Letter: To ignore or account for the costs of pollution?

Two contrasting bills are being considered in Concord this week. One, HB504, is a fossil fuel industry billionaire dream. It claims New Hampshire’s energy policy strives “to promote affordable, reliable and secure energy resources for the health, safety and welfare of its citizens,” but it focuses on “firm resources” like fossil fuels and nuclear. It attempts to ensure “energy independence by removing regulatory barriers to innovation to ensure that the state can procure affordable, reliable and secure energy resources.”

New Hampshire produces neither fossil fuels nor nuclear fuel rods. One wonders how “independent” this approach can make the state. Notably, the bill fails to mention climate change. Like the state’s ten-year energy policy, it ignores the increasing likelihood of federal carbon pricing, a policy every other developed country is already using to reduce climate pollution. The bill assumes that short-sighted market actors know better than energy, environment and climate experts regarding what the future will bring.

The second bill of note, HB278, takes the opposite approach. Based on the expert consensus about climate change and the economics of climate pollution, it considers what other countries are doing that is increasingly likely to affect us. HB278 calls on the state to anticipate a future federal carbon price in procurement decisions to save taxpayers money by avoiding stranded costs from incompletely-informed short-term decision making. Will mainstream science and economics or short-sighted free-market fundamentalism win? That’s up to all of us.

John Gage

Windham