Title: 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.
Policy area: Energy

Summary:
This resolution expresses the sense of the House of Representatives that the United States must establish (1) electricity as a basic human right; and (2) a publicly- and community-owned power system that is just, equitable, antiracist, and resilient to climate changes and disasters.

[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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