Duke Energy’s Green Facade Isn’t Fooling People Anymore
Cities and towns in North Carolina are demanding better from a utility company with a dreadful environmental record.
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Protests at Duke Energy’s shareholder meeting in 2014 in Charlotte, North Carolina, focused on the massive coal ash spill at the company’s Dan River Steam Station that February.
Eleven years ago, as President Obama was beginning to emphasize climate change as a potential legislative priority, utility companies began strategizing to survive the new age. In June 2010, then–Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers co-authored an op-ed in Politico with Eileen Claussen, a veteran of the Clinton administration and the founder of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, in which the two agreed that the time for legislators, businesses, and environmentalists to take action had arrived. “If that means capping emissions from the utility sector first—so be it,” they wrote. The pair called for clear federal regulations and policies so that Duke Energy and other companies could rightfully lead on climate change. After all, the corporation was “already scheduled to retire and replace virtually all coal and other large power plants with cleaner and more efficient technologies by 2050.”