Washington, DC - With summer already scorching the Houston area, the possibility of heat-related deaths is rearing its ugly head again. Rep. Gene Green (D-Texas) has introduced a bill to eliminate the suffering he called “needless.”

“People who live on low or fixed incomes are the ones who die every summer in our country,” Green said. “The travesty is that there is already a source of funding to help people pay utility bills, but it’s not being used effectively. Only three percent of available funding goes to cooling homes in the summer and 74 percent goes to heating homes in the winter. Our bill would fix that.”

Green’s bill, the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) Equity Act of 2007 (H.R. 153), would divide federal money would evenly between homes that need heat in the winter and homes like those in Houston that need cooling in the summer.

“I don’t want to make Minnesotans shiver through the winter, but there are ten times as many people suffering in the Texas summer heat,” Green said. “The system is based partly on archaic 1978 gas prices, and it’s based on politics, not need. It’s fundamentally unbalanced,” he added.

Texas has 10 percent of America’s low-income families, but receives only $10 of LIHEAP funding per low-income person, the lowest amount in the nation. Minnesota, with just one tenth the number of low-income residents, receives more than $160 per person.

According to the National Weather Service, hot weather killed 2,596 people between the years 1985 and 2000, five and-a-half times more than the 462 fatalities caused by cold.

Green said another way to attack the problem is to appropriate more money for LIHEAP. This year he signed letters to Rep. David Obey (D-Wis.), chairman of the Labor, HHS, and Education Appropriations Subcommittee and Rep. John Spratt (D-SC), chairman of the Budget Committee asking them to fund the entire $5.1 billion that was authorized for LIHEAP in the Energy Policy Act of 2005 for fiscal year 2008.

Green has tried other ways to increase funding for heat sensitive states, too. There is a secondary formula used to calculate how much money each state receives. Under this formula, population and income are given greater weight in determining distribution of funds. This would greatly benefit Texas. However, it is only triggered when Congress appropriates $2 billion or more for the program, which has rarely been the case. In 2003, Green introduced an amendment that would have activated the secondary formula whenever Congress appropriated at least $1 billion.