Does your power company ask you to lobby the Senate? IREA does.

Would your utility company ask you to take a specific position on a bill? Apparently they do in Colorado. Customers of the Intermountain Rural Electric Association (IREA), a member-owned electric distribution cooperative, are receiving an odd request -- to lobby their senators!

This month IREA sent an email to each of its customers (a copy of which was forwarded to 1Sky) asking that they contact their senators and urge them to oppose the climate bill being considered in the Senate, based on the ACES bill passed last month. Contact information for the Senators, complete with a link to their contact page, is even provided. To convince customers, they present three reasons to oppose climate legislation.

1. Cost

The co-op references faulty cost estimates from the Heritage Foundation, the numbers often used by the opposition, while completely ignoring the CBO analysis that disproves the analysis by said conservative think tank. They also state that millions of jobs will be lost when, in fact, the opposite is true.

2. Alternative Energy
They use convoluted logic to try and support their theory that there is no alternative to fossil fuels, which they claim will inevitably lead to “energy rationing,” but they don't fully explain why.

3. Climate Change?

There is no so-called consensus that CO2-a trace gas that must be measured in parts per million to be detected in the atmosphere at all-significantly affects climate.

Clearly, IREA doesn’t think much of their customers, because the debate over climate legislation has moved past this, and few among the opposition still resort to climate change denial to support their views. Even the opposition accepts the facts – climate change is happening, and we are the cause. Instead, they contend that more scientists believe climate is directed by solar energy and magnetic field fluctuations. What? This is a new one, even for the opposition. It’s convenient that they don’t provide references or even explanations for these particular “facts.”

In closing they mention, in noticeably smaller text, that they're raising rates,so customers don’t need any additional raises sure to come from the climate bill. They are hoping, I’m sure, that customers will connect the rate increases to the climate bill, and channel that anger into letters and calls to their Senators, blaming and opposing the bill.

Intermountain Rural Electric is relying on poor science and biased reports as well flawed logic to convince, or at least to sufficiently confuse, customers to press their Senators to oppose the bill. Although full of inaccuracies, they're counting on customers taking these statements as truths, and they’re acting before we can get the real truth to them. This is but a taste of the sort of tactics being used by the opposition to defeat a climate bill; we need to act now to make sure they can’t spread any more of these lies!