THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume X, Issue # 280, October 28, 2008
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
STOP THE WAR ON POOR FAMILIES:
Evironmentalist Anti-Energy Policies Impose
Immoral Burdens on Our Poorest Families
By Niger Innis
BRINGING SANITY & COMPASSION BACK TO U.S. ENERGY POLICIES: THE NEED TO INCREASE U.S. DOMESTIC ENERGY
PRODUCTION & REDUCE ENERGY IMPORTS FROM FOREIGN SOURCES -- THE NEED TO DRILL, MINE, & USE AMERICAN ENERGY
-- THE NEED TO DEFEAT THE ENVIRONMENTALISTS & THEIR ALLIES AMONG THE LIBERAL LEFTIST POLITICIANS & BRING TO
AN END THE ECONOMIC WAR THEY ARE WAGING AGAINST POOR FAMILIES IN THE U.S.A.
FULL STORY:
Liberal politicians and environmentalist activists continue to say we must switch to “green” energy. Oil, gas, coal and
nuclear must go, they insist.
Informed voters support conservation and alternative energy. But they know fossil and nuclear fuels created health and
living standards unprecedented in history.
Over two-thirds of American voters support increased onshore and offshore oil and natural gas drilling. They know world
energy demand is surging, while U.S. domestic production is prohibited and declining. They realize anti-drilling policies
don’t just cause unemployment and cost us trillions in lost lease bonus, royalty and tax revenues.
Those policies also wage an immoral war on poor families. They destroy jobs, erode civil rights gains, and force minority
and elderly households to choose between food, fuel, rent, and medicine.
Since 2006, the cost of driving a 25-mpg car 10,000 miles has risen $600. Heating and air-conditioning costs – and the price
of everything we eat, wear, and do – continue to soar. While higher income families spend a nickel of every dollar on
energy, families at the bottom of our economic scale spend up to half of their incomes on gasoline, heating, and cooling.
This is intolerable and unnecessary. We have centuries’ worth of oil, natural gas, oil shale, coal and uranium, and we can
develop them without harming the environment.
But environmentalist radicals in and out of Congress refuse to let us do so. They want to force us to switch to renewables,
even though there is a yawning chasm between 0.5% of U.S. energy produced by wind and solar power and 93%
produced with hydrocarbon and nuclear power.
The eventual switch to alternative energy is obviously decades away. Meanwhile, we are sending up to $700 billion a year
to Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and other countries, and doing so in the midst of our worst economic crisis in
memory.
People are justifiably angry that U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi refused to allow a debate or vote on ending
congressional drilling bans. The only “energy” bills she supports would open few areas, while adding more taxes,
regulations, lawsuits, delays, price hikes, and renewable-energy mandates and subsidies. They will produce little or no new
energy.
Wind farms with hundreds of gargantuan, unreliable wind turbines have to be located where the wind actually blows,
usually hundreds of miles from cities. That means long transmission lines, often through forests and scenic areas. And that
means opposition, delays and lawsuits from the same environmentalists who “support” wind and oppose power plants that
actually produce abundant, reliable, affordable energy.
It’s increasingly obvious that the only power environmentalist pressure groups and their legislative allies want is power to
control our lives, and curtail energy use and economic growth.
Their latest ploy involves claims that the greatest threat facing minority families is climate change. Not drugs, teen
pregnancy, deadbeat fathers, gangs, murders, frightening dropout rates, AIDS, or skyrocketing energy and food prices.
Climate change!
“Our very health and economic well-being are at stake,” claims the President of the District of Columbia-based Joint Center
for Political and Economic Studies. The Center has teamed up with the Natural Resource Defense Council and other extreme
environmentalist groups to convince minorities that “costly” global warming will have “disproportionate impacts” on
minorities.
Temperatures are higher in cities, they argue, due to the “urban heat island effect,” and air-conditioning use among Black
families is half the rate for white Americans. Therefore, global warming will cause more heat-related deaths among minority
families, they claim.
This attempt to justify anti-energy policies by promoting climate change hysteria is embarrassing nonsense.
The disparity in heat-related deaths has nothing to do with climate change, whether human or natural in origin. It’s due to
the inability of poor families to afford air-conditioning and electricity. The disparity in cold-related deaths is even more
striking, and likewise due to energy affordability.
Lock up our energy, take away fossil fuel and nuclear power, impose cap-and-trade policies – and you drive prices even
higher. You make heat and electricity less affordable. You force more people to depend on unreliable, nonexistent wind
power. You force more to choose between heating and eating. You destroy jobs and trample on civil rights. You cause
more to die.
But radical Greens want to reduce access to the fuels that produce 93% of our energy. They want to increase energy costs.
They call this “energy conservation.” I call it “economic enslavement,” and worse.
Moreover, global temperatures have barely risen for 10 years, even as global CO2 levels soared. Many experts say we are
heading for a period of falling temperatures, because of declining solar intensity. Over 31,000 scientists say there is no
credible evidence that carbon dioxide emissions cause climate change, much less global warming disasters. And China and
India are not about to end their fossil fuel use.
Punishing poor families in the name of speculative climate chaos is insane.
We need to bring sanity and compassion back to our energy policies. Drill, mine, and use American energy. Demand that
politicians and environmentalists end their war on poor families. And vote accordingly.
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
Political Economy -- Philosophies, Systems, & Public Policies:
Government, the Economy, & Economic Prosperity
Political Environmentalism Versus Human Progress & Prosperity:
Policy Issues Relating to Energy, Environment,
& Natural Resources
The Earth's Natural History, Global Climate Changes,
& the Future of Human Life & Civilization on the Planet:
Science, Ideology, & Public Policy
Niger Innis is national spokesman for the Congress of Racial Equality (www.CORE-online.org) and Co-Chairman of the
national “Stop the War on the Poor” campaign (www.StopWarOnPoor.org)
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THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
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Conservative Government Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity