Up and Down the Ballot, Future of Our Country’s Health, Prosperity and Climate Security is at Risk.
This article earlier published in Sheekeydaily
The election is well under-way and there’s a lot at stake — gun-safety, health care insurance, fiscal responsibility, and the safety of the air, water and climate that supports us. It’s not just the vital Presidential race, which is getting so much attention, but also for the choices voters make up and down the ballot, for members of Congress, Governors, state legislatures and local governments.
The future of our country’s health, prosperity, and climate security from energy policy has never been at greater risk — nor has America ever been offered a greater energy opportunity. In the past two months alone, the benefits flowing to the health, prosperity, security and the very stability of our climate system from embracing new, cheaper, cleaner energy options have been spectacularly documented– yet very little of our national electoral conversation has focused on threat to these benefits if the electorate allows special fossil fuel interests to prevail at the ballot box.
Too few candidates have been asked how they would choose to ensure that the American economy embraces a cheaper, cleaner and more secure energy future. But here are the choices this year’s crop of political leaders will make: For example, even after years of national effort, 100,000 Americans every year still die from particulate air pollution, mostly from power plants, factories and refineries. Just by accelerating the replacement of dirty fuels in these facilities with clean (and free) sun, wind and water, we can cut this heartbreaking death toll in half.
When you ask Americans what worries them, one of the main problems is that everything costs too much; they just can’t afford to live. But underneath the cost of a pound of hamburger, or a plane ticket, or the rental on an apartment are the costs of the energy that produces and delivers that product. The wholesale costs of generating one kilowatt-hour of power have fallen substantially — in two years by one third — thanks to cheaper wind and solar power. But price a household pays for using that cheap kilowatt-hour over that same two year period has gone up by 17%, with higher profit margins being demanded by utilities.
A major portion of inflation reflects the inflated cost of gasoline, electricity and natural gas , often the result of price gouging by the global oil cartel or local electricity monopolies — price gouging which a rapid expansion of local solar, water or wind could guard against. Indeed, just expanding reliance on clean energy at the present rate would reduce energy costs in the next five years by more than 10%, according to Lazard Frere.
And cheaper energy costs are not the only clean energy benefit for our economy. In the last four years the shift towards clean energy have already generated 170,000 new jobs across nearly every county in the US; staying on a clean energy pathway for the next two decades would add an incremental 3,900,000 jobs, according to the non-partisan Energy Innovation Policy & Technology thinktank.. Indeed, led by clean energy opportunity, US industrial investment has now reached a trillion dollars a year — its highest level since the Eisenhower Administration, according to the Council on Economic Advisors.
And faced as we are almost every week with a weather shock of one sort or another — hurricane, flood, tornado, heat wave, drought — the clean energy pathway also promises to cut American’s contribution to climate change by 67% in the next decade, according to the University of Maryland Center for Global Studies — twice as fast as the progress we have been making — with twice as rapid health and economic benefits as well.
How do the American people feel about clean energy — is our nation divided as well on this issue? Apparently not. Americans tell pollsters an overwhelming majority — 67% — like the idea of emphasizing powering our economy with local wind and sun instead of dirty coal and polluting oil.
And they don’t just tell pollsters. They are showing leadership at the household, city hall and statehouse level. Last year the federal government encouraged households to invest their own funds in making their own homes more energy self-sufficient. Households who make such investments were rewarded with a tax credit — but this was still their own money they were putting up! The experts expected only 1% of people to make this decision — instead a stunning 3 times as many households, 3.4 million of them, invested their own funds in clean energy options like solar panels and heat pumps. And there was no red-state/blue-state chasm. The four states with the highest participation rate in the clean energy investment opportunity were Nevada, Florida, Arizona and Maine. Yes, 2.6% of Californians invested; but so did 2.7% of Texans, according to the Department of the Treasury.
So, if clean energy means less lung cancer, cheaper power bills, millions more job; if it’s one issue that Americans are not only agreeing on but acting on with their own dollars in both California and Texas, why is it at risk? Who wouldn’t want to curb inflation and reduce the risk of hurricanes? People who profit from expensive fossil power.
Expensive electricity, gasoline and home heating gas makes money for special interests. Those special interests have invested their windfall profits not in bringing cheaper and cleaner energy to Americans, but in making sure that too many of our politicians are eager to keep us dependent on expensive, dirty, and dangerous fossil fuels.
In Texas, for example, more and more Texans were saving more and more off their utility bills as more and more wind and solar energy was becoming available. That meant fewer profits for operators of dirty and expensive gas fired power plants. So, what did Texas politicians do? Encourage the transition? Nope. Even though the existing gas power plants were failing 20% of the time in the last humongous cold wave, Texas politicians set aside $5 billions of taxpayer income to build new gas-only power plants that weren’t needed and couldn’t be relied on, according to Bloomberg New Energy. They went further — they explicitly prohibited further growth in wind and solar plants in Texas — except for the ones they couldn’t stop, the ones which Texas were buying for themselves with help from Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the IRS.
Buying politicians is the last resort of coal, oil and gas. Voting these purchased politicians out of office is the greatest power an American voter still enjoys. But we need to find those fossil-fuel bought politicians. Only then can voters begin to replace them with politicians who still understand that energy should be cheap, clean, and safe. Because as you go vote at the polls remember: American innovation and ingenuity can produce energy cheap, clean, safe and in abundance. We all ought to enjoy that bounty.