CEO’s Message – November 2025
Policy Actions Hurt Progress
It’s difficult to know how former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel came to recently pen an astonishing piece in The Wall Street Journal. The theme of his op-ed is that electricity is scarce, prices are rising, and Democrats should capitalize on this phenomenon during next year’s elections. That in and of itself isn’t astonishing. Mr. Emanuel has been a longtime Democratic politician, serving in the House of Representatives, as mayor of Chicago, and ambassador to Japan during the Biden Administration. He’s rumored to be eyeing a run for the presidency in 2028.
What’s astonishing is that Mr. Emanuel proclaims himself—and his former boss, President Barack Obama—to be “all of the above” energy development advocates. He excoriates bureaucratic intransigence as an impediment to bringing more electricity supply online. He bemoans the 11,000 generation projects that are in regulatory purgatory. He blames “National Republicans” for not adopting Texas’s “build baby build” approach to “generation of all sorts.”
Huh?
Does Mr. Emanuel not know that recent history is easily remembered or searchable when something doesn’t sound quite right? I count at least 14 regulatory and policy actions taken by the Obama Administration during its eight-year reign that strongly discouraged and impeded the development of fossil fuels. These include the Environmental Protection Agency’s Endangerment Finding on greenhouse gases; coal leasing and surface mining interagency reviews; the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards rulemaking; Cross-State Air Pollution Rule; proposed carbon standards for new power plants; former President Barack Obama’s Climate Action Plan; social cost of carbon; EPA Clean Power Plan; EPA Coal Combustion Residuals Rule; New Source Performance Standards for new power plants; Effluent Limitations Guidelines for steam electric plants; the Paris Climate Agreement; coal leasing moratorium on federal lands; and the Stream Protection Rule. Not to mention projects slowed or stopped by reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act and/ or Endangered Species Act.
As someone who was deep into the weeds on all of these issues—working for a utility that operated and built “all of the above” generation, Mr. Emanuel now urgently calls for—I can tell you the cumulative effect of these policy actions makes it extremely difficult to count on fossil generation staying in the mix, in existing or new forms. In fact, a big reason for the current gap between today’s needed generation and its availability is that many plants shut down or did not come online due to these policies.
It’s convenient now to have amnesia about how we got into this box. Better to hector, as Mr. Emanuel does in his op-ed piece: “The Democrats’ agenda shouldn’t be advertised as a campaign to save stranded polar bears, rescue the climate or curb carbon emissions. It should be a ratepayer-first strategy. In 2026, it’s affordability stupid: Electricity supply up, electricity bills down.”
If only Mr. Emanuel and his colleagues had this foresight 16 years ago.
Dave Lock
CEO