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Viewpoints from the Publisher's View

CareApril Issue, 2009, Potrero View

By Steve J. Moss

Californians spend upwards of a billion dollars each year to subsidize electricity and natural gas customers. Under the California Alternative Rates for Energy, or CARE, program, low-income households are gifted a 20 percent reduction on their energy bills.

CARE provides needed relief to millions of Californians, who, even with the discount, are hard-pressed to pay for food, rent, and utilities. But in an era in which we desperately need to reduce our energy use – to lower associated costs and polluting air and greenhouse gas emissions – subsidizing energy use has the odd effect of encouraging environmentally damaging demand. In our neighborhood that demand is chiefly met by the aging Potrero Power Plant, whose emissions may contribute to Bayview-Hunters Point’s higher than average asthma rates.

Low-income families tend to rely on older, less efficient appliances, including energy hogging refrigerators. In some cases heating systems are so bad – and insulation nonexistent – that ancient stoves are used to warm homes. As a result, much of the CARE subsidy is eaten-up by inefficient appliances that better off Californians would simply replace as a way to reduce their utility bills.

No doubt we should help our poorer neighbors pay for steadily rising energy costs. But there’s a better way to do that than rate subsidies. We should take the billion we spend each year and invest it directly in low-income homes. Energy efficient appliances, lighting, and weatherization would lower these households’ bills while making them more comfortable. And, if we look to these same families to conduct energy audits, and deliver or install energy efficiency appliances and lighting, thousands of green collar jobs would be created.

We need to squeeze more productivity out of our resources. A good way to start would be to create more productive public policies. If we really cared, we’d do more than just give low-income families a hand-out to help them solve their problem. We’d give them an opportunity to help us solve the problems all of us face.