As the youth-led climate movement becomes more and more important to the national debate over energy policy, fossil fuel industries and utilities are realizing it’s no longer enough for them to saturate our political system with campaign contributions. Indeed, with students at the forefront of local and regional efforts to oust Big Coal and Big Oil, we’ve seen more and more cases where the fossil fuel giants and have attempted to hijack student initiatives and diffuse our movement’s momentum. In this post, I want to draw attention to just such a case in my home state of Oregon.
This spring we’ve seen the likes of Peabody Energy try to undermine student activism at Washington University in Missouri, while coal barons in Montana try to bribe high school students to stop protesting coal in their communities. But in the last couple weeks I encountered the first instance I’m aware of in which a coal-dependent utility has moved to undermine campus activism in Oregon. In response to growing momentum around a statewide campaign to have student governments pass resolutions calling for an early transition away from the Boardman Coal Plant, individuals with ties to the plant’s owner worked to sway a student senate vote at Linfield College without making public their connection to the utility. Read on for the full story beneath the fold.
Over the last school year, I’ve had the pleasure of working with students at Linfield College on campaigns designed to take on fossil fuels in Oregon. Students at Linfield turned out to a major hearing on the Northwest’s energy future last fall, and this month organized a bike ride protest against liquefied natural gas. This spring Linfield activists have been working to pass a student senate resolution calling on Oregon decision makers to transition our state away from reliance on the Boardman Coal Plant by 2014. Four college campuses in Oregon have already passed similar resolutions - with several others making progress toward that goal. But student senators at Linfield had some legitimate questions about the resolution, so on April 19th I headed out to the campus to help the climate group there answer questions about Boardman Coal.
What I learned from my own observations of Associated Students of Linfield College is that these student senators want to do the right thing. And quite rightly, they don’t want to pass a resolution the implications of which they don’t understand. Many legitimate questions and concerns came up during my own discussion with student senators – but it soon became obvious most of the skepticism came from an individual senator who was very vocal about the fact that Portland General Electric (which owns the Boardman Coal Plant) claims closing Boardman by 2014 is impractical. It was no surprise most of this senator’s concerns came straight from PGE’s own talking points, because he explained to everyone present that he’d talked with officials at PGE.
I’ll admit concerns about the objectivity of PGE as a information source (I mean, if you wanted to learn about the benefits of Wall Street reform, would you ask Goldman Sachs?). But overall I was impressed someone in the student senate had gone to the trouble of contacting PGE and asking for their viewpoint. Yet as the conversation progressed, I couldn’t quite understand this senator’s adherence to the same discredited, PGE-originated arguments those of us engaged in this fight have heard time and time again. Something was up. And understandably, the senate voted that night to side with their highly vocal and apparently knowledgable peer, not the guy from the Sierra Club (me). That night the coal resolution failed to pass.
Yet I wasn’t the only one feeling there was something more to this state of affairs than met the eye – and in the Internet Age, secrets are notoriously hard to keep. A web search by a member of the campus environmental group at Linfield revealed the student senator who had “contacted” PGE has a much closer relationship to the utility than he’d made public. In fact, he is the son of the Vice President of Transmission and Distribution Services at PGE. So far as I’m aware, the student senate at Linfield was simply given the impression their peer had researched the Boardman issue in-depth by contacting PGE to get their side of the story. To the knowledge of myself and the environmental team at Linfield, the senator who most vocally opposed Linfield’s coal resolution never made public his significant conflict of interest.
Had all members of the student senate known this, there’s no telling how they would have voted. But what’s certain is they deserved to know; and it seems safe to say this undisclosed conflict of interest heavily influenced the senate vote. Fortunately students at Linfield are not about to let PGE’s unseen influence carry the day. Students are already compiling signatures from their peers on a petition asking their senate to re-consider the resolution, this time with all the facts before them. The senate will likely take up the resolution again within the next few weeks.
I can’t say how disturbing it is that the utility owner of Oregon’s biggest polluter was able to undermine campus policy and student activism at a campus that’s done so much to lead the clean energy fight in Oregon. The good news, however, is that the fantastic team at Linfield is now taking this campaign to a new level, educating their peers about what happened and bringing PGE’s influence under the light of scrutiny. The student senate at Linfield deserves to have the chance to consider the coal resolution again, and this time to be given all the facts. And thanks to the efforts of Linfield climate activists, I feel confident saying they’ll get that chance.
Hey everyone,
my name is andrew carpenter, and I am the student that spoke against the resolution. To comment on some of your statements, both sides were given the same amount of time to deliver their arguments. No policies were violated, seeing as in our senate we can openly discuss items before they are voted on.
Here is a response that I wrote to a article in the Linfield review, similar to yours.
“Hey everyone,
seeing as this article has to do with me, I figured that it might be good for me to maybe clear up some comments.
First, yes my father is Bruce Carpenter, Vice President of Transmission and Distribution. I told all of senate that I talked to the Vice President of Transmission and Distribution along with the rest of the people I talked to. Did I feel as though it was necessary that I say that it was my father? No, it was not. Though when people asked me how I was able to contact a VP, I informed them that it was my father.
Second, I am in fact not a ‘monkey wrench’ being used by PGE. I contacted my father ASKING for information on the Boardman Power Plant. All of the information that they gave me is readily available to the public. If people would like, I will get links for them.
Third, I would say that this is not an open close discussion on whether or not it is environmentally friendly. One needs to consider the social and economic effects as well as the environmental effects. This is the difference between being green (only looking to maintain the environment) and sustainable (social and economic impact).
I offer this dialogue to further the conversation on discovering what is best for everyone.”
-Andrew Carpenter
Hi Andrew,
I appreciate your taking time to write in here – and to a certain extent I can see why you might not have thought it necessary to explain to everyone at the Linfield senate meeting that you had a personal relationship to PGE. Yet I believe this really was something that needed to be more out in the open. I feel it’s very likely your arguments influenced the senate vote at Linfield, and also that some people in the room might have reacted differently if they knew you had personal connection to PGE. From the standpoint of someone who was at the senate meeting when the vote occurred (though I’m not a Linfield student – I just came to help answer questions) I can say it wasn’t apparent from anything said that night that this connection existed.
Tuesday evening I was at a Department of Environmental Quality hearing on the fate of Boardman, during which people spoke up on both sides of the issue. One woman testified in support of PGE’s plan to keep Boardman open for ten more years, and said she was speaking that night as a Portland resident and member of the community. But she also explicitly stated that for transparency’s sake, she wanted to let everyone know she was also a PGE employee. I believe this transparency statement probably changed the way many people viewed her testimony, and that their reaction to what she said might have been much different had she not made this statement. I think this kind of transparency is important to discussions of this kind.
I’ve been working with the student environmental group at Linfield for a while (I work in a volunteer capacity with lots of similar campus groups in the Northwest). I therefore feel comfortable saying these students put a lot of work into their campaign to pass this resolution at Linfield, and that they would be justified in feeling they’ve been treated unfairly after realizing a senate vote was influenced by a conflict of interest not everyone knew about. Had they known a member of senate had a personal connection to PGE, I suspect they would have tailored their own arguments differently. I think they’re right in insisting that the dialogue needs to happen again, this time with all the facts presented to everyone.
I appreciate your own willingness to engage in a dialogue about this important matter, and hope that it continues.