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labama Public Service Commission President Twinkle Cavanaugh has said it emphatically, pointedly, with gusto:

A push for the PSC to formally review the rate structure of Alabama's largest utilities is a "full-frontal attack" by "environmental extremists" who want to kill Alabama jobs.

Pow!

"Their agenda-driven actions threaten to raise the rates you pay for electricity and other utilities, and they harm our ability to remain competitive with other states while creating new jobs and opportunities for our citizens," she wrote in a recent op-ed published on the PSC website.

Bam!

The old one-two punch. And maybe my head is reeling, but I'm still trying to understand.

Why would reviewing the rate structure of Alabama Power Co., Alagasco and Mobile Gas -- monopolies which have been allowed a return on equity that remains above the national average - kill jobs?

How can a formal review of the rate structure - particularly in light of al.com reports that show Alagasco customers often pay higher rates than those in Mississippi, and that Alabama Power commercial and residential customers pay more than their counterparts in Georgia - be bad for the people or the economy?

I asked Cavanaugh once Thursday.

I asked her twice, and I still didn't get a good answer.

The closest thing was this. Cavanaugh said a formal rate review - like the one suggested by PSC Commissioner Terry Dunn this month and blocked by Cavanaugh and commissioner Jeremy Oden - would bring too many lawyers to the table.

"In a formal hearing, what happens is ... lawyers talk to lawyers and no one trusts anybody," she said.

As if everybody trusted everybody now. Outside the PSC and the utilities it is supposed to regulate, that is.

What she meant was that a formal rate review would bring other voices to the table. Voices that do not have a vested interest in keeping the cozy rate structure as it is.

Which means ... this is not about jobs. It's about silencing voices, marginalizing political opponents, muting those who would ask for cleaner air or water, discrediting those who would land like flies in the ointment of Alabama's utilities.

I asked her, just to be sure.

Is this not just a way of excluding those environmental groups from the process?

"Maybe so," Cavanaugh said without apology. "You can write that. I want to exclude the environmentalists from taking part in the process."

Say this for Cavanaugh. She owns what she says.

But who are the "extremists" who would kill our jobs? I asked if there are environmental groups she does not consider extremist. And she paused.

"I'll get back to you," she said.

She did acknowledge that she had a green side of her own.

"I am all for the environment," she said. "I hunt, I fish, I bait worms on the hook for my little girl."

But in the end the real answer to the real question never came. There was no answer for how a long-overdue review of the rate structure kills jobs.

Because the truth is it is far more complicated than that. Particularly in places like Jefferson County, where air pollution, especially soot associated with coal-burning power plants, car exhaust and heavy industry, has for years put Birmingham in violation of federal air quality guidelines. That, in turn, blocked the area from landing industry that might pollute it further.

There has been progress in Birmingham's air recently. But the outlook is still hazy.

What is clear, in the state's largest metro area, is that pollution has been a far bigger job killer than any run-of-the mill request for a formal review of rates will ever be.

The issue of the rate review has been overly politicized, painted with extreme language and fought with the most bitter rhetoric proponents of the utilities can use.

Do not get lost in it. The issue is about rates, and ultimately about utility profits.

If you want to examine those, though, you know what that makes you.

An extremist.

John Archibald's column appears in the Birmingham News and on al.com. Write him at jarchibald@al.com