These Lawmakers Have A Plan For The Public To Take Back The Grid (The New Republic):
The resolution aims, according to the 12-page text, to establish “access to electricity as a human right and eradicate the reliance on monopolized, profit-driven utility corporations and providers and the flawed regulatory regime that has failed to regulate these utilities in the public interest.” Public power through entities like electric cooperatives and municipal utilities already serves about one-third of retail electricity customers. “Certain segments of our economy—like water, health care, and energy—are so absolutely essential to people’s lives that we cannot allow profit motives to dictate decision-making,” Bowman said over email. “And as long as energy is treated as a commodity like any other, poor people, workers, and communities of color will suffer.”The dilemma Bush faced back then—choosing which utility bills to pay—is common.
Nationally, Black, Hispanic, and Native American households spend 43 percent, 20 percent, and 45 percent more of their income on energy bills, respectively, than non-Hispanic white households. Bush and Bowman’s measure builds on multiyear campaigns by the Democratic Socialists of America, whose chapters have pushed for public power in Chicago, Providence, and the Bay Area, among other cities. In New York, DSA and allied elected officials—including Bowman—are backing a bill in the state legislature called the Build Public Renewables Act, which would empower the state-run New York Power Authority to become “the sole provider of energy to all state-owned and municipal properties” by 2025.
The new resolution—co-sponsored by Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Mondaire Jones, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, Marie Newman, and Raúl Grijalva—calls out the “fundamental conflict when shareholder gains determine the prices and accessibility of fundamental public goods,” and outlines several suggestions to scale up public and community-owned clean power while fighting energy poverty. It sets goals to expand job-creating weatherization and energy efficiency programs and guarantee that public renewables are built by local, ideally union workers making prevailing wages.
Bush and Bowman’s measure builds on multiyear campaigns by the Democratic Socialists of America, whose chapters have pushed for public power in Chicago, Providence, and the Bay Area, among other cities. In New York, DSA and allied elected officials—including Bowman—are backing a bill in the state legislature called the Build Public Renewables Act, which would empower the state-run New York Power Authority to become “the sole provider of energy to all state-owned and municipal properties” by 2025.
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Kate Aronoff June 3, 2021, The New Republic.
The Green New Dealers Propose Their Own Infrastructure Idea: Socialize Your Energy Bill: Cori Bush, Jamaal Bowman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and others are uniting behind a new resolution backing public electric power.
SARAH SILBIGER/GETTY IMAGESCongresswoman Cori Bush speaks during a news conference held to reintroduce the Green New Deal at the U.S. Capitol on April 20, 2021.
One day at work, well before being elected to Congress, Cori Bush got a call from her godmother. “She had a dream my house burned down,” Bush recalled to me over the phone. Her godmother urged her to go make sure everything was alright.
When Bush got home after work and picking up her kids, she looked around and didn’t see anything out of order. Then she checked the outlet behind her daughter’s bed. Plugged into it was one of the three electric space heaters she was using to heat the house. Juggling utility bills, Bush had opted to let the gas get turned off to make rent and keep the lights on. When she pulled back the bed, Bush says, “fire shot out of the outlet.” If not for her godmother’s premonition, she wouldn’t have checked the outlet and her daughter could have gotten trapped in the flames.
Bush, now a U.S. representative for Missouri, is introducing a new resolution on Thursday with Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York to help prevent similar situations across the country. The resolution aims, according to the 12-page text, to establish “access to electricity as a human right and eradicate the reliance on monopolized, profit-driven utility corporations and providers and the flawed regulatory regime that has failed to regulate these utilities in the public interest.” Public power through entities like electric cooperatives and municipal utilities already serves about one-third of retail electricity customers. “Certain segments of our economy—like water, health care, and energy—are so absolutely essential to people’s lives that we cannot allow profit motives to dictate decision-making,” Bowman said over email. “And as long as energy is treated as a commodity like any other, poor people, workers, and communities of color will suffer.” The dilemma Bush faced back then—choosing which utility bills to pay—is common.
The dilemma Bush faced back then—choosing which utility bills to pay—is common. In 2019, a study by Action St. Louis and several other local groups found that 52 percent of low-income residents of St. Louis and 48 percent of the city’s Black residents face energy burdens that are more than twice the citywide median. Nationally, Black, Hispanic, and Native American households spend 43 percent, 20 percent, and 45 percent more of their income on energy bills, respectively, than non-Hispanic white households.
