With Help From The Atlantic's Advertorials, Southern Company Pimps An "Energy Transition" It Isnt Part Of
EDIT
Southern Company’s white paper is a “native advertisement that The Atlantic’s in-house content studio has created on behalf of their client, Southern Company,” and “nothing more than a propaganda effort that The Atlantic name confers legitimacy to,” said Michelle Amazeen, an associate professor of journalism studies and advertising at Boston University who specializes in researching misinformation. “It is not independent, peer-reviewed research. It is marketing research which, fundamentally, is used to market products,” Amazeen said. The partnership “is in the best interest of Southern Company rather than the public interest.” For its part, The Atlantic acknowledged that the collaboration with Southern Company was a marketing effort. Anna Bross, a senior vice president of communications at The Atlantic, told me that “Atlantic Insights is the marketing research division of The Atlantic. To be sure there is no confusion, Insights is part of our sales and marketing team, separate and independent from our editorial division.”
The Atlantic has partnered with Southern Company on marketing before, including through The Atlantic Ideas Festival, which is billed as “addressing the most significant issues of our time with today’s boldest thinkers as we bring The Atlantic’s journalism to life onstage.” This year, Southern Company is an underwriter of the festival; in 2022 and 2023, The Atlantic’s CEO, Nicholas Thompson, interviewed the company’s CEOs about the transition to clean energy. Those interviews were “distinct and separate from the editorial interviews at the Festival, and clearly delineated, introduced, and labeled as such,” said Bross.
EDIT
They are building new gas-burning units, still rely on coal for power, and are actively blocking clean energy solutions like solar, he said. Southern Company’s Alabama subsidiary, Alabama Power, has imposed a charge on rooftop solar panel owners, which is being challenged in court, as well as a tax on large-scale producers of solar energy. The company is also known by local advocates for its prolific dumping of toxic coal ash and for operating the most greenhouse gas-intensive power plant in the nation, located in West Jefferson, Alabama. Southern Company uses hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars to run a carbon capture testing and research center in Wilsonville, Alabama, even after the company was investigated for fraud, sued, and forced to refund $377 million to ratepayers for its failed carbon capture project at a coal plant in Kemper County, Mississippi.
Ramsey Sprague, President of the Alabama-based Mobile Environmental Justice Action Coalition, described Alabama Power as “vampiric,” and said it suppresses renewable energy generation in the state, pledges to mitigate its pollution via “unproven” carbon capture technologies, and “fleeces its customers” for the benefit of investors on Wall Street. A 2023 study found that Alabamians have the highest electricity bills in the United States. Jilisa Milton, a co-director at the Greater-Birmingham Alliance to Stop Pollution, found Southern Company’s promotion of public-private partnerships around the energy transition ironic. “I don’t think they’ve ever invited us to have that conversation,” she said about Alabama Power. “We’ve tried to engage executives — there’s not really a channel for that.”
EDIT
https://www.desmog.com/2024/10/30/southern-company-is-promoting-propaganda-disguised-as-research-with-help-from-a-major-media-company-the-atlantic/