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Burning fossil fuels like methane gas, coal, and oil is the leading contributor to the rapid and unprecedented warming over the last 200 years. These fuels release carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide, which trap heat, warm the planet, and are linked to adverse health outcomes such as respiratory illnesses (including asthma), cancer, and heart disease.
Warming from fossil fuel emissions is directly related to more catastrophic events like intensifying droughts, floods, and extreme heat. There is growing scientific consensus that we have already surpassed 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, the limit that would have prevented even more dire and irreversible climate consequences like permanent ice sheet melting, loss of entire ecosystems, and intensifying ocean warming. At the current rate, we are on a trajectory for 2.5 degrees Celsius warming by the end of 2100.
In 2025, scientists noted the planet’s first catastrophic climate “tipping point,” or point of no return — namely mass coral reef die-off from rising ocean temperatures. These die-offs imperil the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of humans and animals who depend on ocean ecosystems for food, natural buffers, and economic systems. These catastrophic — and again, often irreversible — climate effects also have disparate impacts on racialized and historically oppressed communities, including communities of color, immigrant groups, the working class, LGBTQ+ communities, and those with limited proficiency in their region’s dominant language or languages. This is true across educational attainment and age categories.
In the United States, the energy sector is second only to transportation as the highest contributor to carbon dioxide emissions and climate warming, and 74 percent of all human-produced greenhouse gas emissions come from burning fossil fuels for electricity. While the U.S. has seen a decrease in carbon dioxide emissions from the electricity sector since the 1990s due to investment in renewable energy resources like solar, wind, and geothermal technologies, energy-related carbon emissions increased by 7 percent in 2021, in part due to increased electricity demand as more of the economy electrifies.
More recently, the rise of hyperscale artificial intelligence data centers has also skyrocketed demand for electricity. Energy use from these data centers is projected to increase from 183 terawatt hours (TwH) in 2024 (or 4 percent of U.S. total electricity consumption) to 426 TwH by 2030 — an increase in demand of 133 percent. Currently, data centers receive 40 percent of electricity from methane gas resources, with methane gas projected to continue as the largest energy source for data center electricity into 2030. Without additional renewable energy investment, data centers could produce 2.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide by 2030.
Mitigating the disproportionately catastrophic climate and health harms from burning fossil fuels for electricity calls for bold action, especially as demand for electricity continues to increase. One of these is decarbonization — the process of reducing or removing fossil fuels from production by switching to renewable energy resources in energy and economic systems. Researchers have found that scaling up renewable energy resources to 90 percent by 2035 and net zero emissions by 2050 is technically feasible with substantial increases in solar, wind, and battery storage technologies. Clean energy grids can reduce energy costs and are reliable in the absence of fossil fuel resources, even with projected electricity demand from multi-sector electrification.
The predominance of investor-owned electric utilities (IOUs) — which provide electricity to a majority of U.S. households — complicates, disincentivizes, and impedes clean energy investment and development. This is due to a mix of historical industry capture and political power, regulatory information asymmetries, and the profit motive of private energy production and distribution. Decarbonization within the IOU space is consequently lagging behind where it needs to be. For more information, please read our earlier brief, Advancing a Clean, Equitable Energy Transition through Alternatives to Investor-Owned Utilities.
Member Scholar and University of Pennsylvania Presidential Distinguished Professor of Law and Energy Policy Shelley Welton echoes the need for a new approach in the energy space, noting that while regulation of privately owned utilities may have worked in the last century to “incentivize low prices and adequate” supply, “this century, however, climate change creates the need for more deliberative, experimental management of electricity to meet the additional aim of decarbonization while maintaining affordability and reliability.”
This calls for creative solutions, and one of these is electric cooperatives — alternatives to IOUs that, if democratically run and operated, could have a strong positive impact in ushering in a just, equitable clean energy transition.
Electric cooperatives already serve a vital role in bringing electricity to sparsely populated and historically energy burdened regions (the private market failed to address energy connection in rural areas in the 20th century as there wasn’t significant financial incentivize for economic scale in sparsely populated areas, leaving service gaps and high costs to customers, and ultimately prompting state intervention).
Still, there are limitations to electric cooperatives. They are often embedded in long-term fossil fuel contracts with substantial debts or are contracted with IOUs with resource mixes that don’t meet decarbonization goals. They can have a history of unequal and unfair representation in elected board structures, and they are often largely self-regulated outside of the traditional energy regulatory space.
But particularly in the rural communities they are based in, electric cooperatives can be agents of decarbonization if they embrace funding opportunities to move into a clean energy future, improve fair representation across elected boards, listen to their member-owners’ desires for clean energy resources, collectively pressure suppliers to adopt cleaner energy resource mixes, or exit distributor contracts entirely.
