Speaker 2
And so a lot of them made the decision, you know what? We'll borrow the money, we'll clean up our emissions, but we'll keep these things running. It's 2011. We have a few decades to go. This climate change thing can't be that big of an issue. Exactly.
Speaker 1
You know, utilities were actually quite involved in promoting climate denial. We know that oil companies were up to it. But utilities were doing it too. And these utilities, they actually decided about a decade ago, a lot of them to sink another several hundred million dollars into any given coal plant to renovate it rather than shutting it down. And like you said, Alex, this was money that they borrowed. So if you fast forward a decade, they haven't paid all that money back yet. They still have debt on those plants. And so they need revenue from their customers. They need to keep charging people to keep that coal plant operating and to pay back the loans on those bad decisions. Right.
Speaker 2
If they shut down the coal plant and say it switched to wind, they would still owe money on that debt they took out 10 years ago. And now also have to borrow more money to set up whatever new wind project they need to set up. So they'd be losing revenue from their coal plant and adding debt. Lots of them can't afford to do that. So they're thinking, I have to keep generating this electricity until I pay off the debt so that I can do something else. Yeah.
Speaker 1
So they're keeping these much dirtier and much more expensive coal plants open because it makes financial sense for them, not for their customers. And it doesn't make sense for the planet either. Right. And this is a big problem. According to the Rocky Mountain Institute, which is an environmental think tank that works a lot on this issue, utilities have around one hundred billion dollars in coal plant debt right now. So we are talking about a big mountain of debt. And the thing is we've got to solve this problem if we want to move away from