Back when Bush was living in North St. Louis, her investor-owned electric utility put her on a “Budget Billing” plan, where high bills some months were meant to lower costs in others. Sure that an $1,800 bill must have been a mistake, she called customer service to sort out the problem. It wasn’t a mistake, though, and she had to move out.
The new resolution—co-sponsored by Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Mondaire Jones, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, Marie Newman, and Raúl Grijalva—calls out the “fundamental conflict when shareholder gains determine the prices and accessibility of fundamental public goods,” and outlines several suggestions to scale up public and community-owned clean power while fighting energy poverty. It sets goals to expand job-creating weatherization and energy efficiency programs and guarantee that public renewables are built by local, ideally union workers making prevailing wages.
Bush and Bowman’s measure builds on multiyear campaigns by the Democratic Socialists of America, whose chapters have pushed for public power in Chicago, Providence, and the Bay Area, among other cities. In New York, DSA and allied elected officials—including Bowman—are backing a bill in the state legislature called the Build Public Renewables Act, which would empower the state-run New York Power Authority to become “the sole provider of energy to all state-owned and municipal properties” by 2025. The congressional resolution has support from DSA, the Center for Biological Diversity, the Gulf Coast Center for Law and Policy, Native Organizers Alliance, the Sunrise Movement, and a number of other climate and community organizing groups that have long advocated for public power.
More ambitious still is the resolution’s call eventually to transition off for-profit utilities entirely. The federal government would acquire them before transferring ownership over to state, local, and tribal governments, “or other appropriate scales of public ownership.” Alternatively it could use public funds to convert them to community or cooperative ownership. The resolution also suggests asserting “Federal control and ownership” over transmission lines, and giving today’s fossil fuel workers a seat at the table in deciding what an energy transition should look like.
Backing the measure, as well, is the union representing workers at the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, which is engaged in a long-running fight against austerity and the costly privatization of the island’s beleaguered public utility. Union president Angel Figueroa Jaramillo said in an emailed statement that handing the utility over to private contractor LUMA Energy “threatens the jobs and pensions of thousands of union workers and threatens to undermine Puerto Rico’s transition to an affordable, reliable, 100 percent renewable energy-based electrical grid.”
The public power demands now made by Green New Deal advocates have deep roots in that framework’s namesake. In 1932, in the wake of the implosion of a massive utility holding company empire serving 32 states, Franklin D. Roosevelt campaigned on allowing investor-owned utilities to be brought under public ownership. As he told a crowd in Oregon just a month before the election, “where a community—a city or county or a district—is not satisfied with the service rendered or the rates charged by the private utility, it has the undeniable basic right, as one of its functions of government … to set up, after a fair referendum to its voters has been had, its own governmentally owned and operated service.” Amid fierce opposition from energy barons, the New Deal brought power to most of the 90 percent of farms and rural homes that lacked electricity in the lead-up to the Great Depression, via the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Rural Electrification Administration.
Hearkening back to that New Deal legacy, Bush and Bowman’s resolution looks not only to expand public power to democratize existing public power infrastructure further. While it could be a powerful engine for clean energy development, existing public power has suffered from decades of disinvestment and, the resolution text notes, “serious yet resolvable” governance challenges. The resolution proposes structuring public utilities for greater public accountability, including an Energy Department–run process to bring public input, transparency, and accountability to the TVA and Power Marketing Administration.
“We built this model back in the early 1900s and basically haven’t revisited it since.”
“We built this model back in the early 1900s and basically haven’t revisited it since. Now energy is core to everything we do as human beings living and working in the twenty-first century, and it just doesn’t make sense to allow this broken, outdated system to exist,” Bowman told me. “We need a new model, rooted in racial and economic justice. And now is the time to begin this conversation, as we begin to build back better and invest in infrastructure across the country.” At the moment, the Biden administration is immersed in negotiations with Senate Republicans over passing the president’s proposed infrastructure package. That includes some environmental and social justice aims but does little to overhaul the deeper challenges that plague the nation’s sprawling and outdated energy system.
Public utilities and coops were left out of the bargain struck at the turn of the century between private utilities and reformers. In exchange for monopolies over their service areas, investor-owned electric companies agreed to be regulated by state-level public service commissions tasked with approving rate hikes and ensuring reliable service. Regulatory capture quickly became baked into the business models of the private utilities, while many public utilities—exempted from most oversight—devolved into old boys’ networks with little incentive for change. In recent years, member-owners of electric cooperatives have fought to democratize them and bring fresh blood onto coop boards that seldom hold public meetings.
