For far too many people paying for necessities like food, clothing and shelter is already a continual challenge, let alone paying the monthly electricity bill.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) found the bottom fifth of U.S. households spent a budget-crushing 22 percent of their after-tax income on residential utility bills and gasoline in April 2016. That’s a far higher percentage than the 6 percent economic scenarios suggest is “affordable” for household budgets.
Groundswell, a renewable energy advocacy group, said in a recent report that the bottom 20 percent of earners typically spend nearly 10 percent of their income solely on electricity, more than seven times what the top fifth pay.
The same report revealed that more than half of those households lived at or below the federal poverty level, and per the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, approximately 23 million people required some sort of federal assistance to help pay for electricity or home heating in 2011.
Families and businesses in Massachusetts, Connecticut and California, meanwhile, pay over 60 percent more than the national average for their electricity – all because their states don’t have the infrastructure capacity to deliver low-cost energy to their communities.
These Americans, working hard to stretch every dollar, are an important component of the never-ending energy debate. Yet, rarely, if ever, are they mentioned.
They should be acknowledged, not forgotten.
We all know about the vast economic benefits local energy can bring to a community – tax relief, more energy self-sufficiency, personal security, increased business spending and new jobs. And we also know that pipelines are the safest way to transport energy. Moving oil and gas by pipeline is 4.5 times safer than moving the same volume across the same distance by other means, and over 99.999 percent of what’s moved through pipelines safely reaches its destination.
But perhaps the best thing about energy infrastructure is what it can do for your bills.
The more we support local energy development, and the more we sway policymakers to approve much-needed infrastructure projects, the more low-cost energy we can bring to market, which in turn will lower all our utility bills and help alleviate the difficulties of paying them off, especially for those struggling.
That’s because price spikes in energy act as a regressive tax for cash-strapped families, seniors living on fixed incomes and households with incomes below the poverty level. And unlike other necessities – like housing, food and health care – these households often cannot shop elsewhere for cheaper energy, and local and federal governments regularly do not have the resources to assist. We should be creating more ways to deliver affordable energy up front, not creating safety nets once people can’t afford it.
But unless we allow more investment in our energy infrastructure, that can’t happen.
Instead, rejecting pipeline proposals would reduce energy security benefits and U.S. geopolitical leverage by increasing America’s reliance on imported energy, increasing costs on those who can least afford it. The cost of virtually every U.S.-made good and service would also go up, since oil and natural gas help make just about every item we use daily, including the clothes we wear, the shampoo we use, the medication we take, and the food we eat. If the price of one key ingredient in the manufacturing or delivery of those products goes up, so does its price tag.
An increase in energy prices, via any of these methods, means that the tens of millions who already pay far more than they should just to keep the lights on fall further behind – and unfortunately, further out of a debate that affects them most.
David Holt is president of Consumer Energy Alliance. If you would like to write an op-ed for the Washington Examiner, please read our guidelines on submissions.
