The first new legislation of Speaker Kevin McCarthy's Republican Congress — HR1, the Lower Energy Costs Act — is an exorbitantly mislabeled bill. It allows utilities and pipeline companies to build thoroughly unnecessary energy infrastructure, which will be paid for by electricity and gas consumers decades into the future. Despite its name, it will raise energy prices by fast-tracking efforts by oil, gas and coal producers to export an ever-expanding share of U.S. production, a strategy that has already tripled gas prices for American consumers. What this legislation reveals is that McCarthy go to nearly any lengths to allow his extreme-right members sacrifice the public interest to the interests of fossil-fuel producers.
The substance of this bill, to be fair, is entirely consistent with the stance Republicans are taking in every other arena of energy regulation: increase reliance on coal and oil, the most expensive fuels; slow down the production of cheaper energy sources, particularly wind and solar electricity; increase the freedom of fossil fuel producers to set exorbitant prices; allow wasteful and unnecessary investment in pipelines and other forms of oil and gas infrastructure which will soon become useless relics.
