[Congressional Bills 117th Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
[H. Res. 457 Introduced in House (IH)]
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117th CONGRESS
1st Session
H. RES. 457
Expressing that the United States must establish electricity as a basic
human right and public good, 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.
_______________________________________________________________________
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
June 4, 2021
Ms. Bush (for herself, Mr. Bowman, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, Ms. Tlaib, Ms.
Newman, Mr. Jones, Ms. Pressley, Ms. Omar, and Mr. Grijalva) submitted
the following resolution; which was referred to the Committee on Energy
and Commerce
_______________________________________________________________________
RESOLUTION
Expressing that the United States must establish electricity as a basic
human right and public good, 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.
Whereas scientists globally have determined that the human-caused climate
emergency is bringing widespread harms, including deadly heat waves and
drought, severe flooding and storm events, threats to public health and
safety, limited and inconsistent water and energy access, and rampant
biodiversity loss;
Whereas energy, water, broadband, and other utilities are basic needs for
survival and good health and should be publicly owned and accessible to
all;
Whereas the current energy system reflects historically entrenched, structural
racism, whereby Black, Brown, Indigenous, and other communities of color
face disproportionately high energy burdens, the threat of and actual
disconnection from service, and local air and water pollution from
fossil fuel energy generation;
Whereas, one-third of people in the United States struggle annually to pay their
electricity bills, with Black, Brown, Indigenous, and people of color
hit the hardest of 25,000,000 households that have had to forgo food or
medicine to pay utilities bills, 7,000,000 said they had to make that
decision every month;
Whereas pollution from gas infrastructure, often owned by the private energy
industry, has increased the risk of cancer for 1,000,000 Black
Americans, and Black communities have 1.54 times the exposure to
particulate matter compared to the overall American population;
Whereas the status quo energy system threatens to bring the planet past climate
tipping points that cannot be reversed, which threaten more catastrophic
impacts;
Whereas to mitigate the climate emergency and maintain a chance of meeting the
1.5 degree Celsius global warming target, United States greenhouse gas
emissions must decline to zero by 2030;
Whereas the United States is the world's largest historic emitter of greenhouse
gas pollution, responsible for approximately 25 percent of cumulative
carbon dioxide emissions since 1870;
Whereas the electricity sector, along with the building and transportation
sectors, is the leading source of United States greenhouse gas
emissions, and with the transition off gas and petroleum products, there
will be a substantial need to expand electrification;
Whereas scientists have highlighted the importance of immediately halting all
new fossil fuel infrastructure projects in the United States to meet 1.5
degree Celsius targets;
Whereas major investor-owned utilities are not on track to meet national
decarbonization goals and currently rely heavily on fossil fuels;
Whereas the utilities crisis in Texas in 2021, grid failures in California,
annual Atlantic hurricanes, Midwest heat waves, and West Coast wildfires
act as potent examples of the failures of an investor-owned and heavily
marketized system to ensure reliability and resilience to climate
catastrophes;
Whereas renewable energy resources, particularly solar plus- storage,
microgrids, and other distributed sources provide climate and economic
resilience benefits to communities;
Whereas investor-owned utilities and the State utility commissions tasked to
regulate them are failing to meet their collective mandates to serve the
public interest and provide customers with just and reasonable
electricity rates;
Whereas in 2020 nearly 4,800,000 low-income households in the United States live
in a state of energy insecurity in which they were unable to afford
their energy bill;
Whereas there is a fundamental conflict when shareholder gains determine the
prices and accessibility of fundamental public goods;
Whereas there are limited avenues for legitimate public participation,
transparency, and community wealth-building from existing investor-owned
utility business models and regulations;
Whereas private monopolies and market-centric models have proven incapable of
managing the transition to renewable energy at the pace and scale
necessary to address the climate crisis, and without intention to repair
harms of the fossil fueled system to Black, indigenous, people of color,
and low-wealth communities;
Whereas investor-owned utilities, fossil fuel energy companies, and their
industry associations fund and coordinate obstruction of renewable
energy policies and programs, including rooftop and community solar
requirements and incentives;
Whereas many investor-owned utilities have a history of abusing relationships
with legislators and regulators and promoting disinformation to maintain
the status quo fossil fuel system and protect profits;
Whereas investor-owned utilities and fossil fuel energy companies valuations are
based evaluating fossil fuel infrastructure over time frames
incompatible with planetary survival;
Whereas some existing public and cooperative utilities have serious yet
resolvable issues related to governance, regulation, legacy debt, and
climate impacts that must be acknowledged and overcome to develop an
effective and 100-percent renewable public utility system; and
Whereas truly public ownership of utilities would allow for improved oversight,
accountability, high-road labor standards, and public participation in
renewable energy procurement and deployment: Now, therefore, be it
Resolved, That it is the sense of the House of Representatives
that--
(1) the United States must establish electricity as a basic
human right and public good, 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, and it must reimagine
its power system to be just, equitable, antiracist, and
climate- and disaster-resilient through establishing a publicly
and community-owned power system, which should include
principles such as--
(A) public accountability over the system's energy
choices and funding for community-led program design;
(B) a commitment to 100-percent renewable energy
for newly established systems and prompt transition to
100-percent renewable energy by no later than 2030 for
existing public and cooperative power systems;
