The grim irony of the pursuit of “green” energy is that it may be placing millions of people in poor countries at risk of living much shorter, unhealthier lives due to air pollution.
To the world’s poor, electricity (including air conditioning), modern highways, quality medical care, and so much more of the good things first world people take for granted are routinely denied them out of concern for the environment (sic), or rather the elites’ insistence that they rule over the poor with a paternalistic (slavemaster) hand. CFACT Senior Policy Advisor Paul Driessen calls the actions of these elites “callous, immoral, eco-imperialistic, and genocidal.” As newly elected Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte says, “They think they can dictate our destiny,” but we will not submit to their rule.
“There is a regressive nature to some of these things,” Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom said at a conference on green energy Friday. “We have to be sensitive to issues relating to energy costs.”
Cambridge University electrical engineering professor Dr. M.J. Kelly concluded in a peer-reviewed journal article that attempts to fight global warming with green energy will impoverish the world.
The radical Green push for colleges and universities to divest themselves from investment in fossil fuel companies is misguided, immoral, lethal, and, yes, racist. While Western civilization has seen an 11-fold increase in wealth, a doubling of lifespans, and health and prosperity unprecedented in human history, nearly 1.5 billion still live without the benefits of modern technology. While China (which will ignore the bigots) has linked nearly its entire population to the power grid, over 300 million in India and more than twice that number in sub-Saharan Africa lack even the simplest of modern amenities that electric power and motorized transportation afford. CFACT Senior Policy Advisor Paul Driessen asks, “What right do divestment activists and climate change alarmists have to deny Earth’s most destitute people access to electricity and motor fuels, jobs, and better lives?”
Many environmentalists want to stop the burning of coal for electricity. But a new report from the International Energy Agency says this abundant resource is critical for lifting people out of poverty.
Shellenberger and Nordhous state: “In the name of democracy it now offers the global poor not what they want—cheap electricity—but more of what they don’t want, namely intermittent and expensive power” which “offers the poor no path to the kinds of high-energy lifestyles Western environmentalists take for granted…. In the name of democracy it now offers the global poor not what they want—cheap electricity—but more of what they don’t want, namely intermittent and expensive power” which “offers the poor no path to the kinds of high-energy lifestyles Western environmentalists take for granted.”
The EPA claims that ethanol, a fuel made from corn, has only a minimal impact on food prices. But Sam Kazman, general counsel for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, disagrees. . .
When you think about the effects of global warming hysteria, you might think of higher electricity prices, not people being thrown off their land and having their homes burned down. . .
A campaign is growing to pressure food companies and consumers into boycotting palm oil because of its alleged environmental impacts. But according to a new report by the non-profit group, World Growth, palm oil is a highly efficient source of food and fuel, and is a good way to produce fossil fuel alternatives and capture carbon from the atmosphere.
If you want to learn what farmers think (and need), talk to African farmers – not to bureaucrats, environmental activists or politicos at the Rio+20 United Nations summit in Rio de Janeiro. You’ll get very different, far more honest and thoughtful perspectives.
Dr. Kelvin Kemm, a South African nuclear physicist and CFACT advisor, explains on Kenyan TV that Africans need to greatly increase the availability of affordable electricity and do not need Europeans telling them “No.”
Freedom 21, of which CFACT was a co-founding organization, is a coalition of groups that came together, quite literally, in the waning days of the last century, to build a domestic and international movement that could promote freedom as the guiding principle for the 21st Century and beyond.
