Guest Commentary

By Stephanie Enloe,

stephaniee@cfra.org,

Center for Rural Affairs

What if you could reduce your electric bill while increasing the comfort of your home?  More and more utilities are finding ways to do this, often using “tariffed on-bill financing.”

Tariffed on-bill financing may be a dry term, but programs in this category have exciting benefits for residential electric utility customers. These programs – sometimes billed as “Upgrade to Save” or “Pay as You Save” – can save customers hundreds of dollars annually, enable utilities to provide energy efficiency upgrades, help homeowners build equity in their homes, and create local jobs. You can talk to a utility saving expert to help talk to you on what you need to do to save on your utilities. Using a tariffed on-bill approach, a utility covers the upfront cost of an energy efficiency or distributed generation project for a customer’s home. The customer pays for the upgrade, usually over many years, via a small “tariff,” or fee, on their bill. Because these projects help customers use less energy, programs can be designed so the total cost of each bill is still lower than before they installed the upgrades.

Rural electric cooperatives, which serve 45 million rural Americans nationally, usually are eligible to apply for millions of dollars to finance these programs using the Energy Efficiency Conservation Loan Program (EECLP). This program provides low-interest loans to rural utilities to help customers install energy efficiency or other clean energy projects.

Using EECLP and on-bill financing, rural electric cooperatives are in a position to infuse millions of dollars into the rural communities they serve.

For more On-Bill Financing information contact Stephanie Enloe, at stephaniee@cfra.org.

Established in 1973, the Center for Rural Affairs is a private, non-profit organization working to strengthen small businesses, family farms and ranches, and rural communities through action oriented programs addressing social, economic, and environmental issues.

By Edwin Feulner

Heritage Foundation Founder

Americans still enjoy freedom of religion. But these days, they’re expected to leave their faith in the pew or at home — not allow it to influence their behavior in the public square.

[Read more…] about Getting back to first Principles

By Matthew Wells, President

Science Teachers Association of Texas

Science Department Chair, Cypress Lakes High School

I am reminded of the old West Texas adage, “Please, Lord, one more oil boom and this time I promise not to throw it all away.”

[Read more…] about The Big Squeeze for Texas Education

By Barbara Coombs Lee and Kim Callinan

During a CNN presidential town hall on Feb. 3, an 81-year-old man from Concord, NH, with phase IV colon cancer, Jim Kinhan, asked Hillary Clinton what she could do to “help advance the respectful conversation that is needed around this personal choice that people may make, as we age and deal with health issues or be the caregivers of those people, to help enhance and — their end of life with dignity.”

Jim Kinhan is not alone.

[Read more…] about Reforming our End-of-Life Healthcare System

By Edwin Feulner

Heritage Foundation Founder

President Obama opened the annual Easter Egg Roll at the White House this year by saying it was a bittersweet moment: it would be his last time hosting it.

[Read more…] about Rule by Unelected Bureaucrat

By Tim Brown, Bell County Commissioner, Precinct Two

Anti-government, anti-tax sentiment is all the rage these days.  It has come to dominate political dialogue and, to an increasing extent, policy.

[Read more…] about Arbitrary caps deny local governments flexibility

To the Editor:

Claire Hartman, at the BOA meeting 3/3/16, said it’s easy to stand up before the board and criticize.

[Read more…] about Nothing is easy

By Edwin Feulner

Founder of Heritage Foundation

On the last day of February, the high temperature hit 64 degrees here in Washington. Yet the snow drifts from January’s massive East Coast blizzard were still melting. So what are we to make of the weather and the climate-change controversy? Is it getting warmer or colder?

It’s not even a question worth asking, as far as the analysts at NASA are concerned. Before the blizzard hit, they had already announced that 2015 was the hottest year on record. Not that this is anything new for most Americans. We hear dire global-warming proclamations on a near-daily basis, and it’s always just been the hottest day, week, month or year — no matter what the weather’s like outside.

Yet, as climate expert David Kreutzer recently pointed out, NASA is fairly selective about which information you’re supposed to believe. The agency’s own satellite data shows that while last year was indeed warm, it wasn’t as warm as 2010 or 1998.

But wait, some may say. You can chalk up this discrepancy to the difference between what the satellite data says and what the surface temperatures are (which NASA gathers from thousands of sites worldwide, with a few “adjustments” thrown in). But it doesn’t matter. Neither data set supports the wild predictions being bandied about by global-warming alarmists.

Search all the data for evidence of the accelerated warming projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change, and you come up empty-handed. Sometimes temps go up, but not always. There’s no constant warming. Indeed, the data show a significant moderation of the warming trend. At times it appears to have leveled off or even cooled a bit.

Should we be surprised? Not really. When you throw in variables such as measurement errors, as well as El Niño and La Niña, it makes sense that the average temperature for some years will be higher even if the overall trend is flat.

“Will the trend stay flat? Probably not,” Kreutzer writes. “The Earth has been recovering from the Little Ice Age for a couple of centuries and recovering from a real ice age for thousands of years. So there is a reasonable chance that we will revert to an overall warming trend, but there is no guarantee. Who knows? We might even be headed into another ice age (as was predicted in the 1970s).”

None of this is to say that human-caused CO2 emissions haven’t contributed to some warming. They likely have. But the bottom line is that, one way or the other, there’s no reason to believe that the sky is falling. Or, to be more exact, that the earth beneath it is warming up to levels that should frighten us.

No data points to catastrophic warming, hysterical predications aside. And, it should be noted, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that there have been no upward trends in hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, or droughts.

Small wonder then, that liberal groups who are vested in global-warming alarmism often ignore data that contradict their agenda. They tell us repeatedly that the debate is over, as if there is an expiration date on free speech. Unfortunately, too many in the media comply. Some outlets, such as the Los Angeles Times, won’t even accept letters to the editor that question the gospel of man-made climate change.

Hence we get very selective reporting. “For example, the national media hyped NASA’s finding that 2014 was the hottest year on record,” writes Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas. “Ignored was the footnote that revealed that NASA was only 38 percent certain this was accurate. Less than fifty-fifty. Americans would have been better served by a coin toss.”

There’s a lot of hot air circulating, all right. Fortunately, it’s more political than scientific. Leonardo DeCaprio may have been taken in, but the rest of us can ignore the overheated rhetoric.

Ed Feulner is founder of The Heritage Foundation (www.heritage.org).