The resolution is also positioned as a response to climate change. In addition to attempting to provide affordable electricity and weatherization—making homes easier to cool and heat—it proposes setting a target for existing public power systems to reach 100 percent renewable energy by 2030. It further calls for forgiving the debts that keep many electric coops, in particular, hooked on coal. The resolution explicitly mentions the role investor-owned utilities have played in exacerbating extreme weather events in Texas and California, noting the challenge today’s energy system poses for dealing with the effects of climate change, too.
It posits public ownership as a route toward more stringent oversight and public participation in clean energy procurement and deployment, and a more direct way to bring relief to the communities of color worst hit by energy poverty. Building public renewables, the resolution text contends, could be a way to establish “high-road labor standards” in the clean energy sector rather than simply outsourcing contracts for wind and solar to largely nonunion, third party developers, as is now common. “We could make clear decisions about how fast we’re moving on projects, and about where we are investing to repair past harms,” the Next System Project’s Johanna Bozuwa, who consulted on the bill, told me by phone. “It allows us to build a much more equitable renewable energy transition and has the potential to be much faster, too.”
“When someone’s trying to win election or reelection, and a company is offering $5,000, that can be a hard thing for people to turn down.”
Public ownership, Bozuwa and other advocates argue, would also be a means of ending investor-owned utilities’ stranglehold over politics. As researchers at the Energy and Policy Institute have documented, private power providers have engaged in many of the same climate denial tactics as coal, oil, and gas companies. Their influence is particularly noxious at the state level, where companies like Dominion Energy in Virginia and FirstEnergy, in Ohio, are a ubiquitous presence in state legislatures, using ratepayer money to block climate measures and pro-renewables policy. “When someone’s trying to win election or reelection, and a company is offering $5,000, that can be a hard thing for people to turn down,” Bush said. “What we are trying to do here is break through the iron grip they’ve had.… We have not taken money from these corporations. We are not accountable to them.”
Existing proposals to transform the electric grid largely rely on creating new incentives for investor-owned utilities, including through a proposed Clean Energy Standard. Some of these incentives—like renewable energy tax credits—exclude public utilities from taking advantage, since only for-profit companies have the requisite amount of tax liability. Those now rallying around public power are looking to make sure that clean electricity is a right built with the public interest in mind, not a luxury doled out for the benefit of shareholders.
With co-sponsors spanning the Squad, the public power resolution reflects a guiding vision for a Green New Deal, in contrast to the more tepid proposals being bandied around infrastructure debates. It also helps chip away at an idea that private utilities have spent more than a century trying to promulgate: that providing electricity is something that can make people rich. “After the last 40 years of Reaganomics,” Bush said, “we need a strong public sphere. We want publicly owned goods that will last.” Kate Aronoff @KateAronoff
Kate Aronoff is a staff writer at The New Republic.
** CityandstateNY Legislative progress on climate change divides political left:
Groups like the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America say Albany Democrats are not doing enough to promote renewable energy. By ZACH WILLIAMS JUNE 1, 2021 cityandstateny.com
There are two weeks left in the official 2021 legislative session, and environmentalists cannot agree on how best to use that time. Some lawmakers are focusing on a bill that would make it easier for manufacturers to sell electric vehicles. Advocacy groups are rallying Thursday outside the state Capitol in a last-ditch push to pass a proposed carbon tax this year. With the June 22 primary approaching, Democratic socialists are even making a city campaign issue out of the idea of making the New York Power Authority a bigger player in renewable energy.
The legislative language states that the New York State Build Public Renewables Act would encourage the quasi-public agency to build new renewable projects and require it to be “the sole provider of energy to all state owned and municipal properties” by 2025. “When we talk about all the things we want to do on a city level, a lot of it is predicated on our partners at a state level stepping up and making this possible,” said Tiffany Cabán, a City Council candidate from western Queens. “It always comes down to Democratic leadership, right?” She will be among the six candidates backed by the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America who will speak at a June 2 rally outside City Hall.
Democratic socialists are not the only people on the political left who say Democratic state lawmakers are not pushing hard enough on climate change, but they are arguably the most vocal with plenty of political muscle to boot. That is irking some mainstream Democrats on the public power bill, including some legislators who are key to it ever becoming law.
The upcoming rally will highlight the lack of progress on climate change legislation since 2019 and draw attention to the political donations some Democratic leaders have received from companies that currently make money off fossil fuels, according to a media advisory. The June 2 rally is being organized by a coalition of environmental and democratic socialist groups called Public Power NY. Left-leaning activists say they are holding powerful legislative leaders accountable while their critics accuse them of bullying them on a complicated bill in order to boost their political brand before city elections.
