Posted on 02/27/2018 5:54:55 AM PST by Kaslin
This has been a colder-than-usual winter in the Midwest and Northeast, so many Americans are facing high home heating and electric bills. In some areas, these bills can reach $1,000 a month.
Liberals, of course, charge that Donald Trump is the culprit. An AP story last week screamed: "Trump Once Again Wants to Cut Energy Assistance to the Poor." Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders charged that if Trump has his way and eliminates the Low Income Heating Assistance Program, people might "freeze to death."
But wait. Donald Trump is pro-American energy development. He isn't the one who is making energy bills more expensive in the Northeast and the mountain states. It's the liberal green groups and politicians such as Bernie Sanders, who accede to their anti-fossil fuel demands.
In my book Fueling Freedom, my co-author Kathleen Hartnett White and I discovered that the shale gas revolution lowered the price of natural gas by about two-thirds (from $10 to $3 per million cubic feet). This, in turn, has meant big savings in electricity and home heating costs from where they were a decade ago. We calculated the benefits to poor households from these lower prices and estimated that shale gas results in $10 billion in consumer savings each year. The annual budget for the LIHEAP program is about $3 billion. So shale gas is saving poor families three times what LIHEAP does.
Yet the left-wing politicians who say how shameful it is to cut energy assistance are the ones who want America to stop producing shale gas by banning fracking and other modern drilling technologies that make natural gas so cheap.
Cheap natural gas from fracking also benefits millions more poor families than does LIHEAP. The government estimates that about 6 million poor families receive LIHEAP each year. But there are at least 10 million low-income families in America. Cheap natural gas lowers costs for all families, while federal assistance only benefits the ones who sign up for government handouts.
If the goal is to provide cheap energy for low-income Americans, fracking is many times more effective than LIHEAP.
The story doesn't end there. Home heating and electric bills would be much cheaper still for poor families without the so-called renewable-energy standards pushed by greens and liberal politicians at the state and local levels. The Manhattan Institute has found that states with these wind and solar mandates have had much larger hikes in utility costs than states without them. New York, which is revving up its green energy policies, charges its residents 40 percent more for electric power than the national average.
I'm still not done. Professor Bernard Weinstein of Southern Methodist University has examined why utility prices have spiked so much in the Northeast: "New England and New York are using imported liquefied natural gas (LNG), which is much more expensive than domestic gas, to satisfy nearly 20 percent of their heating and electric power needs," Weinstein found. "Some of this imported gas has come from Russia, despite current international sanctions."
Imported natural gas? How can a nation with massive deposits of very cheap natural gas -- such as the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania and West Virginia -- be importing natural gas?
One reason is that we don't have pipelines to inexpensively transport the natural gas to the Northeast. Environmentalists who hate oil and gas have spent years blocking this vital infrastructure -- not just the Keystone Pipeline but also many other pipelines that should be transporting shale oil and gas efficiently across the country. It doesn't seem to bother the green groups that the biggest victims of anti-fossil fuel policies are low- and middle-income Americans. Never has.
Environmentalism is effectively a regressive tax on America's poorest households, imposed upon them by liberal politicians and the rich liberals who fund them, such as Democratic donor-extraordinaire Tom Steyer.
Amazing, isn't it, that this same crowd turns around and attacks Trump for forcing poor people to pay more for energy. If you have sticker shock when you pay your energy bill this month, at least you now know whom to thank -- and it ain't Donald Trump.
These lefties will never learn. Like the big fella on the radio said you have to defeat the.m. Squish them like a bug. Trump’s the man.
It aggravates me no end that the feds subsidize home heating oil for the “poor” in the Northeast. These “poor” on average make significantly more than the average Oklahoman who end up subsidizing the dirtiest source of heating there is. In the summer, we pay our own cooling bills.
The feds should stop it immediately and let the market work like it should. Pipelines would soon be wanted by Northeast citizens, heating costs would plummet and the air would be cleaner.
The heating oil companies definitely don’t want natural gas pipelines..
What’s going on here in the Phoenix area is pretty interesting. The electric company here (APS) has been getting all this great press in news stories in the local paper as well on the radio for lowering their rates. They say it’s because of the Trump tax cuts which are lowering their tax rates so they are passing some savings to us customers.
What is NOT being reported is at the same time, APS has discontinued their cheapest plan options. Actually they stopped offering these to new customers years ago, but if you had one of those plans you could stay on it. I’ve been on it for over 20 years.
Last week they sent out a letter saying they are forcing those of us remaining on those plans to switch to a new plan. I called them and went over the options, and best the rep and I could figure, my bill will probably go up by 20-50% under the new plan.
So while the new plans might have lower rates than they had in the past, so people who have been on them before might notice a decrease in their bills, people like me (and I bet most people left on these old plans ARE like me - retired, on a fixed income, because like I said, they haven’t been offered for many years so only us oldsters could have gotten into the older plans before they were closed to new customers), well, we’re going to see significant increases in our bills.
As you can imagine, in this area of the country it’s not heating in the winter that’s the biggest issue, but it’s the a/c in the summer. Of course during the summer under the new plan the rates are WAY higher than the old plan, and even higher than the winter rates under this new plan.
I plan on doing a lot of sweating in the summer from now on, I guess.
It may be economical as some Texas families have found, to get a camper and head to WI or MN during the summer, just as people from those states come to the Rio Grande Valley to spend the winter. They are the “Snowbirds,” so there should be a cute name for those escaping heat in the summer….”Cool Cats”?
BFLR
No, but close
That and also a way to pay for the state gov’t pensions by adding multiple fees to your bill.
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