South Carolina

Minor expenses on things like Office Depot and parking are easy to find, but evidence of what fossil fuel giants want, well, not so much. As an example, see 2024 expenses for Duke Energy lobbyist Tony Denny, who also lobbies for the increasingly flood-stricken town of Myrtle Beach.

Like many coastal states, South Carolina is being hit with soaring home insurance costs, driven in part by the greater frequency and severity of hurricanes and tropical storms. From 2021-22, home insurance rates rose by 22%, the second-high increase of any state.

Many of the insurers lobbying Congress and state legislatures for help in covering climate-related insurance claims are, at the same time, lobbying against state legislation that would require insurers to disclose the extent of their holdings in fossil fuel companies. Leading this anti-disclosure push is the American Property Casualty Insurance Association (APCIA). In South Carolina, APCIA shared lobbyists with Duke Energy in 2024, while the SC Property & Casualty Insurance Guaranty Association has shared lobbyists with the Williams Companies, builder and operator of gas pipelines.

Beaufort County, SC, will become the most at-risk county in the country because of climate change, according to a February 2023 study by ProPublica, suffering more flooding, higher temperatures, and greater instances of heat-related health conditions. In 2024, the Beaufort County Council and Beaufort Board of Education shared lobbyists with coal company Holcim. The coastal Charleston suburb of Mount Pleasant shared a lobbyist with the Williams Companies.

In June 2023, the Woodwell Center reported that between 2040 and 2060 the number of at-risk structures in Charleston County will increase to more than 87,000 — about 58% of all its structures. To what extent are lobbyists for Charleston, Beaufort, and Mount Pleasant advocating for state funding to deal with flooding, while simultaneously promoting further dependence on fossil fuels? South Carolina makes it hard to know. The state’s disclosure system gives a lot of granular detail about lobbyists’ expenses, but it doesn’t disclose positions taken on individual bills.

Best feature: a useful year-end summary that includes all payments in all categories for all principals, downloadable in csv format.

Worst feature: The State Ethics Commission’s website leads users into a lot of cul-de-sacs, where the only way to find additional information about a search result is to return to the main menu and start over.

Additional Findings

The South Carolina lobbyist reporting system lives on the South Carolina State Ethics Commission site. It isn’t too difficult to find, though it does require clicking few a through different screens and websites before getting to the point where you can actually start searching for lobbyists. It’s possible to search for lists both by client and by lobbyist. There are very few filter options, with the only one being lobbyists’ principals, state agency lobbyists’ principals, or all lobbyists’ principals. There’s no all-lobbyists filter for individual searches. There’s no toggle for active/terminated lobbyists, but it looks like all lobbyists that return on the full integrated list are active. On individual searches, reports are listed and can be accessed, but other information isn’t spelled out clearly. There is a useful year-end summary that includes all payment in all categories for all principals, downloadable in csv format.

The downloads themselves are in csv format and are generally easy to work with, though they don’t have lobbying firm information. There’s also no date of registration information, but it might not be needed if only active lobbyists are downloaded. Overall, South Carolina’s lobbyist reporting system is pretty middle of the road; it doesn’t include many options for filtering, and the ones it does include are not overly important. It has a good, clear tool to easily search for individual lobbyists, but the view feature doesn’t include the most important information. Downloads are generally easy to use, but can’t be filtered beyond a couple criteria.