle to building regional transmission lines is a few farmers and ranchers and not massive, entrenched companies with billions of dollars vested in threatened assets.
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Manchin cites inflation for West Virginians for why he won't support BBB, but West Virginians are forced to buy overpriced electricity from a plant that burns waste coal, supplied by a company Manchin owns.
The guy is literally an inflation profiteer.
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I know a lot of people have poured every ounce of themselves into trying to push Congress to pass a worthwhile climate bill for years. Thank you.
I try not to tell people how to feel in this work. But I hope you feel appreciated. I appreciate you. Many others do too.
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Sigh, let's get this over with. On the brighter side, today is an especially excellent day to learn what your Public Utility Commission does and how to make your voice heard there.
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Last thought of my day: it really is stunning how far the climate movement has come in 4 years.
On the timescale of physics, it’s not fast enough, because there is no fast enough - only as fast as we possibly can.
But on the timescale of politics: Wow. Just amazing.
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I'm not endorsing that tribalism - it's a symbol of a dumb and broken politics and personally I want everyone's kids to breathe cleaner air in their homes, regardless of their parents' politics.
It's simply a statement that reflects the market structure of gas utilities.
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Every member of the Ohio Legislature, *R or D*, should be out with a statement by end of tomorrow that they:
1. Have returned all First Energy campaign money from this cycle, or given it to charity.
2. Pledge never to accept another cent.
It's time.
@OHIOcitizenact
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The fact that the main beef I am seeing from people with the John Oliver utilities segment is that it didn't include their *preferred* utility scandal is a bit telling, don't ya think?
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It's almost impossible to be this stupid.
I work for the people of Pueblo, not the people of Paris.
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LOL John Oliver told people to Google “[your utility] + Scandal” and got an instant, across-the-site traffic boost 😂
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I can't talk to the guys installing a heat pump water heater in my garage because I'm busy on conference calls talking about building electrification and it's really killing me.
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A nuance that can be tricky for folks to grasp:
(1) Fossil-fuel funded groups are absolutely funding renewables disinformation.
(2) They are providing that disinformation to an audience that's very hungry for it, primed by much larger political, cultural, social dynamics.
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I spent 4 years convincing tech companies that if they powered their data centers with 100% clean energy, and pushed for policy constructs to make that possible, then they could be part of the climate solution. If they didn't, then they'd be driving the climate crisis.
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Millions of Americans are about to face a de facto rate increase when utilities spread the costs of the Permian supply chain freeze across their bills for the next ten years.
Maybe gas isn’t so cheap after all?
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I ❤️❤️❤️ that Dominion, Duke and the Trump Admin are too bitter and short-sighted to realize that by chalking up their epic loss on ACP to activism, they gave thousands of people like me a massive shot of adrenaline to kill all the other new fossil infra left on the board.
#LFG
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A reminder that if a person derives their salary from the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels, you should put zero weight on their opinions about the optimal ways to decarbonize, even if they are polite and use a lot of 10-cent words.
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The fact that utilities can charge customers millions of dollars to pay lawyers to argue in favor of rate hikes on those same customers is one of those things that makes many professional advocates shrug, but which boils the blood of any normal human who pays a utility bill.
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*whispers*: "air conditioner" is also a wonky name that doesn't really convey what the device does for normies; it hasn't seemed to slow down that tech much.
We need policies that will make heat pumps cheap and easy. Do those two things and it won't matter what we call them.
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Let me just thank for the one thousandth time all those Georgians who helped elect two Democrats to win their runoff elections 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻
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If you enjoy the stuff I tweet about on here, maybe give John Oliver’s show Last Week Tonight a watch tonight!
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When I talk about how Entergy has aggressively fought proposals from local groups to invest in microgrids w/ distributed solar and batteries, people love to shout "ThAt CaN't PoWeR tHe GrId!"
True. But it *can* power community resources like cooling centers. Would save lives.
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If you describe to any normal person (doesn't work on this for a living) how monopoly utilities spend to influence their regulators, within the first 2 minutes they will express shock that any of it is legal.
I'd say this is true 9/10 times, independently of their R/D politics.
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I rarely read things that make my jaw literally swing open involuntarily. Kudos to you Justice Alito, you've done it with this incredible line: "He allowed me to occupy what would have otherwise been an unoccupied seat on a private flight to Alaska."
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Three Republicans and a Democrat just voted for a binding, 100% carbon-free electricity standard in Arizona.
The times they are a changin' folks.
**ARIZONA** will have 100% carbon-free electricity by 2050, with interim targets in '32 and '40, per a bipartisan vote by the Arizona Corporation Commission today.
The ACC will need to finalize it next year, but the votes should be there, based on what went down today.
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Impressive work from the Biden Administration to craft rules about what qualifies as "green hydrogen" that put the industry on a path to actually meeting the intended goal of reducing pollution, despite immense pressure from gas and utility interests, led by NextEra.
