New Hampshire has a Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS). The Democrat majority state government pushed it through back when John Lynch was governor. It requires electricity providers to buy a percentage of the power you pay for from more expensive sources. Those costs are then passed on to consumers.
If the state didn’t make them they wouldn’t do it. Given the choice, they’d pay less for power and pass the savings on to job creators and families. Not that Democrats share all the blame.
Given the chance to undo the money laundering scheme known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), more unnecessary green-energy voodoo that makes it cost more to live and work here, the 2011-2012 Republican Super-Majority couldn’t convince moderate Nashua State Senator Gary Lambert to go along with the veto override pulling the plug on the broad-based tax. One vote. Elections matter.
This year the Republican majority legislature managed to scrounge enough support to override a veto of a Biomass bailout bill that will make electricity cost even more. Another mandate that nibbles away at the edges of other business-friendly reforms. One vote. Elections matter.
It wasn’t enough to screw us with RGGI and RPS; they had to add a biomass bailout on top of it. Stephen Moore, writing at the Washington Times, reports on how these mandates, RPS, in particular, are bad for business.
These mandates aren’t just dangerous. They will raise electric power costs sharply. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that residents of states like California and New Jersey with strict renewable mandates pay about 25 percent more in monthly electric utility bills than states that let the marketplace choose.
In states like Texas, however, consumers have the power to choose electricity providers.
Moore continues,
The folks at the Manhattan Institute looked at green energy mandates from 2001 to 2010. They found that of the 10 states with the highest electric power costs, eight of them had renewable mandates — typically of 30 percent to 40 percent.
They’re bad for our “most vulnerable” as well.
New Hampshire has the lowest poverty rate in the nation (again), which is a testament to our good points but not to those who claim to stand for low-income people or the elderly. As Moore notes, the effective cost of these mandates on people with low or fixed incomes is crushing compared to the deep-pocketed groups and individuals who push them.
Low-income households spend at least four to five times more out of their incomes in energy costs than do millionaires. So the burden to Tom Steyer of higher electric costs is a small nuisance. For a family with an income of $40,000 or $50,000, an extra $500 a year in costs means less money for school supplies, day care, a family vacation, or health insurance.
Steyer is worthy of note for New Hampshire because he and his political action arms have dumped a fair share of nuisance money into the state. He spends millions to force these sorts of mandates through state legislatures. The ends results are millions of dollars sucked out of a productive economy annually. A “natural resource” all its own wasted on higher operating costs or from pinching wallets and pocketbooks of families and the working poor.
The free market had done a phenomenal job of making fossil fuel energy cleaner in response to public interest about carbon footprints, regardless of how misplaced the arguments about CO2 function or effect on the environment. When encouraged to do so, energy producers find cleaner solutions faster and more efficiently out of a desire to compete and profit.
But busy-body legislators need something to do. Special interests cry at them from their cribs demanding attention while promising the world will end if they don’t get their way. In exchange for a moment of peace, elected officials give them (or their agenda) a handful of your cash, rewarding them at your expense. Incentivizing the behavior. Fixing the marketplace with crony-government-mandated controls that reward failure and punish innovation.
The message is clear. Forget cheaper, more efficient, more productive, hire lobbyists to milk the golden taxpayer calf.
Elections matter because it’s your money they are spending. And while Republicans are not perfect, the Democrats are promising to raise your taxes, tax job creators, regulate your behavior, and make your cost of living rise. They are running taking our money and wasting it.
Don’t let them.
