At a rally earlier today in Arlington, Virginia, speaker after speaker demanded that Dominion Virginia Power stop supporting anti-clean-energy "bill mill" ALEC (headquarters right behind the rally). Here's some video from the event, as well as highlights.
Joe Romm of Climate Progress said "what Dominion is doing through its support of ALEC is immoral" and "it is time for them to stop." ALEC is a group which allows businesses to fund legislation that "harms the public...without directly getting their hands dirty." But ALEC has been exposed in recent years for its efforts to enact stand-your-ground laws and to roll back renewable energy standards. That's resulted in dozens of major companies, including several utilities, to abandon ALEC. But not Dominion - they have worked alongside the Koch brothers on ALEC's energy and environment task force to push these dirtiest of laws. Dominion's CEO thinks there is value in supporting ALEC - he is very wrong.
Romm said that corporations are not people - they don't suffer when storm surges get intense, when droughts get longer and stronger, etc. They don't need a livable climate, but people do. "Corporations are amoral entities." We aren't, and we're in charge. Here in Virginia, where ALEC is HQ'ed, they actually feature Thomas Jefferson, implying that Jefferson would be an ALEC supporter - "not even close." In fact, Jefferson talked about "intergenerational ethics" and the importance of not "eating up the whole soil of their country." In short, "it is immoral for one generation to destroy another generation's vital soil - or its livable climate..."
We are here to protest Dominion's immoral support of ALEC. We are, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny." "Now more than ever we are tied in a single garment of destiny" - the climate that we are in the process of unraveling. "The need for activism, the need to speak out is as great as ever." Romm quoted Martin Luther King, Jr. on the "appalling silence of the good people," in addition to the "vitriolic words and actions of the bad people." It is time for Dominion to stop its "immoral" support of ALEC.