Sneaky ballot measure could give one industry a 'Constitutional Right' to pollute

Over the next three weeks, Colorado voters will get to vote on an amendment to their constitution giving one single industry the ability to largely prevent any regulation of itself or its pollution. Amendment 82 says that the state would establish a “right” for the natural gas industry to sell its products.

It’ll be the only industry in any state to have a state constitutional right assigned to it.

Things like pollution controls to protect air and water that might reduce consumption would violate that right. So would local communities trying to limit or ban gas wells or pipelines. Even during a dry fire time, an effort to ban gas-fueled camp stoves and outdoor grills or lights would be a violation.

The amendment is being pushed by a dark money group called Advance Colorado; the original donors behind it are hidden, but it’s not hard to guess. And if it passes in Colorado, expect similar amendments and laws to pop up in every state in the union.

This is, frankly, nuts. Instead of increasing the power of the fossil fuel industry and encouraging more consumption of their planet-destroying products, we should be helping Americans tap into nuclear fusion power that’s free, compliments of that giant reactor 93 million miles away that we call our Sun.

What reminded me of this is that here in cloudy, rainy Oregon we just started, for the first time since April, to buy electricity from our local grid because 3 years ago we installed solar panels and batteries on our home. The summers are free (which includes charging our Ioniq5 electric car) and in the winter I use a tiny fraction of what we used to buy.

So why, Louise wondered out loud when I told her that we’d just bought $6 worth of electricity this week for the first time in months, hasn’t every home in every city in America — particularly those south of the Mason-Dixon line — done the same?

The answer, of course, is that most people can’t afford the up-front cost of the solar installations. But what if there was a way to solarize most of the houses in a community or even a state that didn’t cost the homeowners a penny and left them with free solar electricity from panels with a 20-40 year lifespan?

It’s actually something that’s ridiculously easy to do, if we can just find politicians willing to defy the fossil fuel and for-profit utility industries.

I first understood how this could work for an entire country back in September of 2009, when I was invited to join German Member of Parliament Hermann Scheer as a keynote speaker at a conference inBarcelona, Spain.

Almost a decade earlier, Scheer had shepherded his “100,000 Rooftops” program through the German Parliament and was eager to talk about how it worked and how it could work in Spain. As he laid out the concept to me over lunch, it was simple and elegant.

You can read the details here and here but this is something that American cities, counties, and states could implement an American variation on right now.

First, you pass a law saying that the local or state government will 100% guarantee/backstop 10-year bank or credit union loans up to $40,000 to install solar power and batteries on any home.

If the homeowner defaults, the government will pick up the loan. Because the risk to the bank becomes zero this way, the law can also mandate that the loans are made in the neighborhood of a 1.5% rate, enough to cover processing costs and give the banks a small but reliable profit.

Second, you require the utility to buy surplus electricity from those panels at a multiple of the current going retail rate for the first ten years while those loans are being paid off.

The goal is for each home to generate enough cash every month, or at least averaged over a year, to cover 100% (or something close to it) of the cost of the loan payments. Depending on local power costs, the abundance of local solar, etc., that could run from 1.5 times retail all the way up to a few times retail.

This way, the utility is paying off the loans so the homeowners incur no costs, and the banks are making a small profit. So far, everybody is happy except, apparently, the utility.

You’d think that the power companies would object to this since they’re the ones paying the premium for electricity for the first ten years, but think of it from their point of view.

Every home that comes online is part of one less power plant, transformer distribution station, or high-tension setup they have to pay to build and/or maintain. (Germany did this to generate enough power to decommission several nuclear power plants.) At the end of a decade they’ll have a reliable source of power that’ll last for many more decades that they can sell to businesses, data centers, apartment buildings, or whomever else wants electricity but isn’t eligible for this program.

For non-profit and community-owned utilities this would be a huge boon. They’d be able to better serve their customers during times the sun isn’t shining, upgrade their existing equipment to a smart grid, and be available to set up other revenue sources like EV charging stations or even data centers.

The picture is a bit dimmer for the for-profit utilities, although even there if the program were rolled out more slowly it could help them by ending the need to build new power plants and deal with the rising costs of fuel. My local power company, Portland General Electric, is for-profit, but they still happily buy electricity from me because that’s less they have to worry about producing.

For-profit utilities, by the way, are only 5 percent of the companies selling electricity in America, although because they’re concentrated in high population areas they serve about two-thirds of Americans.

If this were done nationally, you could even require all electric utilities to be owned and run by nonprofit co-ops or local governments like the other 95% are in America today. It would take some serious political commitment to resist their lobbying pressures, but could be done; Nebraska, for example, hasn’t had a for-profit utility company anywhere in the state for over 80 years.

And under FDR, the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 did this on a regional basis that ended up producing the TVA and the Bonneville dam (now investor owned), which provides much of my region’s electricity.

If we were to revive the 30% federal tax credit (that Trump and the GOP killed with their Big Beautiful Billionaire’s Bill) for installing home solar and batteries that Louise and I used, and states were to add in their tax credits as many (including Oregon) did recently, it would also go a long way toward making such a program more easily possible.

And it would trigger an economic boom for the whole country. We could build solar panel factories, companies that construct the batteries and control systems, and launch a massive construction/installation revival that would hire millions and could last decades.

There are a few bugs and tweaks that would need to be worked out, not the least being the rate utilities pay during that ten-year “pay off the mortgage on the solar installation” period.

But imagine if the entire cities of Phoenix, Atlanta, Mobile, or Los Angeles — and hundreds of others — could run without having to burn an ounce of fossil fuels.

Electrification is exploding around the world. The majority of cars being sold in China and Europe are electric; both have massive, industrial scale wind and solar installations, as well as hundreds of millions of rooftop solar systems right now.

America is the laggard, largely because the fossil fuel industry owns the GOP, thanks in part to five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalizing the bribery and purchase of judges and politicians.