Jeanne Shaheen believes we need a comprehensive approach to energy that addresses both the short-term crushing high prices and our long term energy needs. It’s a national security imperative, an environmental imperative and an economic imperative.

• Refundable Tax Credit for Winter Heating Fuels. Jeanne Shaheen supports an emergency refundable tax credit of up to $2,000 for people who use heating oil, propane, or natural gas as the primary source of energy for heating their primary residence.
  
• Crack down on Wall Street speculation. To lower gas and heating oil prices in the short term, Jeanne Shaheen believes we need to crack down on the rampant Wall Street speculation that is distorting energy markets and driving up the cost of crude oil. Loopholes are enabling billion dollar hedge funds to evade government oversight and speculation limits and to distort oil markets, driving up prices. Speculators are not the airlines, home heating oil dealers, manufacturers and others who actually use oil and trade oil futures as a way of minimizing the effects of price swings on their businesses. Rather, speculators trade oil contracts as a profit-making investment and never take actual delivery of fuel. Experts estimate that closing these speculation loopholes could reduce the price of a barrel of oil by 30 to 50 percent. That’s why the airline industry and home heating oil dealers and others who actually use fuel in their businesses support closing these speculation loopholes.
• Smartly increase domestic production. Jeanne Shaheen wants to smartly increase domestic production of oil in a way that benefits American families and small businesses.
• End subsidies to big oil, make a serious commitment to energy efficiency and alternative energy.  The long term answer to our energy needs and future economic prosperity is energy efficiency and clean alternative energy. The world is on the verge of the most significant economic transformation since the Industrial Revolution.  Millions of new jobs will be created in alternative energy, energy efficiency and environmental remediation.   These jobs will go to the first nations to invest seriously in clean energy.

Jeanne Shaheen wants those jobs, that prosperity, and that economic security to come to New Hampshire. 

Jeanne Shaheen wants to redirect the billions of dollars in tax breaks Washington is giving to the oil companies – they don’t need them, they’re making the largest profits in the history of business – and instead use that money to expand tax credits for energy efficiency and alternative energy like solar, wind and forest byproducts, invest in research and development of new energy technologies, and build a 21st century transmission system.