Cover Story: ... what should Southern Co. do about it?
CL asked knowledgeable Atlantans what Southern Co. should do about global warming. More answers — and a chance for you to comment — are available here.</
William Buzbee
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Emory University law professor and director of the Emory Environmental and Natural Resources Law Program</
First, from my following of the regulatory battles, the science of climate change is as sound as any regulatory issue in decades. So Southern Co.’s claims that there’s a need for more science is puzzling and a little disappointing.</
Second, Southern Co.’s call for voluntary action is a typical move for industries seeking to avoid regulation, but voluntary measures historically tend to be highly ineffective. The auto industry [and] the oil industry have made similar arguments in the past on other issues. In this setting, there will need to be broad-based action that’s uniformly enforced if there’s to be room for improvement.</
I understand a company will be making business decisions for business reasons, but there are times when a risk is broad enough that you’d hope a company would take a longer-term perspective. I think Southern Co. is probably wrong here. I think that there will be regulation. And I think they’ll be behind other companies like Duke [Energy] that have accepted the reality of the climate change problem.</
Benita Dodd
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Vice president of the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think-tank</
I think utilities have done a commendable job, actually. They’ve invested millions in cleaning up coal. ... Human carbon emissions are a drop in the ocean compared to natural emissions, and when we stop worrying about trees and volcanoes, then we can start worrying whether humans are adding too much carbon to the atmosphere. I think that climate change takes place all the time, and I think we’re incredibly pompous if we think humans have that much influence on it.</
The problem is we’re not opening the door to a variety of energy choices, like nuclear [and] opening up [the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge]. It’s all very well to point your finger at one source of energy, but if you’re closing doors as far as regulatory excess, what do you expect utilities to do? When you give utilities access to alternatives that are viable, then it becomes easier to set coal as a resource aside.</
We need more legislators with the courage to take a stand against NIMBY-ism [“Not in my back yard”]. It’s fear-mongering. Good lord, nuclear energy is the cleanest source of energy. There’s a lot of fear about it because of activists who bring up things like Three Mile Island. Everyone acknowledges nuclear [power plants] are clean sources of energy, but no one wants them in their back yard because of this paranoia.</
Patty Durand
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Director of the Georgia Sierra Club</
It is the duty of government to look out for the common good of clean air and clean water, and to address the serious issue of global warming — not Southern Co.</
By taking money from corporations, our elected officials like the governor and the Legislature compromise their ability to protect the public interest. Citizens need to understand this process. We have a serious problem with the fact that elected officials’ decisions are compromised by large corporate donations and an inattentive public.</
The most recent example of this is through Georgia EPD’s [Environmental Protection Division] recent proposal for a Clean Energy Fund. This Clean Energy Fund would have promoted renewable energy and energy-efficiency programs leading to improvements in air quality, encouraging pollution prevention activities, and stimulating local job creation and economic growth. This fund would have cost Georgia taxpayers nothing. However, Georgia Power didn’t want it because true conservation would reduce demand ... and would not lead to maximized shareholder wealth. Georgia Power was successful at causing EPD to withdraw the Clean Energy Fund proposal.</
Georgia continues to be last in the country on per-capita spending on energy efficiency. ... Citizens must demand strong EPD and state leadership to decisively address global warming and stop letting Southern Co. decide our fates.</
Lowell “Rusty” Pritchard
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Adjunct professor of ecological economics at Emory University</
I suppose for all of us, our fundamental moral obligation is to be honest, not to mislead others, not to pretend we know more about the facts of something than we do.</
I know [Southern Co. has] something of a reputation for skepticism on global warming science, but there’s not a lot of controversy about the warming or about whether people are causing it. A company shouldn’t feel like it can misrepresent facts in a public debate, and we should hold people responsible when they don’t tell the truth. Does that mean you have a legal standing to sue someone for misrepresenting the science of climate change? No. But should they be ashamed of themselves? Yes.</
Now, it’s wrong to pick on just Southern Co., because they’re following on this path that we’ve created as a society. When we go along with the creation of [the institution of corporations], we sort of set them free and say, “Take care of your shareholders as long as you operate under the law.” And they do, and we shouldn’t be surprised that they do.</
The problem is that they’re making these decisions as a corporation, and a corporation doesn’t have to have a conscience. As citizens, they’d like clean air. But as business owners, they’re motivated by profits. To me, that feels schizophrenic. ...</
I’m sure they’re good people. They take care of their families, go to church. But they’ve figured out ways to justify the position their company makes them take, and it’s a miserable position to put people in.
