If they had their way, existing coal and gas power plants would continue polluting for years to come—time that we simply do not have. EPA’s common sense rules are one of the most powerful tools we have to ramp down carbon pollution, and if anything, they don’t go far enough.

That’s why we, along with a coalition of climate advocacy groups, sent a letter to EEI’s member utilities demanding they stand by their climate commitments and these carbon pollution regulations—not with EEI. And thanks in part to a growing wave of public pressure, utilities are on the defensive as the gap between their rhetoric and the reality is exposed.

However, many utility companies chose to maintain support of EEI’s short-sighted and harmful lobbying effort—for now. As a ratepayer, and with these companies spending your money to attack your climate future, you can hold them accountable for that choice. Tell your utility to stop using your money to kneecap climate action, support EPA’s commonsense limits on power plants, and leave EEI.

Utilities truly committed to decarbonization cannot continue to hide behind or associate themselves with lobbying groups actively blocking policies to decarbonize. Fundamentally, utilities only get their power to run the electrical sector because they are supposed to serve the public interest; they must not use their power to hurt the public response to the climate crisis. Undermining these policies hurts our economy, public health, and communities. 

Shareholders, ratepayers, and the public want to see a cleaner electricity system as the climate crisis continues to unfold in front of their eyes—from wildfires in Hawai’i to scorching heat in Arizona to rising ocean temperatures in Florida. But many of these very same people demanding climate action are unwittingly funding climate delay. That’s because utilities in nearly all states use ratepayers’ monthly utility bills to fund shadowy lobbying efforts and membership fees for EEI.

All the while, companies like Southern California Edison (SCE), whose CEO was recently elected as EEI’s board chair, continue to mislead their customers by boasting they are “leading the transformation of the electric power industry toward a clean energy future.” 

Their actions say otherwise. SCE, along with these other utility companies, chose to hide behind their lobbyists at EEI instead of standing up for their customers’ interests: