Ever overhear liberals, even in the Church, claim that fighting climate change is necessary to protect the poor? Experts say this assertion is a myth and the exact opposite is actually true.
Fighting climate change will hurt poor people the most, a panel of energy and business experts explained during an event at The Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 21. Entitled “How Climate Policy Hurts the Poor,” the event centered on how the Obama administration’s climate agenda will disproportionately harm low-income families and minorities, the very people whom officials often say they are trying to protect from the effects of climate change.
Even Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Gina McCarthy openly conceded this point. “We know that low-income minority communities would be hardest hit,” McCarthy admitted in August.
In an equally incriminating statement during his 2008 campaign, President Barack Obama confessed that “electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket” under his plan to “bankrupt” carbon-emitting coal power plants. Such a move would impact low-income families the most, since they spend a larger portion of their income on energy.
The United States could slide in the direction of European countries like Germany, where “portions of the population are actually reverting to what are pre-Industrial conditions,” according to Texas Public Policy Foundation Senior Fellow Kathleen Hartnett White. Because the government there has attempted to replace fossil fuels with renewables, energy prices in Germany have increased to three times more than in the U.S., causing as many as 800,000 households to disconnect from the electrical grid.
America may be headed toward similar conditions. White said that unelected government bureaucrats at the EPA were “perilously close” to radically changing the “energy dynamics” of the U.S. through implementing invasive regulations under the Clean Power Plan proposed by Obama.
Such policies ostensibly meant to fight global warming would not only drive up the price of electricity, but the price of virtually everything. Hispanic Leadership Fund President Mario Lopez said the proposed Clean Power Plan would cost consumers an additional $565 billion per year for energy, and increase prices for “normal everyday things,” ranging from clothing to soap to toothpaste. It would also cause “massive job losses,” increase poverty by 25 percent, and lead to 14,000 premature deaths.
“These are real people we’re talking about here,” Lopez said. “The EPA, and I think the Obama administration sometimes, forgets that unfortunately.”
National Black Chamber of Commerce President Harry Alford went beyond attributing the administration’s actions to forgetfulness, saying that targeting the poor was no accident.
“It’s not inadvertent; it’s by design. It’s sinister,” Alford said. He explained that these proposed regulations expanded the “poverty industrial complex” that began with President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. This phenomenon lines the pockets of “fat cats” with billions of dollars and funnels power to leaders who claim they are the “champions” of the poor, according to Alford.
Although invasive energy regulations may enrich a few politically well-connected individuals, it would devastate the U.S. economy. Cornwall Alliance Spokesman Dr. E. Calvin Beisner said carbon fuel usage closely parallels both material wealth and human health. Cutting carbon emissions to 1990 levels would reduce GDP by 40 percent, and cutting carbon emissions to 1970 levels would reduce GDP by two-thirds.
“If we value human material well-being, we want to see GDP per capita rising,” Beisner said. “And it does so only as hyper-carbon fuel use also rises.”
Lifting the poor out of poverty is a worthy goal, and a mission Christ called the Church to pursue. But when it comes to regulations that will supposedly counter global warming by diminishing fossil fuel use, even liberals like Obama and McCarthy confess that the poor, especially low-income minorities, will suffer. And according to the experts, fossil fuels have actually increased wealth around the world and diminished poverty rather than precipitating global apocalypse.
Christians with a heart to serve the poor therefore ought to take the claims by so-called “champions” of the needy with a grain of salt. It’s worth pondering where the real threat actually lies: with global warming or politicians and crony capitalists who claim to be working on behalf of the poor.
Comment by Neil Bragg on September 23, 2015 at 2:15 pm
The environmental policies of the European Union have already created what is called “energy poverty,” with thousands of people, mostly the elderly, dying in the heat of summer of the cold of winter because the EU’s policies have made heating and air conditioning unaffordable – the
Obamessiah wants to impose those same policies on the US. Isn’t that just like a leftist – in the name of “saving the planet” (as if that were possible) let thousands of people die from hypothermia.
This isn’t conservative propaganda, btw, it’s been widely reported in the left-leaning media in Europe. You won’t hear the left-leaning media in the US talk about it, for obvious reasons.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/high-costs-and-errors-of-german-transition-to-renewable-energy-a-920288.html