From Nathan Dombeck

Janesville

To the Editor:

The buzzword around Washington is ‘affordability’. Affordability encompasses much, from the price of groceries to the cost of a new car to the rate on a mortgage for your new home. There is one area of the affordability paradigm that this cognitively backwards Trump administration keeps getting wrong however — the cost of energy.

Keeping our lights on, heating and cooling ourselves, storing our food are absolute basics for our home. Relative niceties like streaming services, the internet, a washer and dryer for our clothes are all staples these days too. These things take electricity or gas to run, and that is increasingly becoming more expensive. It’s simple supply and demand — the power companies have us over a barrel.

The Trump administration could help. They could invest in the cheapest form of electricity out there — renewables — with more solar or wind projects; heck, they could even let some of the wind projects ALREADY in the pipeline on the East Coast come to fruition, rather than cancelling them half-built.

Yet time and time again, Trump’s oil obsession comes to the fore. He took half a billion in donations prior to the election from the oil industry, and they are getting their payoffs — in the form of dropping renewable subsidies, hostile country takeovers to snatch oil reserves, and slashing requirements to curb pollution.

We could help the earth and our wallets at the same time; but the millionaires at the top of the heap have no interest in you, me, or the planet.