Will
The Obama Administration still hasn’t gotten the message voters sent
The lame duck session and 111th Congress finally ended, without the White House getting key items on its wish list. So now, the Environmental Protection Agency and Interior Department intend to impose costly, job-killing, economy-strangling new rules for power plants and refineries, and implement more land-grabs that will lock up additional millions of acres and more billions of dollars of American energy.
Their goal is to end the hydrocarbon and nuclear era in
EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson claims these actions are needed to ensure “environmental justice” for poor and minority families threatened by “manmade global warming.” Meanwhile, the
Businesses, workers and families face unemployment, injustice, bankruptcy and worse at the hands of their government, if this regulatory power grab continues.
The Congressional Research Service says average
In
All this is before the Feds actually implement more of the job-killing, family-freezing CO2 limits and other plans they are contemplating. To see what’s in store for millions of American businesses and families, one need only look at the planet’s sole country that still obstinately clings to its draconian climate change and renewable energy goals, regardless of the costs.
Across
Moreover, most of
Far worse, more than 5.5 million households will be plunged into “fuel poverty” by early 2011 – forced to spend more than 10% of their family incomes on energy – National Energy Action and other charities said. That’s over one-fifth of all
Nearly 28,000 people died in Britain last winter, most of them pensioners who could not afford adequate heat. Charities say this is the highest winter death rate in northern Europe, worse even than much colder nations like
To stay warm, thousands of elderly are using travel passes to ride buses all day, while others seek refuge in libraries and shopping centers, the Sunday Express noted. Others are “putting their health at risk, in an attempt to keep costs down,” by bundling up and turning the heat down or off entirely, said Age UK Charity Director Michelle Mitchell.
Now, amid the Christmas and New Year holiday, two million homes, schools and hospitals face fuel rationing. Some families could wait weeks before they can get their fuel oil tanks refilled, as more snow falls across
Meanwhile, the British government has cut funding for its Warm Front heating assistance program from $470 million this year to $172 million in 2011, Consumer Focus campaigner Jonathan Stearn angrily noted. And because the winds barely blow during the coldest weather, Britain’s “shiny new green” turbines were able to supply only “one-500th of the exceptionally large demand” for electricity during the frigid weather of early December, Sunday Times columnist Dominic Lawson ruefully observed.
That’s a tiny fraction of the wind turbines’ “rated capacity.” But it is a situation commonly faced with turbines on freezing
Is this what Lisa Jackson would call “environmental justice”? How do her actions, perverse notions of “justice,” and government-driven energy price spikes square with a 2009 poll by Wilson Research Strategies? It found that 56% of blacks think politicians and bureaucrats setting climate change policy in
Northern US winters are far worse than even record-setters in
The outgoing Congress nearly enacted a bill that would have provided much needed congressional checks on EPA actions. The Murkowski bill fell just short in a Senate dominated by partisan Democrats. The incoming Senate should be far more supportive of such legislation, especially in the face of EPA and other attempts to override the will of Congress and the American people.
The Affordable Power Alliance will urge the new Congress to honor its constitutional duties, and prevent the Obama administration from imposing excessive regulations inspired by extreme ideologies. Congress, including Democrats up for reelection in 2012, needs to heed the overwhelming public demand that
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Niger Innis is national spokesman for the Congress of Racial Equality, a 68-year-old human rights organization; Rev. Samuel Rodriguez is president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, America’s largest Hispanic Christian organization, with 25,434 member churches; Amy Frederick is president of 60 Plus, a senior citizens advocacy organization representing over 500,000 seniors nationwide. The three are co-chairs of the Affordable Power Alliance, a humanitarian coalition of civil rights, minority, small business, senior citizen and faith-based organizations that champion access to affordable energy: www.AffordablePowerAlliance.org