It didn’t take long for officials of California’s first CCA to realize that contracting with two of the nation’s most notorious corporate polluters, as financially prudent as it may have seemed at the time, had some hidden costs of its own.
    Having put the county in the untenable position of supporting the same polluters whose practices they publicly opposed, Marin’s new energy provider had also helped pave the path for evermore corporate control of what many thought would be locally owned and generated clean energy.
    That move has already caused Marin County’s CCA officials to lose credibility with at least some of their natural constituents. Especially disillusioned are those who hoped and believed their new CCA was offering some version of “energy democracy.”
    While Shell and EnXco have wasted no time in exploiting their affiliation with California’s first CCA to parade their “green ventures” in front of an unsuspecting public, a closer look at these companies’ portfolios reveals only a tiny fraction of their profits being invested in renewable energy. Greenwashing aside, the vast majority of Shell’s earnings go toward health and environment-destroying technologies such as hydraulic fracturing, liquefied natural gas (LNG) and (off and onshore) oil drilling. EnXco does have some well-publicized investments in wind power, but its mother company EDF remains the largest operator of nuclear reactors in the world -- and one of nuclear power’s biggest investors.