Arlington Heights Daily Herald. June 11, 2024.
Editorial: Keep politics to a minimum in clean-power transition
Nicor is still gaining far more natural gas customers than it is losing to electrification, but it’s important that stakeholders are preparing for a future when that will not be the case. Daily Herald file photo
Nicor lost 38 customers last year who disconnected natural gas service and replaced it with all-electric service. The gas company added 11,000 new customers. It’s clear that even if it can be seen as a “legacy business” with a limited future, natural gas is not going anywhere soon.
But given the push toward electric power as a clean-environment strategy, it’s easy to see why planners are beginning already to envision the impact of declining reliance on natural gas. And it’s encouraging to note they’re opening the process to a wide range of influences.
This is the philosophy behind a new Illinois Commerce Commission initiative called the “Future of Gas.” The ICC began the inquiry in March and, as our climate writer Jenny Whidden described in a report Sunday, held the first of two series of workshops in April gathering issues that will need to be addressed. The second will be scheduled later to study solutions and strategies, even as the commission works with utilities and other stakeholders toward identifying future needed infrastructure investments by July 1, 2025.
One important goal of the process is to try to minimize the influence of politics on the policymaking. As we’ve seen in recent years with alarmist predictions of costly bans on gas appliances, the topic is ripe for controversy, especially in today’s fraught political environment.
Can policymakers really overcome that atmosphere to deal with questions about the impact on households of converting to all- or mostly electric power? The costs of expanding the electricity grid to handle dramatically increased demand? The capabilities making natural gas production and use more environment friendly? Ways to make sure that the likely increased costs facing natural gas consumers aren’t concentrated on the users least able to make conversions to electricity?
That’s a big ask. But a worthy goal.
“My hope is, rather than people going to the legislature and lobbying and trying to convince legislators what to do, that we rely on the commission’s expertise and that we let the commission come up with the best plan possible for this transition,” said Robert Kelter, a senior attorney with the Environmental Law and Policy Center in Chicago. “Because there is no perfect solution to these problems. There’s too many variables there. It’s very difficult, but it definitely can be done.”
Let’s hope so. Nearly eight in 10 households in Illinois rely on natural gas for heat, and the state has more than a tenth of the entire nation’s total capacity for storing the fuel underground. This is not a purely academic inquiry.
“We’re at this tipping point in the way much of the world is viewing a lot of these different legacy technologies and where we’re going,” said Illinois Commerce Commission Executive Director Jonathan Feipel. “We’ve been doing this model of electric and gas for the last 100 years, and it seems like we’re at a review of, ‘Are we doing the best approach? Are we providing Illinois citizens with utility service at its most effective, most affordable, least cost, (most) reliable and safe? Are we truly doing that?’ We call it the Future of Gas, but really it’s the future of utility service.”
Authorities say more than 800 people and interests are taking part in the process. They include the utilities, of course, but also community representatives, environmental advocates and state and federal agencies. The customer data may not yet suggest an urgency to their task, but the climate science certainly does. Realistically, the implications of that science cannot escape political factors, but the more that stakeholders can cooperate in finding solutions and easing the pathways to them the less the political influences will matter.
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Chicago Sun-Times. June 13, 2024.
Editorial: Spike in out-of-state abortion patients is a reason to keep abortion rights in mind this November
Planned Parenthood of Illinois clinics are seeing more patients traveling from dozens of other states, including the South. Abortion restrictions only make it more onerous, risky, and expensive for patients who need abortion care.
If you haven’t seen them already, take a look at the latest numbers from Planned Parenthood of Illinois on abortions: Since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, the organization’s clinics in Illinois have experienced a 47% increase in the number of patients seeking abortion care.
Nearly a quarter of patients traveled from 41 different states over the last two years, many from neighboring Wisconsin, which has banned abortions after 21 weeks and 6 days; and Indiana, where abortions are now completely banned. In the downstate Carbondale clinic, 90% of patients seeking abortions came from 16 states, many in the south, such as Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi, Arkansas and elsewhere.
Other states where abortion remains legal are also now experiencing a huge influx of thousands of out-of-state patients, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which gathers abortion data. Nationwide, one in five patients seeking an abortion are forced to travel out-of-state.