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*NEW* from me: Wall St. analysts say that if utilities want to grow shareholder profits they should accelerate coal closures and replace coal with clean energy, not gas.
This is from the incense-burning, kombucha-chugging hippies at [checks notes]... Morgan Stanley.
NEW: Financial analysts from
@MorganStanley
say that a faster transition from coal to renewable energy would not only benefit electricity customers - it would also *grow earnings* for investors in utilities that follow that path. 1/3
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The face of a creature who is dutifully responding to the CAISO flex alert by shedding her entire coat in two days, and is disappointed by the lack of any compensation for her demand response efforts.
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Fans of Alabama and Georgia likely don’t realize how much they have in common. They all send electric bills every month to subsidiaries of the same utility holding company in exchange for overpriced electricity from coal-burning power plants that should have shut down years ago!
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Does anyone else find it eerie that we're on pace to hit 2,000 cases/day sometime next week and everyone seems to be acting as if everything's the same as it was a month or two ago? It's not. We're careening over the cliff.
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A 69-27 vote to ratify Kigali shows why so many of us are trying to pressure corporations to align their political advocacy, and that of their trade groups, with their public statements on climate change.
21 Republicans voted for this because industry asked them to vote for it.
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Warren Buffett foretelling dark storms on the horizon for electric utilities and musing rather offhandedly if maybe they'll all just end up becoming public power entities was not on my bingo card, I admit.
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If you’re gonna do this - well, don’t. But if you must, maybe ask something more relevant, like “how many have ever had to choose between paying a utility bill and a medical bill?” That better qualifies someone for insight than looking at a wall of monitors they don’t understand.
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🤯
Cool feature of induction stove is that you can cook through newspaper making cleaning up after frying some plantains a snap
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My folks are bailing out their basement back east, my friends are evacuated from a powerless New Orleans, the wind is turning the wildfire smoke back our way here in CA, and women in Texas are under assault by the state.
How could one day be so bad?
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US electric mix from April 2020, per EIA real-time dashboard:
🌬️🌞🌊 Renewables: 22% (!)
🔥 Gas: 37%
⚛️ Nuclear: 22%
🏭 Coal: 15% (!)
Coal's precipitous decline as a part of the US power mix continues unabated.
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The last 24 hours (Dominion Energy, BP) are revealing how problematic the “net” in net-zero can be when It comes from the lips of companies who are still actively increasing their investment in fossil fuels.
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Do you pay a gas bill? A portion of it every month is going to pay the lobbyists, PR firms and astroturf campaigns of an industry group working to protect corporate profits by thwarting local efforts to mitigate climate change.
NPR brings the goods:
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In Nevada and Washington, the gas industry and its allies spent big money to try to oust climate champion legislators in Democratic primaries because they'd worked to pass pro-electrification policies.
Both climate champs won resoundingly.
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~90% of baby’s crying has an obvious cause (hungry, tired, wet); I assume the other 10% is general anger at the shitshow she’s inheriting because we didn’t start decarbonizing two decades earlier when we had the chance thanks to an orchestrated campaign of lies by polluters.
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Sankey diagrams: they're not just for energy flows! Also fun for $ flows!
This one shows utility CEO political giving in this cycle, c/o
@Matt_Kasper
.
Utilities gave to GOP congressional efforts over DEM efforts by about an 8:1 ratio.
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In 24 hours:
- dad got vaccine.
- trump gone.
- a flock of amazing climate hawks announced to staff Biden Admin.
- new heat pump water heater arriving in an hour to replace gas guzzler.
What a week!
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As of yesterday, my utility (CCA) is paying me $5/month to heat my water in the afternoons when there's lots of solar, instead of the evening peak hours.
I'd rather be paid for what that service is actually worth - sometimes it will be a lot! - but this is a good start.
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TFW you need a young person to show you how social media works but you can’t find one because no one under 40 wants to help a utility that’s causing climate change.
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Here's a 2023 resolution to consider: support grassroots organizations working for climate justice in under-resourced parts of the country.
Do it today and you'll have 361 days to feel good about it long after you've resumed eating grains or whatever.
A 🧵 with great options:
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Maybe - and I'm just spitballing here - but maybe legislators and regulators shouldn't let utilities charge ratepayers for their litigation fees. Has anyone suggested such a policy change?
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If we started calling utility late fees and utility reconnection fees "utility junk fees" - would elected Democrats get more interested in banning them?
These are deeply regressive, punitive poor taxes that utilities use to skim cash from the customers who can least afford it.
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Utility: In exchange for our monopolies, we submit to REGULATORS, okay? It's not like we can just get away with anything we want. Jeez, calm down!
[Regulator, for once, does something utility doesn't want.]
