This morning an email from environmentamerica.org alerted me to this issue and I immediately came to Kos to see if it’s received any attention here yet. Not much, it appears.
A New York Times editorial (“The Koch Attack on Solar Energy”) reports on lobbying efforts in state legislatures all over the US to get them to adopt measures that discriminate against green energy in favor of black.
For the last few months, the Kochs and other big polluters have been spending heavily to fight incentives for renewable energy, which have been adopted by most states. They particularly dislike state laws that allow homeowners with solar panels to sell power they don’t need back to electric utilities. So they’ve been pushing legislatures to impose a surtax on this increasingly popular practice, hoping to make installing solar panels on houses less attractive.
I propose a Daily Kos pre-emptive strike against ALEC, big oil, and the Kochs: emails, letters, and phone calls to our governors, state representatives, and state legislative utility/environment/energy committee heads and members.
Oklahoma Kos member mnementh recently posted a diary that shared a letter he sent to his state representatives when they fell for the Koch-ALEC lobbyists.
Don't be a stooge. Support Clean Electricity…today, when we NEED it to be able to turn the tide on pollution and climate change, NOT tomorrow, when you are looking for a new can of whitewash to paint your political career clean again. By then, there will be no clean anything left for anyone.
If mnementh doesn’t mind being plagiarized, we could copy and paste his letter’s last four paragraphs into our messages and tell our state governments not to consider measures like the one Oklahoma adopted and to repeal any such measures that they may have passed already.
According to the New York Times article, the good news is:
Currently, 43 states require utilities to buy excess power generated by consumers with solar arrays.
A pre-emptive strike conducted by a whole slew of Kos members can thank the state legislators who’ve adopted these net metering requirements and demand that they vote down any repeal efforts. As for the states who haven’t adopted such measures, we must demand that they do so. We must tell our representatives in all fifty states to send the billionaires packing when they come around looking for their handouts.
If ALEC and the Kochs aren't already lobbying your state's legislators on this issue, count on them to be there soon. Don't wait for them; preempt them.
The Times article concludes:
This campaign is really about the profits of Koch Carbon and the utilities, which to its organizers is much more important than clean air and the consequences of climate change.