Liberal politicians and environmental activists continue to say we must transform our economy to “green” energy. Our future is in wind and solar, they insist. Oil, gas, coal and nuclear must go.
Informed citizens vigorously disagree. They 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 drilling. They know world energy demand is surging, while US production continues to fall. They realize anti-drilling policies don’t just cause unemployment and cost us billions 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 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, gas, oil shale, coal and uranium – and we can develop them without harming the environment.
But environmental 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 US 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 oil-rich oligarchs in Russia, Iran, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia.
It’s increasingly obvious that the only power environmentalist pressure groups and their legislative allies want is power to control our lives, and curtail our 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.
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 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.
We need to bring sanity and compassion back to our energy policies. Drill, mine and use American energy. And demand that Speaker Pelosi, Senator Harry Reid and radical environmentalists end their war on poor families.
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)
corechicago.wordpress.com 
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