Time to say it clearly: Idaho Power is engaged in greenwashing | Opinion

Dear Lisa Grow, Idaho Power CEO,

We, Treasure Valley youth, are deeply concerned about the dangerous proposal in your latest 20-year energy plan to build new fossil fuel infrastructure, especially as the Trump administration continues to aggressively attack clean energy projects, climate action and environmental justice across the country.

You have long touted your commitments to clean energy and affordability, but your recent actions suggest otherwise. We’ve been fighting back year after year as you increase fees on our power bills and make affordable rooftop solar increasingly inaccessible for our families and neighbors. Now you plan to build two expensive new gas plants by 2030, rely on the volatile gas market for at least two more decades, and decrease investments in clean energy and peak reduction programs.

We have given you countless opportunities to listen to the voices of the youth and prioritize clean energy for its benefits to the grid, public health, and our communities. Now, it’s time we call your “Clean Today, Cleaner Tomorrow” slogan what it really is: greenwashing.

Your clean energy goals are empty promises to make you look good and feel good. Your top VP, Adam Richins, revealed at a stakeholder meeting last fall that the utility likely won’t meet its goal for 100% Clean Energy by 2045 because he thinks it will just be too expensive.

You know that clean energy is already the most cost-competitive source of new power. It is your job to hold your executive staff accountable for this kind of misdirection and cowardice. You must direct them to pursue affordable clean energy innovation to lead Idaho Power toward the clean energy future you claim to support.

Instead, you’re willing to throw out your clean energy commitments for short-term financial gain. Your base salary alone is nearly $1 million per year. You regularly celebrate Idaho Power’s increasing stock dividends, and, as a monopoly utility in our state, you get a guaranteed rate of return on all your projects.

We’re done with corporations and millionaires like you abusing our economy, ruining our democracy and polluting our environment, just to make more money for themselves. We’re sickened by Trump’s call for more toxic coal, oil and gas, and your willingness to play along.

Are the lives of Idahoans worth less to you than your paycheck and political points?

Here’s a reality check: the climate crisis is already spiraling out of control, and your choices now have a direct impact on our future. Our health suffers due to high heat and our sports games are cancelled due to smoke. Our schools close because the wildfire smoke is so bad that you can see it lining the hallways. Our elderly and disabled family members rely on electricity for life-sustaining medical care, and will face health and safety threats with more frequent power outages.

Whether we like it or not, this is our life, this is what we know, and it will only get worse as climate change intensifies.

We didn’t make the decisions that got our climate to this point and put our community’s safety and security and our futures at risk. But we’re here to harness the power we have to fight for a better future— for a just transition now.

You have the power to prioritize the safety and security of our community, or to abandon us entirely and imperil our future with extreme heat, food insecurity, flooding, and wildfires. To understand the current impacts of climate change and affordability of clean energy, and knowingly invest in risky and expensive fossil fuel infrastructure is an act of violence and a breach of trust to local youth and to your customer base, who has no choice but to purchase energy from you. Want to regain our trust? Prove us wrong. No new gas.

The Idaho Climate Justice League is the Sierra Club’s youth-led climate activist team. It consists of Adam Fullmer, Anise Welty, Harmony Trude, Amalia Farrow-Neirwirth, Zairy Petersen, Rainier Serrano and Max Jochum.