(C) equitable and transparent planning systems that
include robust public involvement and are based in the
public interest, with particular attention to repairing
legacies of harm and pollution in environmental justice
communities;
(D) wide-scale deployment of weatherization and
energy efficiency technologies to reduce energy
consumption, boost resilience of poorly insulated
homes, and fight energy poverty, prioritizing
communities of color and low-wealth communities first;
(E) energy affordability to address egregious
energy burdens and energy poverty that
disproportionately penalize rural communities and
communities of color; and
(F) a guarantee that the public power system
infrastructure and installed technologies are built
with unionized labor and in a manner that upholds Buy
America and Buy Clean standards, pays prevailing wages,
honors project labor agreements, uses Department of
Labor-registered apprenticeship programs, adheres to
local and equitable hiring standards, and maintains
high environmental standards;
(2) in pursuit of the above principles, the House of
Representatives should strive to--
(A) transition away from investor-owned utilities
and marketized energy systems that have collectively
failed to meet climate and justice requirements, by
acquiring them through the Federal Government and
transitioning them to State, local, Tribal, or other
appropriate scales of public ownership or alternatively
transitioning them to community or cooperative
ownership with the support of public dollars, and
expand public investment and support for retraining and
relocation to ensure comparable qualities of life and
prevailing wages for communities and workers currently
dependent on the fossil fuel industry;
(B) create an advisory body to assess options and
plans for consistency with the principles and
objectives outlined in this resolution;
(C) establish participation by worker
representatives from relevant industries,
representatives of affected communities, technical
experts, advocacy groups, and others as appropriate, in
order to ensure that concrete technologies, ownership
structures, and administrative and contractual
arrangements are consistent with the objectives
articulated above;
(D) assert Federal control and ownership over the
transmission and associated grid assets and make
substantial investments in the grid's resilience,
health, weatherization, and capacity to allow for wide-
scale distributed energy resources to come online;
(E) allocate Federal grants, loans, loan
guarantees, and other financial instruments to
municipal utilities and rural electric cooperatives to
replace existing and planned fossil fuel infrastructure
with distributed, cooperative renewable energy and
these grants should be used to buy out stranded fossil
fuel assets in exchange for these utilities to deploy
100-percent clean, renewable energy generation by 2030,
the process which should include transparency
mechanisms to ensure payments are reasonable in
subtracting cleanup and other costs from the value of
infrastructure, and federally fund State, local, and
Tribal government procurement of new renewable
generation and transmission infrastructure;
(F) require all Federal public power providers,
including the Tennessee Valley Authority and power
marketing agencies, to evaluate current procedural
justice concerns to redefine a gold standard for
accountable public and renewable power utilities'
active accountability and participation, and to act as
catalysts for the widespread development of climate-
resilient renewable energy generation, in which
significant investments are made to ramp up solar and
storage microgrids, which can be achieved through--
(i) a 100-percent clean and renewable
energy portfolio by 2030 at the latest, with a
significant carveout for distributed solar and
storage resources, and an immediate phaseout of
fossil power;
(ii) robust accountability and transparency
mechanisms to ensure a just and equitable
transition and accountable management;
(iii) an accountable Board for the
Tennessee Valley Authority and systems of input
for power marketing agencies under the
Department of Energy that allow for
transparency and public participation to help
ensure just and equitable power choices and
outcomes;
(iv) strict requirements to remediate
pollution from leaks and spills and clean up
existing fossil fuel infrastructure; and
(v) prioritization of union jobs with high-
road labor standards that pay prevailing wages;
(G) facilitate the development of community owned
and controlled clean energy resources by directing--
(i) expansion of distributed energy
resources, including community and rooftop
solar, microgrid technology, and storage, to
boost climate and disaster resilience and
ecological protection and restoration,
prioritizing such systems for communities of
color and low-wealth communities first;
(ii) investment, including grants, loans,
and other financial instruments, and technical
support into community owned and controlled
renewable generation resources such as rooftop
and community solar and storage as well as
efficiency measures, including weatherization;
(iii) additional direct investments,
grants, and reparations to Black and Indigenous
communities whose land was stolen, to support
efforts, as determined by communities, for
building out community-controlled renewable
energy infrastructure (generation and
distribution) in rural and disinvested
communities; and
(iv) complete electrification and enhanced
efficiency of residential, commercial, and
industrial energy systems while taking explicit
steps toward ensuring racial, environmental,
and economic justice in the process;
(H) empower energy democracy by expanding
engagement with the energy system toward building
collective power;
(I) create a Federal energy democracy screening
tool that creates a process for identifying and
characterizing community energy problems and responding
with climate justice energy solutions;
(J) create transparent and equitable systems for
public participation and cultivate processes for
community governance over energy production,
distribution, and procurement decisions;
(K) create Federal guidelines and incentives that
enable communities and workers to have the power to
hold public, cooperative, and investor-owned utilities
accountable;
(L) enact a universal ban on disconnections of
electricity for nonpayment and enforce progressive
residential electricity rate regulations, including a
cap on energy burdens and energy debt for low-wealth
households; and
(M) create Federal programs for reusing, recycling,
and equitable and proper disposal of parts of panels,
batteries, turbines, and other components at the end of
life to prevent furthering environmental injustice,
pollution, waste, or international waste.
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