New report: Duke Energy, predecessors understood climate change and ignored it for decades

The Bottom Line from NC Newsline

Duke Energy and other utilities, particularly in the South, are pushing to add new natural gas plants like this Florida facility. (Photo by Glen Richard/iStock Images Getty Images)

It’s a great tragedy of our time that the global climate change crisis is not something that emerged suddenly or as a surprise.

Not only have scientists predicted how it would play out for decades, so too have many of the polluters whose CO2 emissions have done so much to cause it.

A powerful new report from the nonprofit Energy and Policy Institute highlights these truths. The report is entitled “Duke Energy Knew” and it explains in sobering detail how by the 1970s, the utilities that comprise today’s Duke Energy Corporation had early warnings about how burning fossil fuels would lead to climate change.

And even more disturbingly, the report shows how by the 1990s, Duke utilities began backing disinformation campaigns that denied the science of climate change and promoted opposition to legal limits on greenhouse gas emissions.

The bottom line: Duke can’t change the past. But like other polluters, it can act now to address its past sins. One hopes the report leads to just such an outcome.

For NC Newsline, I’m Rob Schofield.