As America's largest polluter, the electric utility industry contributes substantially to climate change. With justification, proponents of industry reform, such as Sandeep Vaheesan in Democracy in Power, argue that power producers should work toward remediating environmental damage by replacing fossil-fuel burning technologies with renewable energy resources.

A lawyer for the Open Markets Institute, an organization that advocates for democratically based competition policies to combat monopoly abuses, Vaheesan makes a clear argument: the American electric utility industry, long dominated by investor-owned power companies, has employed cartel-like tactics to subvert the public interest and to thwart climate change mitigation. Since the industry's beginnings in the 1880s, profit-making firms sought to eliminate public power entities, such as city-owned utility firms. He contends that these enterprises, joined by public operations of the New Deal era, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and rural electric cooperatives, provide electricity and economic development that enhance the welfare of customers rather than corporate stockholders.

To expand upon these benefits, the author urges Congress to extend the authority of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which would disperse hundreds of billions of dollars in grant