House Bill 6 bails out corporate shareholders and undermines Ohio’s clean energy economy. The law contains the most regressive energy policies in the country, providing hundreds of millions of dollars in bailouts for aging coal and nuclear plants, and only heightens the costs and impacts of increasingly chaotic climate change. HB 6 guts Ohio's efficiency and renewable standards which have saved billions of dollars for Ohio's families, business and industry.
Sierra Club supports efforts to put House Bill 6 on the ballot to give Ohioans a say on this deeply flawed and dangerous law. Sierra Club further opposes and is appalled by misleading and xenophobic intimidation tactics targeting legal petition gatherers for the referendum.
Ohio needs an energy agenda that reduces carbon emissions through reliable investments in energy efficiency programs, ramping up wind and solar projects across the state, and investing in communities and workers being left behind by corporate polluters. House Bill 6 should be repealed, and the Ohio legislature must pursue a just transition for workers and communities that have been reliant on coal, nuclear, and gas, not bailouts for corporate shareholders.
Update from Ned Ford: HB 6 Referendum - An Unprecedented Opportunity
As October begins a Referendum is under way on HB 6. If 265,000 valid signatures of registered Ohio voters are collected before October 21st, HB 6 does not go into law, and instead will be on the ballot in November, 2020. The Referendum petition drive is getting a huge amount of attention, mostly because FirstEnergy supporters are covering airwaves and the internet with threatening false advertising and are attempting to harass and disrupt the petitioners.
Neither the Referendum petitioners nor the organized group paying for the ads opposing the petition are identifying themselves, but it is obvious that the petitioners include natural gas industry interests, and the opponents are FirstEnergy Services. Sierra Club is not formally involved in the petition, but for the purpose of overturning HB 6 our objectives are identical to those of the natural gas lobby. We seek to return Ohio law to its current state, and prevent the corruption of Ohio's electricity market.
If the Referendum is successful, all the issues we care about - efficiency, wind and solar, as well as the aging and failing nuclear plants and the least competitive coal plants in the region will be on everyone's minds, sets, screens and conversation for an entire year. And having HB 6 on the ballot will motivate the sort of people we will want voting on all the candidates in the General election.
Because of the controversy the petition process is being tightly managed. We are not able to circulate petitions, at least not at this time. Petitioners can be found at public libraries, Boards of Elections, and large public events in the bigger cities. In some of the larger cities we can get petitioners to events where we know that friendly audiences will be attending. Contact Ned Ford (Ned.Ford@fuse.net) if you have an event with forty or more people that you think would be receptive to the Referendum petition.