The data is no surprise, and it’s “devastating” for women to be forced to travel for abortion care, as Planned Parenthood of Illinois President Jennifer Welch told Sun-Times reporter Kaitlin Washburn. It all reinforces this board’s strong view that lawmakers have no business interfering with health care decisions that belong solely between a patient and her doctor.
That’s not just our take; it’s the majority view in this country, since polls have repeatedly shown that most Americans believe abortion should remain legal in all or most cases.
We hope women, and other voters, remember that come November. Lingering anger over the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe two years ago this month, in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, has cemented abortion as a 2024 campaign issue, especially among suburban women in swing states, as a Wall Street Journal poll showed.
It ought to be clear by now that outlawing or severely restricting abortion doesn’t put a stop to it; it only makes it more onerous and expensive for women who need abortion care.
The court could take another big step backwards on reproductive rights in the coming weeks in a case challenging access to mifepristone, one of two drugs used in the most common regimen of medication abortion, which now make up 63% of all abortions in the U.S., up from about half before Roe was overturned.
The court’s decision, expected later this month, involves two cases that are related to the FDA’s approval of mifepristone in 2000. A ruling in favor of those challenging the FDA’s approval would, as the legal website scotusblog.com explains, severely limit access to abortion even in states where it remains legal otherwise.
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Chicago Tribune. June 13, 2024.
Editorial: Judge rightly halts state Democrats’ cynical bid to cement supermajorities
Show a little humility, Illinois Democrats
For Democrats in Illinois, the overwhelming political power they enjoy never seems to be enough.
A judge on June 5 invalidated a hastily enacted state law pushed through on a partisan vote that would have booted 17 Republicans from the ballot in November for state legislative seats. Democrats said the law, signed in early May by Gov. J.B. Pritzker, was a bid to prevent “back-room deals” when slating candidates and ensure primary voters have a say in who is representing their political party. The measure would have barred party leaders in various districts from appointing a candidate in the general election if no candidate from their party had run in the primary.
There’s a reasonable debate to be had on this subject. But Democrats made their true motivations obvious by making the law effective for the upcoming election, which at the time Pritzker signed the bill was just six months away. Republicans cried foul and claimed, rightly, that Democrats were changing the rules in the middle of the game to protect their supermajorities.
Most of the GOP candidates to whom Sangamon County Circuit Judge Gail Noll’s ruling applies have little chance of defeating Democratic incumbents. The law in practical terms appeared to be an effort to protect one of the few downstate Democratic lawmakers, state Rep. Katie Stuart of Edwardsville, from facing an opponent. Republicans have a chance of winning in that district, which has posted reasonably decent numbers for GOP candidates in the past.
This law, legally shaky from the outset, says plenty about the state of both parties in the Land of Lincoln. On the Democratic side, going to such lengths to help a single legislator when the party’s gerrymandered state of play already has yielded majorities so large as to be unhealthy for the state’s governance is a bad look. There is no partisan monopoly on good policy ideas, and a Republican Party essentially shut out of policymaking means there’s little check on the worst impulses of the Democratic Party.
That said, the GOP is unquestionably in a dismal state in Illinois and badly needs rejuvenation. The corrosive effect of Donald Trump has plenty to do with this situation, as Republicans in this lamentable MAGA era too frequently battle each other rather than taking the fight to Democrats. If they wish to vie for seats in blue parts of the state, Republicans should reasonably be expected to field primary candidates.
But, as Judge Noll wrote, that requirement shouldn’t be foisted on either party well into an election season. If ethics and good government really were what this law was about, Democrats could have made it effective beginning in the 2026 election cycle. “Changing the rules relating to ballot access in the midst of an election cycle removes certainty from the election process and is not necessary to achieve the legislation’s proffered goal,” Noll wrote in her opinion.
Republicans followed the rules as they existed when the current cycle began and shouldn’t be prevented now from fielding candidates. That’s an anti-democratic move, frankly, from a party that claims to be a staunch defender of the democratic process.
Here’s the bigger picture. We’d like to see Prairie State Democrats show a little more humility. Illinois is a blue state, yes, but well over 40% of this state’s residents are Republicans. We get that politics is a contact sport, but that’s an awfully large chunk of the population to ignore.
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