Utility:
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Surreal to see my name in print alongside people like
@billmckibben
,
@JesseJenkins
,
@MariaBelenPower
, sharing a soapbox with
@drvolts
to rant and rave about how utilities "game the system and thwart America's clean energy push." Thanks
@ClaraJeffery
and
@MotherJones
!
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1. Utilities: won't invest in renewables at needed scale unless forced; prefer to keep building gas (cc
@leahstokes
' narwhal curve).
2. Customers: Ok, we'll do it w/ distributed solar!
3. Utilities: That's not COST OPTIMIZED! Utility-scale solar only!
4. Loop back to 1.🤔
As long as electric utilities continue investing in new gas, foot-dragging on coal retirement, & under-investing in renewables/storage, the debate people love to have on here of "utility-scale solar vs. distributed solar" will continue to feel pretty darned silly to me. 🙃
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Strangest aspect of utility politics might be watching Republican electeds align themselves with monopolists and reject markets because their commitment to thwarting climate policy to own the libs and their loyalty to fossil fuel & utility donors outweighs their professed ideas.
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Climate action is, at a basic physical level, about replacing polluting infrastructure with clean infrastructure.
But it's more useful to think of it as being about replacing people in positions of power who don't get that, or make money from not getting that, with those who do.
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A legislator from Virginia has proposed a bill to bar the state's investor-owned electric utilities from charging customers for advertising, trade association dues, lobbying and other political costs. More from
@shelbyjgreen
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Arizona utility regulator works 50 hrs/wk for a far-right organization whose affiliate bused people to the rally preceding the 1/6 insurrection.
All this while paid by taxpayers to regulate electricity, gas and water, a full-time job.
How many hours in a week are there again?
This tax filing shows that Turning Point USA CFO Justin Olson - who also receives a salary paid by taxpayers as a commissioner at the Arizona Corporation Commission - was paid $155,769 by TPUSA for 50 hours/week of work.
Isn't regulating utilities supposed to be a full time job?
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This one guaranteed to set the party on fire.
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One good climate mitigation strategy for philanthropy to consider would be to financially support local journalism, which is in freefall and often used to be the only thing keeping anyone informed of what polluters are doing in state capitals.
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Why does my electric company need to advertise?
"Investor-owned utilities around the country use ratepayer money on advertising unless they’re explicitly barred from doing so, Pomerantz said. 'Sometimes, even if they are prohibited, they’ll do it anyway.'"
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A Duke Energy Indiana exec tries to explain to customers who are mad about high bills that it's not Duke's fault, it's that darned expensive coal and gas!
If only there were energy sources with no fuel costs that Duke might try instead...🤔🤨💨☀️
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Here's the closest thing you'll get from me to a take about ERCOT itself until we learn more about what happened:
All regional transmission operators are in positions of immense public trust and should be subject to FOIA the way any normal government agency would be.
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The hippies at [checks notes] *Morgan Stanley* say that investors in the most carbon-heavy utilities stand to profit if those utilities ditch coal for renewables. It would save ratepayers money too. Must-read from my colleague
@joesmyth
.
New: Financial analysts at Morgan Stanley and Moody's Investors Service expect that decarbonization will benefit utility ratepayers and shareholders
Replacing coal with renewable energy could save customers up to $8 billion - each year
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A Connecticut bill would bar utilities from charging customers for the costs of litigating rate cases and other contested proceedings, trade association dues, advertising, sponsorships, charity, or lobbying.
It passed out of committee 20-4, with bipartisan votes, this week.
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If anyone deserves to be in this thread it's Rep. Eskamani:
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Inspector just came to check out our heat pump water heater so that we'd be eligible for rebates. He also tested the carbon monoxide from our gas oven.
I asked him whether he would be doing the stovetop too.
"No, we stopped doing that, because they all fail every time." 😲
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A thought in case something has you down today:
The climate movement - from youth-led organizations, to communities fighting fossil fuel projects, to individuals quietly trying to change financial institutions from the inside - is more powerful than it has ever been.
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Utilities’ positioning toward CEPP right now (ranging mostly from tepid to quite hostile) is proof once again that profit motive is less of a barrier in that industry to decarbonization than cultural inertia and groupthink are.
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There is a lot of chiding on here of climate activists to respect fossil workers. It feels like straw-manning to me.
Most climate activists I know bend over backward nowadays to distinguish between fossil fuel workers and executives running the industry, and appropriately so.
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Your occasional reminder that the Wall Street fly-by-nighters who are proposing CCS retrofits of U.S. coal plants have no intention of generating remotely marketable power. These are all schemes to take advantage of 45Q to build literal tax credit factories.
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Just spent a couple of hours calling voters. Can confirm it:
✅Is fascinating to talk to different kinds of people.
✅Really is useful.
✅Is better for your mental health than anything else you will do on your computer/phone.
Stop doomscrolling, start being useful folks.
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