Republicans Want To Ensure Your Freedom To Pay More Than Necessary For Dirty Energy

[hatrack]

When you think of "freedom," do you think of paying more for a worse product? No? Well good, you shouldn't. No one does. Except, perhaps, House Republicans, whose new HR 1 bill, the "Lower Energy Costs Act," would increase energy costs, and includes a section labeled "Homeowner Energy Freedom" that would leave homeowners 'free' to continue using old, inefficient, and wasteful appliances. How would a legislative package named for lowering costs actually increase them? Well, Republicans want to boost methane (née natural) gas exports, because they don't care that it hurts low-income communities and people of color on the frontlines of fossil fuel pollution in Texas and Louisiana. And they don't care that gas exports result in Americans paying more when competing on the global market, where prices can be five times as high.

Even worse is the Homeowner Energy Freedom section, which you know is bad because it's dressed up with such a name. Other sections are named plainly to describe the intention: for example, the "Natural Gas Tax Repeal" section would repeal the section of the Clean Air Act that provides an incentive for oil companies to reduce methane emissions.

Some conservatives love to claim that putting a price on pollution is a market-based solution that Republicans could support. However, when Republicans actually have policymaking power, they use it to try and repeal such efforts, even though a price on methane could reduce the climate-warming pollution by 40-80% at no net cost to producers, and despite the fact that reducing methane pollution is critical to protecting the 17 million people living close enough to be subjected to other types of pollution from these facilities.

But the GOP didn't even try to hide those facts with a fancy name for that section, probably because repealing a tax is always going to sound good enough on its own to them. On the other hand, people like free money for upgrading their home appliances to more efficient new models that would reduce energy consumption and save on their power bills, so Republicans had to disguise their attempt to repeal those measures.

EDIT

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/3/23/2159786/-For-The-GOP-Freedom-Means-You-re-Free-To-Pay-More-For-Their-Donors-Dirty-Energy

[2naSalit]

1. Pretty much written in stone...

In my state where extractive industry is the base of the economy and anyone who tries to go with renweables be damned. And they raised the rates for households at least twice last year.