Documents Reveal ALEC's Looming Attacks on Clean Energy, Fracking Laws, Greenhouse Gas Regulations

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The Guardianย has released another must-read piece about theย American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), this time laying bare its anti-environmental agenda forย 2014.ย 

The paper obtainedย ALEC‘s 2013 Annual Meeting Policy Report, whichย revealed that ALEC โ€” dubbed a โ€œcorporate bill millโ€ for the statehouses by the Center for Media and Democracy โ€” plans more attacks on clean energy laws, an onslaught of regulations pertaining to hydraulic fracturing (โ€œfrackingโ€) and waging war against Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) greenhouse gasย regulations.

โ€œOver the coming year, [ALEC] will promote legislation with goals ranging from penalising individual homeowners and weakening state clean energy regulations, to blocking the Environmental Protection Agency, which is Barack Obama’s main channel for climate action,โ€ explained The Guardian. โ€œDetails of ALEC‘s strategy to block clean energy development at every stage, from the individual rooftop to the White House, are revealed as the group gathers for its policy summit in Washington thisย week.โ€

The documents also reveal ALEC‘s boasting of introducing myriad โ€œmodel resolutionsโ€ nationwide in support of fast-tracking approval for the northern half of Transcanada’s Keystone XL pipeline, along with another โ€œmodel billโ€ โ€” the โ€œTransfer of Public Lands Actโ€ already introduced in Utah โ€” set to expropriate federally-owned public lands to oil, gas and coalย companies.ย 

Attacks from Household to Whiteย House

Among the more interesting discoveries byย The Guardian:ย ALEC has plans to attack clean energy from the household-level to the White House-level, working in service to its utility industry members’ unfetteredย profits.ย 

John Eick, legislative analyst for ALEC‘s Energy, Environmental and Agriculture Task Force,ย told The Guardianย that ALEC is closely scrutinizing โ€œhow individual homeowners with solar panels are compensated for feeding surplus electricity back into theย grid.โ€

โ€œAs it stands now, those direct generation customers are essentially freeriders on the system,โ€ Eick told The Guardian. โ€œThey are not paying for the infrastructure they are using. In effect, all the other non direct generation customers are beingย penalised.โ€

Yet, far from a โ€œfree ride,โ€ a report commissioned by theย Arizona Public Serviceย found household solar panels offer a โ€œrange of benefits.โ€ Distributed energy generation defers the need for capital allocation into utility investments, saving ratepayers money in avoiding investments into expensive utilityย projects.

Not limiting itself to penalizing those installing solar panels on their homes, ALEC has also joined the right wing echo chamber in waging war against President Barack Obama’s push to regulate coal-fired power plants and has a model resolution that will be voted on at its States and Nation Summit taking place this week in Washington, DC.ย 

โ€œALEC is very concerned about the potential economic impact of greenhouse gas regulation on electricity prices and the harm EPA regulations may have on the economic recovery,โ€ the resolution reads.

This effort is in line with its previous efforts, coining EPA regulations of greenhouse gases a โ€œregulatory trainwreckโ€ and calling for a two-year regulatoryย moratorium.ย 

ALEC‘s Frackย Attack

ALEC is very active on the fracking front these days, with plans to anoint the industry’s PR shop,ย America’s Natural Gas Alliance (ANGA), with a corporate membership at its meetingย this week. The summit will also featureย presentations promoting T. Boone Pickens‘ โ€œPickens Plan,โ€ which gives tax credits to natural gas-powered trucks and vehicles.

โ€œA model bill endorsed by the Alec board of directors last August would strip the EPA of power to shut down a frack site or oil industry facility,โ€ explainedย The Guardian. โ€œThat would leave oversight of an industry that has to date fracked 2 million wells in 20 states to a patchwork of local authorities that have vastly different standards of environmentalย protection.โ€

Overlooked byย The Guardian but covered here on DeSmogBlog, ALEC has also launched an offensive on local control of extractive industries, putting more decision-making power into the hands of the industry’s bought and sold state-level legislators on critical environmental, health and safety issues such as fracking and mining.ย ย 

โ€œIt just shows that ALEC uses lawmakers as lobbyists to block climate legislation at every turn,โ€ Connor Gibson, a researcher for Greenpeace USA toldย The Guardian, echoing DeSmogBlog‘s earlier findings. โ€œThey try to undermine the authority of agencies that have the power potentially to control carbon pollution, so whenever there is a new EPA rule that pops up, they re-tool their arsenal of model bills to make sure they are blocking the newย rule.โ€

Crisisย Mode

The Guardianย revealed yesterday that ALEC is in fiscal and legal crisis mode, reeling from the fallout of the Trayvon Martin shooting by George Zimmerman in Florida, when ALEC‘sย responsibility for passage its own model โ€œstand your groundโ€ billย received widespread media attention andย criticism.

Tacitly admitting it has masked itself for 40 years as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit charitable organization while operating as a shadow lobbying apparatus and legislator-lobbying โ€œdating service,โ€ย ALEC has nowย launched a 501(c)(4) called the Jeffersonian Project to situate itself to be in compliance with Internal Revenue Service taxย law.

Further, with many corporations dumping ALEC after the Trayvon Martin killing, ALEC even considered aย biblically-inspired โ€œProdigal Sonโ€ campaign to woo the dozens of corporations back into the ALEC tent. Apparently that was too much for the membership and the campaign wasย ditched.

These are tough days for the โ€œUnited States of ALEC,โ€ perhaps made even tougher with this latest investigative dispatch byย The Guardian.ย 

Photo Credit: Moyers &ย Company

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Steve Horn is the owner of the consultancy Horn Communications & Research Services, which provides public relations, content writing, and investigative research work products to a wide range of nonprofit and for-profit clients across the world. He is an investigative reporter on the climate beat for over a decade and former Research Fellow for DeSmog.

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