Media Brief Themes - Energy Policies

A common theme we discussed was energy policy, which featured articles from varying institutions including the federal government, state governments, local governments, nonprofits, private companies, public utilities, school districts, and many more. Articles focused heavily on energy policy targeted at pandemic relief, although we discussed Biden’s infrastructure bill, and some non-energy related policies as well. Something we quickly picked up on is how many institutions made sudden and rapid shifts in their policies. An example of this is Comcast significantly increasing the amount of customers who qualified for their internet essentials program or shut off moratorium. Numerous times, we discussed how these sudden changes in policies caused inadvertent harm to people, such as the moratoriums not giving people shut off notices which are required to receive certain forms of assistance. This aided our work by giving us a better sense of how institutions which can both aleve and increase levels of energy vulnerability function and their deficiencies, thus allowing us to make specific and targeted calls to action.