To: The Dallas Morning News Viewpoints section
Date: August 7, 2008
Subject: Energy bills in Dallas
Result: censored
Your article on energy costs on Wednesday speaks of people having to pay electric bills in the range of $400 to $700 to cool their homes in this hot summer, for houses up to 2500 square feet. A picture of a sample bill showed the amount of $681.38 – which was $400 more than my bill for July in my 1550-square-foot house, where I live and work, and the air conditioner is on all the time.
Seeing that picture made me curious about some of the larger electric bills that people pay in the Dallas area, such as in the thousands of "McMansions", which I guess are in the 5000-7000 square foot range. Plus there are many houses larger than that. Two in particular that have impressed me lately with their tremendous size have been, first, a castle-like edifice in a very prominent Preston Hollow location, and another one of similar magnitude and prominence in Highland Park, or maybe University Park. They both have to be 30,000+ square feet*, and have electric bills in the several thousands of dollars, I would imagine.
As I suggested previously, in my censored Letter to the Editor dated October 3, 2006 – which can be seen on my censored web site, radicalview.com – if people want and feel they need to live in such magnificent splendor, that's one thing. But they should figure as part of the cost, which they obviously can afford, to pay a hefty surcharge for the privilege of using all the energy that it requires.
In the Tuesday edition before the article referenced above, you wrote about the growing number of cars in China, and spoke of the rule that anybody whose car does not get at least 35 miles per gallon must pay supplemental taxes totaling up to 20 percent of the cost of the car. Good idea. I said something very similar back in that same censored Letter to the Editor I mentioned. It has as its basis the idea that there is a fair amount of energy that people ought to be able to use, based on a reasonable and attainable standard, and that if people want more than that, they should be willing to pay a substantial premium for the privilege – with a graduated rate, the more they use. And if they can't afford that, then they can't afford their large, energy-devouring house or gas-guzzling vehicle. I'm sure there are plenty of problems and needs that could benefit from the extra revenue that would come from this, including helping poor people pay for their electricity.
Of course, yes, I realize, there's a problem with my plan to make people pay a fair price for their extravagant use of energy, due to the size of their homes. That is, all those huge houses have already been built, under the assumption of cheap and unlimited energy. If the taxes I recommend had been in place all along, many or most of those houses would have never been built, because the market of people able to afford them would have been greatly reduced. To go back now, after the fact, and say everybody who bought those houses has to start paying fair compensation for the privilege of using the amount of energy they do, many or most of the home-owners would no longer be able to afford to live in their houses – which many probably could barely afford in the first place. Then there wouldn't be nearly enough people who would be able to buy them. So now you've got that much more to add to the housing crisis we already have.
All I know, first, is that people should pay their fair share for the energy they use, and it should be more if they use a lot more. And, second, we should not be building any more of those houses that use so much energy.
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* it's hard to tell the size of the Preston Hollow home since they've managed to keep their property off the tax roll