The Ratepayer Protection Act, currently wending its way through the North Carolina legislature, is the legislative equivalent of a Frankenstein monster: half sensible protection, half climate-policy nightmare.
On the sensible side, the bill would finally rein in data centers and their ravenous power consumption, shielding North Carolinians from higher electric bills caused by those energy-sucking server farms. On the nightmarish side, it would liberate Duke Energy from limits on fossil fuel, upending key aspects of state energy policy and, in some respects, reversing nearly 20 years of painstaking work on climate change.
“It’s the terrible combined with the good,” a local advocate explained. “They should be two separate bills.”
Lisa Sorg, the North Carolina reporter for Inside Climate News, explains how these two opposing ideas got lashed together, where they fit in the state’s political landscape, and what’s at stake if the bill passes.
Because this is Inside Climate News - a 501c3 nonprofit that does not charge a subscription fee, lock news behind a paywall, or clutter its website with ads - all of this vital reporting is freely available. The organization, launched in 2007 and winner of a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2013, now runs the oldest and largest dedicated climate newsroom in the nation. They hold polluters accountable, expose environmental injustice, debunk misinformation, and scrutinize solutions.
Donations from readers fund every aspect of the work. As Sorg, a journalist for 30 years who covers energy, climate, environment, and agriculture - and the social justice impacts of pollution and corporate malfeasance - might tell you: the bill is a classic case of good intentions meeting bad bedfellows.