Campaign finance records compiled by Public Power NY do show Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie of the Bronx, state Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins of Westchester and other legislative leaders have received thousands of dollars each in donations in recent years from energy companies that use fossil fuels like National Fuel and Con Edison. The implication is that the donations represent a conflict of interest with legislative duties. “The speaker is always guided by the members of our conference,” a spokesperson for Heastie said in an email. “We don’t care about any conspiracies anyone wants to peddle. Ever.” A spokesperson for Stewart-Cousins did not respond by publication time to requests for comment.
State Senate Energy and Telecommunications Committee Chair Kevin Parker of Brooklyn, who is sponsoring the public power bill and the legislation that would enact a carbon tax, said the thousands he has received in campaign donations in recent years from companies that benefit from fossil fuels simply reflect his willingness to meet with anyone concerned with energy policy. He added that passing the public power bill requires addressing concerns from a wide variety of interests including consumers, environmentalists and the business community. “Anybody who knows me knows that you probably should not be trying to bully Kevin Parker,” Parker said in an interview. “This is simply a bunch of overzealous advocates who frankly don’t understand the legislative process.”
Similar sentiments were expressed by Assembly Member Amy Paulin of Westchester, who has accepted thousands in political donations in recent years from companies like Con Edison. Paulin is chair of the Committee on Corporations, Authorities and Commissions where the public power bill has sat in recent weeks. “If they think they are somehow going to pressure me into putting a bill on the agenda, you know those kinds of tactics don’t work,” Paulin said in an interview. “I’m very independent minded.” The bill, however, is currently being reassigned to the Energy Committee chaired by Michael Cusick of Staten Island for technical reasons, according to Paulin. Cusick, who campaign finance records show has taken thousands from companies that benefit from fossil fuels in recent years, could not be reached for comment by publication time.
At this point, chances are that the public power bill and the proposed carbon tax will fall short of the legislative finish line this year. “We are just weeks away from the close of this legislative session, and climate funding legislation languishes in committee,” a spokesperson for NY Renews, a coalition of labor unions and advocacy groups backing the proposed carbon tax, said in a statement. The bill aimed at loosening state rules on the sales of electric vehicles also faces long odds. “If we don’t do it this year, I think you will see a huge push next year,” Assembly Member Patricia Fahy of Albany said in a text. Fahy is sponsoring the bill with state Sen. Todd Kaminsky of Long Island, who did not respond to a request for comment.
The same could be said for the public power bill that has become a new point of contention between the political left and mainstream Democrats. Parker and Assembly Member Robert Carroll of Brooklyn, who is sponsoring the bill in his chamber, say they are still pushing to build support for the public power bill before the official session ends on June 10, but complicated bills take time to get done in Albany. “Rome wasn’t built in a day, and big, difficult legislation takes a while,” Carroll said in an interview. “It’s a big state.” The bill that became the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act was first introduced years before it passed in 2019. A bill to set up a single-payer health care system at the state level has yet to pass despite decades of effort.
Some democratic socialists say that given the impending dangers of climate change, their calls for action on the public power bill are justified no matter the political hubbub that it causes. “We haven’t passed any major climate legislation this session,” said Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani of Queens, who was backed by the city chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America in his 2020 election. “We have to pass this legislation. We have to catch up with what’s actually happening because if we don’t, it’s not even alarmist to say so, but it’s our lives, it’s the lives of everyone on this earth that’s at stake.”
Zach Williamsis senior state politics reporter at City & State.@ZachReports
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On June 4, the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, told Trump advisor Steven Bannon on a public show that had he not been able to block a great deal of mail-in voting in 2020, Biden would have won Texas.
We also learned that Oregon Representative Mike Nearman, who was already in trouble for opening the doors of the Oregon Capitol to anti–coronavirus restriction rioters on December 21, held a meeting beforehand, on December 16, to plot the event. An attendee filmed the talk, which set up “Operation Hall Pass.” That operation ultimately opened the Oregon capitol building to far-right rioters, who endangered the entire legislature. The video, which shows Nearman winking and nodding at setting up the invasion, has raised questions about whether other Republicans worked with insurrectionists in other settings.
Watch Oregon’s @RepNearman tell people, step-by-step, how to breach the Oregon Capitol… with his assistance. Days later, the breach happened. Videos adapted from @Oregonian Story https://oregonlive.com/politics/2021/06/days-before-rep-mike-nearman-helped-protesters-breach-capitol-he-coached-constituents-just-how-hed-help-them-do-it.html…1.3M views1:05 / 2:188:43 PM · Jun 4, 2021·Twitter Web App
