I'm speaking of incentivizing reducing power usage in the general case, not merely tax credits. The current solution is "let's give wealthy people more money to play with" (to questionable benefit to the general welfare). I should be clear I'm not saying I oppose tax credits for reducing usage; I'm just saying that poor people aren't getting the same kinds of benefits for using less power, even though they
are using less power than the wealthy folks getting kickbacks.
And, again, I don't have ideal answers. But, I think there's a problem with the government consistently serving wealthy folks, even when those folks are living in much larger houses and consuming far more resources. Should a person with a 4000 sq ft house, consuming 5x the power of a lower income family in an 800 sq ft apartment, really be getting paid off to reduce their consumption?
If we're serious about the problem of climate change, energy independence, etc., we have to start looking at the actual numbers. If five low-income families are consuming the same resources as one wealthy family...what needs to change to bring the 5x family's consumption down? Solar incentives are one of the options; but, again, they serve only the wealthy (and, as far as I know, most solar installations do not replace the entire household usage, and only reduce it by 30-50%). That outsized power consumer is costing everyone more in terms of what it will cost to respond to climate change.
The question is why are the wealthy being rewarded when they're still consuming more than their poorer neighbors (well, probably not actually neighbors...the poor folks are on the other side of town due to zoning laws).
And, on another "class war" theme, the poorest people are the ones being hit hardest and soonest by the effects of climate change. The multiple "100 year record-setting flood" events in Austin destroyed poor southeastern neighborhoods twice in the past five years. Those were the lowest cost neighborhoods, and decisions were made by the Army Corps of Engineers to protect more expensive homes, and ignore the risks to the poorer neighborhoods. Lousiana, Florida, the Carolinas, have all had major weather events in the past several years (not all can be proven to be the result of climate change, but the severity and frequency seems clearly on an upward trend) and the impact has been predominantly borne by the poor.
OK...I went off on a bit of tear there. My point is that I feel a certain discomfort at how readily environmental causes are used to strengthen the position of those who are already wealthy and already relatively safe from environmental destruction, while the folks most likely to be impacted are invisible.