??Jeremy Rifkin: Inside and outside pressure can get Southern Co. to reform
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Rifkin’s 2003 book, The Hydrogen Economy, trumpets the prospect of an energy future in which clean, renewable energy could be stored by companies — and even individuals — in the form of hydrogen. A well-known social critic and author, Rifkin is a lecturer at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and a consultant to major companies. Excerpts from his interview with CL Editor Ken Edelstein are below; a full transcript can be found here.</
Does Southern Co.’s reliance on coal bode well or poorly for the company’s future?</
I think it bodes poorly. Let me put it this way: The power companies understand that we’re heading toward peak oil [the point at which world oil production will be forced to decline]. We don’t know how soon.</
What’s happening with most power companies is they’re making a shift to natural-gas-fired power plants. Natural gas burns a little [cleaner than coal]. ... But natural gas doesn’t buy you much time, and it still emits [carbon dioxide].</
So now the power utility companies and energy industry have to deal with this: There’s plenty of other fossil fuel. There’s coal all over the world. There’s heavy oil in Venezuela, and there’s oil sands in Alberta. ... The problem is they are dirty and they emit a lot more CO2.</
With that as a premise, there’s one statistic that I would share with Southern [Co.] and with your readers, because I think it’s the single most devastating piece of information that we’ve ever been privy to in the history of the Homo sapien species. Last year, the journal Science published an article. Scientists went down to the Antarctic, and they dug under the ice to get a pristine picture of the geological record of the planet. And they found that the concentration of global-warming gasses in the Earth’s atmosphere today is greater than at any time in the last 650,000 years.</
I’m not sure we have emotionally understood the nature of this experiment that humans have with fossil fuels. I’m not sure that we as a whole have grasped the enormity of this shift in the chemistry of the planet, with the full implications of what it means in terms of the habitability of this planet by human beings.</
So by what rationale would either the power and energy industry or civilization ... allow us to go to dirtier fuels, coal, tars and heavy oil — just to get a few years, or maybe a decade, of economic activity at the expense of the future habitability of the planet? If this is what we are willing to do, then perhaps we don’t deserve to be here as a species. It is so shortsighted.</
Having invested so heavily in coal, what should a company like Southern Co. do about its predicament?</
You need a transition strategy at every level of the company. You need a short-term, midterm and long-term strategy. Wean your company off coal and toward natural gas, as a short-term transition. And then [make] steep, steep investment in renewable energies.</
Doesn’t Southern Co. have an obligation to its shareholders to maximize the profit from its investment in coal-fired plants?</
If you’re looking at coal in an era when we desperately need to deal with global warming and get off carbon-based fuels, you’re doing a disservice to your stockholders and ultimately to your consumers.</
The idea that you can only go with the dirtiest fuel because it’s available, and therefore that’s the only way to actually optimize the long-term advance of your company — I don’t buy it. The companies I work with that have coal; they’re still moving to other kinds of technologies.</
How does a company like this overcome the inertia so that it can reform?</
You need pressure from the inside and pressure from outside. There’s nothing unique about Southern. In most industries, while companies talk about thinking out of the box, they never get out.</
When they do get out of the box, it’s because a younger generation of civil society organizations and the public demands new things. Inside the company, a younger generation moves toward leadership and begins to see a new way to operate their business that provides new opportunities for them. There’s no doubt in my mind that the opportunities are in renewable energy and green hydrogen — what we call a Third Industrial Revolution.</
We have this distributive communication revolution in the last 15 years with computers and the Internet, satellite, wireless, Wi-Fi. But companies like Southern have not yet understood the real potential of this revolution for energy. Even though we think of this as an IT and software revolution, it’s really anthropology, which I think will be clear to a younger generation in these power companies. It’s that a fuel cell powered by hydrogen that stores renewable energy is analogous to a personal computer. When you get a personal computer, you generate your own information and then you share it by a click with a billion people on the Internet.</
But they have to figure out a way to make money.</
This is where the communication revolution of the last 15 years converges with the Third Industrial Revolution, meaning companies like Southern will realize their new task — which is [that] they are no longer the providers of energy. They are the bundlers and distributors, meaning we’re going to take the same software and hardware that we developed in Silicon Valley to create the Internet, and we’re going to smarten the grid so that you generate power in your community, with renewables. And with hydrogen, you can send the surplus peer-to-peer back to the grid, and the power companies will distribute and bundle it.</
When do some of the actions of companies to try to prevent reform cross an ethical line?</
There’s a built-in intransigence in every industry, and what happens is there’s a combination of things that force the change. Most pressure comes from the outside in, and then companies change their policy.</
And then enlightened leadership that is responsible on the inside [needs] to say, “You know what? These old ways don’t work. They’re counterproductive. We’re losing our public support. We’re losing our public image. But we’re also losing the opportunity to move to a new future that’s going to be more positive.”</
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