KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Kansas and Missouri residents’ utility bills may be helping to bankroll energy sector lobbying against policies aimed at lowering greenhouse gas emissions.
Federal and state rules prohibit utility companies from passing their lobbying costs on to customers through bills. But in both Kansas and Missouri, utilities like Evergy, Ameren and Spire can include memberships in national trade groups in what residents pay for electricity and gas.
And while utilities are required to carve out those organizations’ lobbying costs, even the remaining sum they are allowed to pass on to customers can go toward efforts that shape major policy, according to environmental groups pushing federal regulators to adopt more stringent policies.
“Millions of Americans may be unwittingly contributing to political advocacy on the behalf of fossil fuel interests when they pay their monthly bills,” said Rachel Golden, director of the Sierra Club’s clean buildings campaign, “and it’s totally inappropriate for utilities to be bankrolling industry group dues and anti-climate lobbying with customer energy bills.”
The Center for Biological Diversity filed a petition earlier this year with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in an effort to make it more difficult for utilities to pass on those fees. Other environmental groups, like the Sierra Club, joined in, claiming national energy industry trade groups, like the American Gas Association and Edison Electric Institute, work on influencing policy using members’ fees — not just dedicated lobbying funds.
The move comes as more than a dozen states across the country, including Kansas and Missouri, passed legislation prohibiting cities and counties from adopting bans on natural gas hookups in newly constructed buildings.
The environmental groups, which vehemently oppose the legislation, say the AGA played a role in helping shape bills introduced around the country.
In turn, they claim, utility customers helped finance the campaign.
“In allowing utilities to categorize trade association dues in presumptively recoverable … accounts, regulators often end up enabling utilities’ evasion of legal prohibitions on the recovery of promotional and political advertising expenses, thereby forcing ratepayers to bear the cost of advocacy that is not in their interests,” the Sierra Club, Earthjustice and other environmental groups said in a filing with FERC.
Both EEI and AGA pushed back against those claims.
Electrical providers, including Evergy and Ameren, belong to EEI. Both Ameren and Spire are members of AGA.
“This filing isn’t about what’s good for the environment or what’s good for electricity customers,” EEI’s vice president of regulatory affairs, Adam Benshoff, said in a statement.
Benshoff said EEI’s member companies have led the charge in reducing carbon emissions.
“To suggest that EEI and our member companies are ‘anti-clean energy’ is disingenuous and inconsistent with the facts,” Benshoff said. “Likewise, to suggest that EEI member company dues are used to pay for lobbying is flat out wrong.”
