An Open Letter on Oak Creek and Paris Gas Plants
- Waukesha NAACP
- Jun 12
- 5 min read
Waukesha, WI- June 12, 2025: We invite you to sign onto the following open letter with the form below.
---------SIGN THE PETITION ----------------https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1wlJXFaOcg3YgNsBupKeEIQY7Ddh2KRrezHmYRp9eA9A/edit.
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To Public Service Commissioners Summer Strand, Marcus Hawkins, Kristy Nieto, and We Energies’ Executives Gale Klapper and Scott Lauber
As you were planning for Memorial Day, the Wisconsin Public Service Commission voted unanimously to approve two new fossil fuel projects proposed by We Energies: massive methane gas plants in the City of Oak Creek and Town of Paris. This decision will be remembered not as prudent regulation, but as a catastrophic failure of moral imagination and a shameful chapter in the long history of Wisconsin’s state-sanctioned corporate capture.
By siding with We Energies — a private monopoly with billions in profits and a legacy of pollution — Commissioners Summer Strand, Marcus Hawkins, and Kristy Nieto, all appointed by Governor Tony Evers, have aligned themselves with the forces of delay, denial and dispossession.
To the Public Service Commissioners:
When faced with a clear choice between protecting communities and appeasing corporate interests, you chose complicity. You held the legal authority, the moral mandate and overwhelming evidence to reject these reckless proposals. Instead, you sanctioned harm. You chose short-term utility profits over public health, corporate convenience over climate science and political expediency over the urgent demands of impacted communities. And there is no doubt that Wisconsin families will pay the price, both literally in dollars, but also in negative downstream impacts on health and quality of life.
With eyes and ears wide open, you chose destruction over dignity, profit over human beings and over the only planet we and our grandchildren will ever share.
Your failure to use the full extent of your authority - your refusal to even try - is not regulatory neutrality. It is structural complicity. You cowered behind a narrow, legalistic interpretation of your statutory authority, as if regulation were an administrative reflex to satisfy a procedural checklist, rather than a moral responsibility to protect the public.
This ruling is not just a betrayal; it is evidence of design. Wisconsin’s most impacted residents — already unduly burdened by unaffordable energy, toxic air and the slow violence of climate collapse — did not lose because you failed to act. They lost because the system worked exactly as intended: to serve utilities, protect capital and sacrifice the rest of us as collateral.
Perhaps we were mistaken to expect leadership from a body built to defer to power. The architecture of regulation, as currently structured, rewards obedience to industry, not defense of the people. Commissioners, you followed that blueprint without flinching. With eyes and ears wide open.
You have allowed We Energies to weaponize the regulatory process as a rubber stamp for corporate greed. The collateral damage? Escalating environmental racism and economic abandonment in regions already bearing the toxic legacy of industrial pollution. Tethering working families to unaffordable bills in the midst of an economic crisis. Locking in decades of methane emissions that will worsen the climate disasters already battering our state.
That is not regulation. It is complete surrender.
And what just happened here — and it bears repeating — is this: a unanimous vote by an unelected public commission to approve massive fossil fuel projects by a multibillion-dollar monopoly, in defiance of overwhelming public opposition, scientific evidence and moral clarity. When that happens in another country, we don’t hesitate to call it corruption.
Shouldn’t we all be deeply unsettled by the fact that our political culture struggles to enunciate it as such when it happens on our own soil, under proud banners of democracy, in such open and plain view, and without shame?
Or perhaps the more chilling truth is that we’ve normalized rulings like these, and the corrupt processes that deliver them. That perhaps we’ve come to mistake state capture for state competence; to confuse public betrayal for public bureaucracy; that we interpret injustice as being somehow inevitable for its being all too familiar.
You, Commissioners, had the opportunity to challenge those socially deteriorating and ecologically destructive logics. Instead, you chose to enshrine them - at the peril of our health, our homes, and our shared horizons.
To We Energies:
Your insistence on expanding fossil fuel infrastructure in 2025 has not only been a masterclass in hubris — it’s a calculated act of extraction dressed up as necessity. You heard from your own customers; the scientists, economists, doctors, faith leaders, teachers, and youth activists, all speaking with clarity and urgency in overwhelming opposition to your plans. And you ignored them all.
You are not responding to demand, you are manufacturing it — conjuring speculative energy needs to justify permanent, polluting infrastructure that guarantees shareholder returns while offloading generational risk onto your average customer. You’re locking in decades of methane emissions and rising utility bills, not because our communities need it, not because we asked for it, but because your shareholders expect it.
From the most powerful and profitable monopoly utility in the state, this is not leadership. This constitutes state-sanctioned looting — of ratepayer dollars, of public trust , and of the very future we’re fighting to secure for the generations to come. You claim to serve Wisconsin, yet your actions serve only your bottom line. And for that you should be ashamed.
To both We Energies and the PSC:
You now bear the responsibility for the collective harms that will result from your
negligence to the abundance of concerns raised so compellingly and consistently by those whose lives you’ve deprioritized in favor of profit, expediency, and corporate allegiance.
We, however, are not, nor have we ever truly been, powerless. And we are certainly not alone. You may have secured an approval, but you have forfeited the public’s trust, and with it, any claim to moral legitimacy.
If you haven’t yet noticed, there is a wide and deep movement arising. You cannot regulate us away. You cannot buy us off with charitable donations. And you will not outlast us.
We are growing in number, in power, in bold and clarifying vision. While We Energies clings to a myopic, profit-driven model that poisons the air and accelerates collapse, and while the Public Service Commission enables that harm under the guise of neutrality and out of cowardice in the face of political retaliation, we are building something far more enduring and live-giving: a future rooted in justice, grounded in community and powered by care.
This fight is not over. It is only beginning…
For a future worth breathing,
-----------------------------------SIGN THE PETITION ---------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------SIGN THE PETITION ---------------------------------------------
Disclaimer – Waukesha NAACP
The views, opinions, and content expressed in this communication (or during this event/program) are those of the Waukesha NAACP and its participants and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) at the national, regional, or other branch levels unless explicitly stated.
The Waukesha NAACP is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization committed to advocating for civil rights, racial justice, and social equity in the Waukesha community. Information provided by the branch is intended for general educational and advocacy purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, or professional advice.
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