The founder and president of Interfaith Power & Light said in an interview that state regulators across the US should provide financial incentives to electric utilities to encourage expanded energy efficiency, but also that utility executives on their own should take “the moral high ground” by making fuel-choice and other decisions that minimize environmental degradation.
Reverend Sally Bingham, one of the nation’s earliest proponents of “Creation care,” acknowledged that utilities face a complex array of sometimes conflicting regulatory and ethical concerns as they seek to provide low-cost power and at the same time seek to shift to cleaner electricity sources and protect lower-income customers from rising rates.
Still, she said, the imperative “to protect what God gave us” requires that regulators, utilities and customers examine different ways they can reduce the environmental effects of power generation while enabling utilities to earn reasonable profits. Each has a role.
“The basis of Interfaith Power & Light is that we, as people of faith, are responsible for caring not only for each other but for the garden that God put Adam in,” said Bingham, who also serves as canon for the environment for the Episcopal Diocese of California. “First, we make the case that we’re caretakers. Second, we ask, ‘What does that mean regarding where we get our electricity from? What fuels do we burn? Where does the fuel come from? How much risk is acceptable?’ That’s where ethics and values come in.”
Just as utility executives and managers insist that their business dealings be “above board,” she said, they also need to insist that key decisions on power planning, fuel procurement, energy efficiency efforts and the like reflect high ethical and moral standards.
Coal is a big target, Bingham said, not only because of its contribution to climate change but because of the environmental effects of coal mining.
“We campaign against mountaintop removal,” she said, noting that when she gives her “stump speech” she asserts that “blowing the tops off mountains is an insult to God and Creation” and that the controversial mining practice also destroys nearby streams and fouls water supplies.
Bingham said that while nuclear plants generate no greenhouse gases, IP&L does not support the construction of new nuclear generating capacity because the nuclear waste issue has not been resolved and because it is unethical to create environmental problems that could last for tens of thousands of years.
On the growing use of hydraulic fracturing to release natural gas from shale, IP&L states on its website that while gas “could provide a short-term benefit by replacing coal-fired electricity generation … gas by itself is not a solution to global warming.”
“We’re calling for fracking to be regulated and for the chemicals used to be disclosed,” as well as for requiring drilling companies to use best-practice standards in their work, Bingham said. There also should be a ban on fracking in fragile ecosystems and in areas of unique public benefit, she added.
On a positive note, IP&L’s founder and president said that California utilities in recent years “have done an amazing and extraordinary job” by reversing the trend toward ever-increasing electricity use and by boosting their reliance on wind, solar and other renewable sources of power.
Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric and other utilities in the state “reward customers for reducing our energy use,” Bingham said, and as a result per-capita electricity consumption in the state has declined over the past 20 years while rising in the US as a whole.
California also has established energy-efficiency, demand-reduction, and renewable-energy requirements for its utilities, she said, as well as programs that help protect lower-income customers from rising electricity bills.
Bingham said that while California utilities did not meet the state target of 20% renewable energy by 2010–and San Diego Gas & Electric “was not even close”–she believes that the pace at which new renewable capacity is now coming on line “gives hope that they should be able to reach the 2020 target of 33% renewable energy on schedule.”
Bingham said that other states should become as aggressive as California, and that until they do customers who can afford to do so should install solar photovoltaic panels or–where it is available–participate in utilities’ retail green power programs under which customers can buy monthly blocks of renewable energy for an added fee.
Other proactive approaches also are taking root. For example, one higher-income congregation affiliated with IP&L initiated a program under which its members purchase sets of two compact fluorescent bulbs, each taking one for his or her own use and donating the other to members of a nearby congregation of lesser means, she said.
To significantly expand energy efficiency, Bingham said, IP&L would back regulatory policies that would decouple utilities’ profits from their power sales and enable them to recover the revenues they lose when they help their customers reduce their energy use. “I’d support that,” she said, noting that utilities “traditionally have been in business to sell more and more electricity” and that new regulatory mechanisms will be needed to shift their focus.
IP&L’s current aim is to expand its reach and, with that, its effect on public policy. “There are 300,000 houses of worship in America, 14,000 of which are involved in our work,” Bingham said. “We’ve been adding a couple of thousand every year, but I ask myself, ‘Why don’t we have 50,000?’ … If every religious leader in this country were talking about our moral responsibility to the Earth, and how that connects to energy use and conservation, we could have a tremendous impact.”
–Housley Carr