Duke Energy Leaving ACCCE Due to Policy Disagreements with ‘Influential Member Companies’
Duke Energy left the American Coalition for Clean Coal Energy on Tuesday over differences with “influential member companies who will not support passing climate change legislation in 2009 or 2010,” the company said.
Via email, Duke Energy has provided EnviroKnow with a set of talking points on their decision:
The following are talking points related to Duke Energy withdrawing from the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, which Duke Energy has been a member of since the fall of 2007.· While some individual members of ACCCE are working to pass climate change legislation, we believe ACCCE is constrained by influential member companies who will not support passing climate change legislation in 2009 or 2010.
· This became increasingly apparent during and after the debate on the Waxman/Markey legislation in the U.S. House in recent months.
· This is not consistent with Duke Energy’s work to pass economy-wide and cost effective climate change legislation as soon as possible.
· Therefore, effective Sept. 1, 2009, Duke Energy resigned from ACCCE
Duke also provided the following background information via email:
We joined ACCCE nearly two years ago to help promote the following key points. We will continue to make these key points.· The fact that using coal to generate power has gotten cleaner and cleaner over the past 15 years, with substantial reductions in nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide, particulate and mercury emissions.
· Coal must continue to be part of our nation’s power generation mix.
· Federal climate change legislation must be fair to the states that depend on coal.
· Federal climate change legislation should also support the development of carbon capture and sequestration technologies.
Update 11:38 a.m EST: ACCCE has removed Duke from its list of member organizations. The screenshot below, taken at 11:30 a.m. EST, still included Duke Energy:
Update 2: Much more on this from Think Progress, Wonk Room, Climate Progress and DeSmogBlog.
Update 3: ACCCE has now released a statement.
Update 4: Both Alcoa and FirstEnergy had also previously ended their memberships in ACCCE, to little fanfare.
