For utilities, all things take a back seat to profit, and their power can be bad for customers and the climate.
BY DAN GEARINO Inside Climate News
COLUMBUS, Ohio—Among other things, the king-size bribery scandals in Illinois and Ohio dominating the headlines lately are a vivid illustration of how utilities routinely exert financial and political power to shield themselves from the risks of doing business, often at the expense of consumers.
The dynamic is so pervasive that some analysts and advocates say they thought they had lost the ability to be shocked by it—until the revelations of the last 10 days.
“I was gobsmacked,” said Ned Hill, an Ohio State University economist who had testified against the legislation now at the center of the bribery probe. The behavior described in legal documents, he said, looks “like the outtakes from The Godfather.”
Hill and other close observers of the legislative process say utilities have too much political power and operate in a campaign finance system that makes it too easy for them to get what they want, and that often leads to unfair competition.
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On July 17, federal prosecutors in Illinois announced that the utility Commonwealth Edison had allegedly provided jobs and favors to people associated with the Illinois House speaker, in exchange for legislation that included a bailout of nuclear power plants. Four days later, federal prosecutors in Ohio made a more startling announcement in an unrelated but similar case, charging the Ohio House speaker, Republican Larry Householder, and four other people, with taking more than $60 million from the utility FirstEnergy in exchange for passing a nuclear bailout.
The utilities’ unrestrained influence also has implications for climate change and the environment, although those factors differ widely in the Illinois and Ohio cases because of differences in the bills passed in each state. But environmental advocates say both the Illinois and Ohio examples are alarming because they show a system in which all concerns take a back seat to profits of utilities.
“When companies like ComEd and FirstEnergy have billions of dollars at stake, spending tens of millions of dollars on campaign contributions, bribes and other activities is sort of a down payment, and that’s sad,” said Howard Learner, president and executive director of the Environmental Law & Policy Center in Chicago.
The Illinois and Ohio scandals touch on hotly contested policy debates about the transition to renewable energy and whether nuclear power, which is carbon-free, is so important to that transition that it needs to be subsidized.
