Yahoo just announced that it has become the fifth company in the past few months to confirm that it is ending its membership in the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, the notorious climate denying lobby group that has attacked clean energy policies around the country.
Microsoft was the first to break up with ALEC last month, followed by Google, Facebook, and now Yahoo this week. Yelp also announced this week that it had dropped its ALEC membership earlier this year.
Why is half of Silicon Valley suddenly treating ALEC like its the smelly kid in class? As Google Chairman Eric Schmidt put it,
The facts of climate change are not in question anymore, everyone understands that climate change is occurring, and the people who oppose it are really hurting our children and our grandchildren and making the world a much worse place, and we should not be aligned with such people. They are just literally lying.
Yahoo, like Google, Microsoft and Facebook, has made significant progress in powering its infrastructure with renewable energy, as Greenpeace reported in its April evaluation, Clicking Clean: How Companies are Creating the Green Internet. All of those companies have also advocated on the state or federal level for policies that would help grow the renewable energy economy, which is critical to addressing climate change, in addition to being a good business move.
Those commitments had always made these companies membership in ALEC a head-scratcher; Driven by fossil fuel members like Exxon Mobil, Peabody Energy, and Duke Energy, ALEC has lobbied to tear down renewable energy portfolio standards, impose fees for rooftop solar panels on homes and businesses, and even teach climate denialism in schools.
ALECs sudden unpopularity with the most innovative and profitable companies in the world have caused it to say some funny things in response, including that it actually has no problem with renewable energy, it just hates whengovernment does any picking winners and losers.
Even a glance at the bills that ALEC has promoted proves that argument to be false, likely just an effort to prevent further defections, which clearly isnt working.
The truth is, ALEC is happy to pick winners as long as they are the coal, gas, oil, nuclear and utility industries which fund the whole enterprise, and happy to pick losers as long as theyre the wind and solar industries which threaten those dinosaurs.
Cases in point: ALECs Utility Construction Review Act aims to facilitate a massive subsidy to the nuclear industry, which couldnt possibly build expensive reactors in a free market without the public handout which ALECs bill promotes.ALECs Updating Net Metering Policies Resolution aims to impose fees on residents and small business owners who spend their own money installing solar panels. Not exactly a free-market ideology there, either.
Thankfully, tech companies that are committed to clean energy are finally seeing through ALECs free market charade and recognizing ALEC for what it really is, which is another tool for polluters to promote policies that are in direct opposition to tech companies’ laudableclean energy goals.
eBay is still an ALEC member, and it has stated some ambition to move toward renewable energy to power its data centers; will it be the next to leave?
