Climate change wars: An update

In America’s endless climate change wars, the federal government has been mostly stymied in efforts to deal with the issue. A big part of this dismal reality is radical right, brass knuckles capitalism dogma backed by hundreds of millions of dollars to feed an anti-climate change propaganda Leviathan. That propaganda beast has mostly succeeded in keeping levels of pollution high and regulation low to non-existent. Along with the carbon energy and chemical sectors, the Republican Party is the main denier of climate change, climate science and inconvenient climate facts, truths and reasoning.

In what appears to be a bit of solidly good news, the NYT writes about an interesting capitalist movement that is stirring among some huge corporations. Some corporate giants appear to be actually genuinely concerned about reducing carbon pollution and climate change. The NYT writes:

Clean Energy Quest Pits Google Against Utilities

Google says its goals for carbon-free power are impeded by state-regulated utilities, particularly in the Southeast, that lack a competitive market.

It was the sort of dry panel discussion that occurs at hundreds of industry conferences every year — until a Google representative decided it was time to unleash.

“This is personal for me,” Jamey Goldin, an energy regulation lawyer at Google, told those attending a May conference in Atlanta on renewable energy in the Southeast. He said he had grown up on a ridge overlooking Plant Bowen, a coal-fired power plant northwest of Atlanta owned by Georgia Power, the dominant electricity utility in the state, and then directed his comments at a lobbyist for the utility’s parent company, also on the panel: “Y’all got a lot of coal running up there, a lot of smoke going up in the air.”

Overturning the system that puts nearly all power generation in the Southeast in the hands of utilities like Georgia Power would “get a lot more renewable energy online and a lot of that dirty power offline,” Mr. Goldin added.

But the outburst was more than personal. It was part of a far-reaching campaign by Google to power its operations with increasing amounts of electricity from wind, solar and other generating sources that do not emit carbon.

Google, Meta, Microsoft and Apple, among others, have made eliminating their carbon emissions a prominent corporate goal — and have set not-too-distant deadlines to get there. Google wants to buy enough carbon-free electricity to power all its data centers and campuses around the world without interruption by the end of this decade.

The corporate quest to rapidly secure vast new amounts of renewable energy faces big challenges, however — not least in the Southeast, one of the country’s fastest-growing regions. And Google’s battle in the region, where it has a major concentration of data centers, raises a question that applies to the energy transition everywhere: Is what’s good for a few companies good for all?

At the heart of their campaign, Google and its tech giant allies want to dismantle a decades-old regulatory system in the Southeast that allows a handful of utilities to generate and sell the region’s electricity — and replace it with a market in which many companies can compete to do so.

What gives one pause about whether this really is good news or not is the context in which this story in playing out. Although Google may actually want a more competitive energy market in the Southeast, it’s unclear what that would mean for consumers. It could be worse than what is there now.

Consider Texas. In the name of infallible capitalist free markets running wild and butt naked, i.e., unregulated, that rabid hater of government and regulation decided to deregulate its electricity sector. What did those wild, butt naked electricity markets deliver compared to consumers who opted to stay with regulated electricity? ‘Deregulated consumers’ got (i) higher costs, (ii) a crappy, poorly maintained grid, (iii) less reliable electricity, (iv) crushing brass knuckles capitalist price spikes at peak demand times, and as an added bonus, (v) dozens of people frozen to death after a big winter storm. Yes, deregulated electricity cost consumers more in Texas than regulated electricity in Texas. That is what an unregulated ‘competitive’ capitalist market in Texas delivered. 

Those darned tyrannical socialist-communist regulations are an unspeakable horror (because they tends to be pro-consumer and that usually gets in the way of profits).

So if Google gets what it wants, consumers might get shafted. But maybe less carbon pollution would result. Given capitalist absence of social conscience, hate of regulation and the profit-above-all moral imperative, consumers could very well get shafted in the brave new world. That assumes there will be a brave new world, which is an open question. The pro-pollution forces with their propaganda Leviathan are going to fight this tooth, claw, dirty tricks, lies and poison daggers.