ALEC’s San Diego Summit: Let's Force Investment in Dirty Energy
Did you know policies promoting clean energy are a form of discrimination?
The annual summit of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), held in San Diego last week, proposed this flip on the script on climate change as a means of protecting the interests of its members.
I’m surprised they didn’t get attendees together for a rousing version of “We Shall Overcome.”
This linguistic jujitsu by right wingers is getting old really fast. Are we really supposed to believe that some of the dirtiest companies on earth are now victims? Really?
ALEC, which will turn 50 in 2023, serves as an incubator for fill-in-the-blank legislation crafted by corporate executives, state, and local officials. Needless to say, what comes out of ALEC is mostly about addressing their corporate members’ bottom line.
As is the case with so many organizations once considered to be limited government advocates, ALEC is increasingly focusing its energies on state-level interventions designed to force companies to hew to actions supportive of right-wing agendas.
https://twitter.com/MaxKennerly/status/1466976786038800385?s=20
Over 100 companies have discontinued their involvement with ALEC including Verizon, Ford, Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart, General Electric and Google, as the group’s stances on voting rights and climate change have become too extreme for their liking.
The Center Media and Democracy (CMD), which tracks dark money and corporate malfeasance in the political arena, are the go-to people when it comes to ALEC. Their research has spotlighted this legislative mill and the people who pay for it. As is true with so many other right wing organizations, they’ve documented the pervasive influence of the Koch family in ALEC.
This year’s summit for ALEC included approval for a new model policy to prevent financial companies ending investments in oil, gas, and coal companies from receiving state government contracts or managing state funds.
Via Common Dreams:
In an email obtained and first reported by Alex Kotch of the Center for Media and Democracy, Jason Isaac, director of the Koch-funded Texas Public Policy Foundation, wrote that "this morning at the ALEC Committee meetings you'll have the opportunity to push back against woke financial institutions that are colluding against American energy producers."
Referring to bills that aim to ban the anti-apartheid movement's Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions (BDS) strategy, Isaac said that "the following model policy is based on anti-BDS legislation supported by ALEC regarding Israel and was recently passed in Texas to include discrimination against fossil fuels. Voting for this model policy, and encouraging more state legislatures to adopt it, will send a strong message that the states will fight back against woke capitalism."
The "model policy" in question is the so-called "Energy Discrimination Elimination Act." In his email, Isaac claimed that "major banks and investment firms are colluding to deny lending and investment in fossil fuel companies, using their market power to force companies to make 'green' investments. This model bill proposes a strategy in which states use their collective economic purchasing power to counter the rise of politically motivated and discriminatory investing practices."
Texas, where vaginas are regulated but guns are not, has already enacted a similar law. It requires the state government to compile lists of entities boycotting investments in fossil fuel companies. Actions that are considered grounds for inclusion on this list include:
denying financing to creditworthy fossil energy companies solely for the purpose of decarbonizing their lending portfolios and marketing their environmental credentials
institutional investors divesting from fossil energy companies and pressuring corporations to commit to the goal of the Paris Agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050
large investments that are colluding to force energy companies to cannibalize their existing businesses
Businesses with government contracts employing more than ten people will be required to submit verification that the company does not boycott fossil fuel businesses.
This legislation, along with partisan (read Republican) efforts by state officials threatening “collective action” against financial entities divesting from fossil fuel enterprises, has been prompted by the success of activists urging corporations and institutions to invest in companies working to reduce their contribution to climate change.
As activist Bill McKibben says in a recent New York Times op-ed:
The movement has grown so large that it’s now also testing the ability of some companies to raise capital. As early as 2017, Peabody was listing divestment as a major concern; by the next year, Shell was warning shareholders that the campaign could have a “material adverse effect on the price of our securities and our ability to access equity capital markets.”
Early divestment adopters have been handsomely rewarded; over the last five years, the market has gone up at an annual rate of 16 percent, but the oil and gas sector has fallen at an annual rate of 3 percent. Now many investors are putting their money into clean energy, where returns have risen by an annual rate of 22 percent over the same period.
While divestment has been gaining attention for its successes, the battle is far from over:
In reality, robust policies to reduce climate-driven financial risks do not yet exist, much to the chagrin of progressive lawmakers and activists. Furthermore, banks have not collectively decreased—let alone halted—fossil fuel financing, despite climate scientists' warnings about the need to do so. And despite the valiant efforts of the fossil fuel divestment movement, asset managers, including pension funds, are still contributing significantly to greenhouse gas pollution.
The increasingly harmful impacts of climate change created by human activity are no longer an abstract concept.
It’s amazing to me that anybody with a modicum of common sense would want to impede progress toward reducing our reliance on burning fossil fuels. But, on the other hand, about one fourth of the population is convinced that a pandemic that’s killed nearly 800,000 people in the US does represent a threat.
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A couple of other notes on ALEC…
Delegates at the summit approved a new push to call a constitutional convention, long a pipe dream of right wingers yearning for a path easing their efforts toward imposing their will on the American people.
From The Hill:
State legislators meeting at the American Legislative Exchange Council’s policy conference here last week hope to use Article V of the Constitution, which allows state legislatures to call a convention to propose new amendments.
“It’s really the last line of defense that we have. Right now, the federal government’s run away. They’re not going to pull their own power back. They’re not going to restrict themselves. And so this Article V convention is really, in my opinion, is the last option that we have,” said Iowa state Rep. John Wills (R), the state’s House Speaker pro tempore who backs the convention.
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The League of Women Voters started a letter writing campaign last summer aimed at getting companies who still support ALEC to end their involvement. At issue are efforts by the organization to weigh in (in a bad way) on voter rights.
Despite claiming it would stop working on electoral issues in 2012, ALEC has reengaged on highly controversial policies related to elections and redistricting in recent years, perhaps without your company’s knowledge. In 2019, ALEC created a secret working group on redistricting, ballot measures, and election law, known as the “ALEC Political Process Working Group.”
The group is led in part by Cleta Mitchell, a controversial attorney who has spread disinformation about the results of the 2020 election and served as a legal advisor to former President Trump as he secretly pushed election officials in Georgia to overturn the results of a free and fair election.iv Another leader of ALEC’s secret working group is Arizona state Representative Shawnna Bolick, who recently proposed a bill to allow the state legislature to overturn the results of a presidential election.
ALEC’s own CEO, Lisa Nelson, said in February 2020 that ALEC was already working with state legislators on efforts to challenge the 2020 election results and “question the validity of an election.” Nelson’s comments were made nine months before the election even took place. Then, in June 2020, ALEC held an exclusive call for its members on the topic of mail-in voting featuring the Honest Elections Projectvii, a group that pushes voter restriction laws and which spread disinformation about the integrity of mail-in voting during the 2020 election.
Somehow, I don’t think ALEC has gotten the message. As Ken Stone noted in Times of San Diego coverage of the summit:
Karen Fann, the Arizona Senate president who ordered the state’s 2020 presidential election audit of Maricopa County, took the gavel Thursday as 2022 chair of ALEC
Responding to questions about the group’s lack of transparency regarding its funding, Fann performed the expected linguistic and ahistorical maneuvers to try and flip the topic.
Calling anonymous political contributions Dark Money is inappropriate, she said, since it was authorized by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling to protect African-American groups from harassment by the Ku Klux Klan.
“Whenever anybody, particularly Caucasion people … donated money to their campaigns, the Ku Klux Klan and others went after them and literally ran them out of business, targeted them, literally trashed them,” Fann said.
As Stone noted in the article, the Supreme Court ruling concerned protecting the NAACP’s membership lists from the prying eyes of the Alabama state government.
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