California cities banned natural gas in new buildings. Texas wants to outlaw those bans.
Texas lawmakers are quickly moving a bill forward that attempts to stop cities from banning natural gas as a fuel source for new construction and utility services — a trend in progressive California cities that some state lawmakers say would restrict consumer choices if Texas cities move to do the same.
At least a dozen similar bills have been filed in states including Kansas, Minnesota and Ohio. But in Texas, the bill has been pushed as a response to the power outages caused by last month’s winter storm.
Now labeled a priority for lawmakers, House Bill 17 would bar cities and municipalities from banning, limiting, restricting or “discriminating” against the type or source of energy used for utility connections. It was included in a slate of bills that the Texas House State Affairs Committee quickly voted out of committee Thursday that are intended to address the storm-related power outages, which left more than 4.8 million people without electricity and killed dozens of people in Texas.
The bill was first filed in January as House Bill 1282. It’s sponsor, state Rep. Joe Deshotel, D-Beaumont, said the legislation is a response to “what is happening on the West coast” where cities have passed energy efficiency plans that prohibit new subdivisions from offering natural gas heating, requiring instead that new homes be heated by electricity.
Analysis: Not all emergencies are priorities in the Texas Capitol.
In 2019 and 2020, 110 people were killed in mass shootings in Texas and another 266 were injured, according to the Gun Violence Archive, an online database of incidents of gun violence.
There were two substantiated cases of election fraud in Texas during those two years, according to the Heritage Foundation’s database of election fraud cases.
Guess which topic state leaders consider to be an emergency?
The latest additions to the appalling, steady stream of mass shootings in America came in the last few days — in three Atlanta-area massage parlors, where eight were killed last week, including six Asian women, and then in a grocery store in Boulder, Colorado, where 10 were killed on Monday.
Those out-of-state shootings reignited a familiar set of arguments about gun violence in a state where new limits on gun ownership and possession are unlikely.
It’s not that lawmakers aren’t thinking about weaponry: In the current session, they’ve filed 22 bills that contain the word “firearm” and 45 bills — there’s some overlap — containing the word “gun.” They run the gamut: regulating sales at gun shows, prohibiting people from carrying guns while intoxicated, allowing unlicensed carry of guns, creating an annual sales tax holiday for gun sales and more. Many of those are up for consideration on Thursday in the House Homeland Security and Public Safety Committee.
