The organization ALEC has come up before for its conservative, pro-business views. So why are businesses beginning to flee membership? Google may be understandable as it’s a very young organization mired deep in an arena not known for its conservative views, and top management certainly believes the scientists are correct regarding climate change. But now, as Nick Surgey @ The Daily Kos reports, a power company – a redoubt of conservatism – is now moving away:
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has suffered the loss of another major corporate sponsor, the Guardian reported Tuesday, with the electric utility American Electric Power (AEP) announcing it will no longer provide the climate change denial group with funding from 2016.
AEP becomes the 107th identified corporation to have withdrawn funding since the Center for Media and Democracy launched the ALEC Exposed project in 2011, joining others such as Shell, BP, Google, Microsoft and Facebook.
EcoWatch notes:
If that wasn’t bad enough for ALEC, AEP said in it’s announcement it will be shifting its focus to working with states to comply with the Obama Administration’s landmark climate rule, the Clean Power Plan.
The Clean Power Plan has been a bugaboo for ALEC, since the plan is meant to mitigate climate change. This is interesting, as AEP is not exactly an angelic corporation, accused of attacking solar power generators using legislation in Indiana (see this CleanTechnica article from Feb 2015) and West Virginia (MorganCountyUSA.org‘s article)1. I have no idea what really motivated their leavetaking; the official quote from Nick’s article is bland:
“We let (ALEC) know that we won’t be renewing our membership in 2016,” an AEP spokesperson told the Guardian. “We are reallocating our resources as we focus on our work with the states around the Clean Power Plan.”
I’ve speculated a little bit on how this might be a negative. Is ALEC an organization dedicated to business objectives, or to a conservative agenda? There is a difference which is becoming more and more apparent, because the conservative agenda is currently dominated by certain religious precepts and magical thinking about how the world should be, not how it is. Many religious organizations and personalities (as distinct from normal people) operate in a world of their own making and sometimes believe that the real world is the same way; however, business leaders who’ve banged into the real world hard enough are likely to balk at the poor intellectual quality of climate deniers, recognizing that as a danger to the survival of their business – not to mention their homes, families, and selves.
In the end, my exploration of the negatives really comes to naught. Another source of funding moves away from an organization not dedicated to reality; another muscle is stripped away from a skeleton. The problem is that the organization is not discredited in the eyes of its primary audience, conservative state legislators. In that respect, it might be slightly hobbled, but those controlling and directing ALEC’s efforts will remain effective – and I continue to worry about an organization that engages in magical thinking in a world that doesn’t easily tolerate the same.
