Opinion

How Obama’s EPA Is Shutting Down The American Dream For Blacks And Hispanics

REUTERS

Peter Ferrara Contributor
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When Obama was speaking to environmentalist supporters in 2008 regarding his plans to address “climate change,” he candidly revealed, “Under my plan, electricity costs will necessarily skyrocket.” Obama’s White House Science Advisor John Holdren elaborated, “We need to de-develop the United States to bring our economic system into line with the realities of ecology and the global resource situation.” Regulations now starting to pour out of Obama’s EPA are well-designed to do precisely that.

As a new report from the National Black Chamber of Commerce explains, “EPA is proposing new regulations … to reduce CO2 emissions from existing fossil-fueled power plants. [T]he impacts on low-income groups, Blacks, and Hispanics would be especially severe.” The study estimates job losses reaching 7 million for blacks and 12 million for Hispanics, with the poverty rate increasing by more than 23 percent for blacks and 26 percent for Hispanics.

The EPA regulations, the latest known as “The Clean Power Plan,” will ultimately more than double the cost of natural gas and electricity, adding over $1 trillion to family and business energy bills. That will drain funds that could be used for new jobs and pay increases, and end up destroying millions of jobs in companies and businesses that can no longer compete under the higher costs. The rules and their costs will reduce U.S. economic growth every year, causing $2.3 trillion in losses over the next two decades alone.

Ecologist Paul Driessen and his colleague Roger Bezdek explain in a recent commentary that the new EPA regs “will result in higher electricity costs for businesses and families, lost jobs, lower incomes, higher poverty rates, reduced living standards, and diminished health and welfare … . Black and Hispanic household incomes will decline by increasing amounts every year, while their food and healthcare costs will climb significantly.” In other words, blacks and Hispanics would be threatened with a new energy-driven poverty.

Driessen and Bezdek add that EPA’s new rules will force poor and minority families to choose between buying food, putting gas in the car, going to the doctor, buying medicines, giving to their church, saving for retirement, or making mortgage, rent and car payments. Small businesses will have to find thousands more just to keep the heat, lights and air conditioning on, without laying people off or closing their doors. Factories, malls, school districts, hospitals and cities will have to pay millions more for energy.”

Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) sums it all up by saying, “A lot of people on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum are going to die.” African-American author and news analyst Deneen Borelli comments, President Obama “is rewarding his overwhelming support by black voters with an energy policy that will significantly reduce their disposable income.”  She adds that the EPA’s new overregulation is “the green movement’s new Jim Crow.” National Black Chamber of Commerce President Harry Alford calls the EPA’s regulatory overkill “a slap in the face to poor and minority families.”

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a naturally present, trace gas in the atmosphere that is essential to the survival of all life on the planet. It is essential to the process of photosynthesis in plants, which is the foundation of the food chain for all plant and animal life. It is not “pollution.” Without CO2, plants would die, and consequently, so would all animal life, including humans.

Indeed, the only documented actual effect of the increased concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere resulting from the burning of fossil fuels is increased agricultural production worldwide, as increased CO2 causes plants to use water more efficiently, and consequently to grow faster. That is why sharply increased concentrations of CO2 are pumped into actual, real greenhouses. Increased CO2 in the air is literally causing a new greening of the planet.

The authoritative, incorruptible, global atmospheric temperature record produced by U.S. satellites shows there has been no global warming for almost 19 years now. Soon that period of no global warming will be longer than the period of actual global warming, due to natural causes, which lasted only about 20 years, from the late 1970s to the late 1990s.  Before that 20 year period, the global temperature record shows 30 years of global cooling.

Indeed, the latest science indicates based on patterns of sunspot activity that the Earth is approaching a period of sustained global cooling comparable to the Little Ice Age that prevailed for hundreds of years between roughly 1350 to 1850 A.D. The growing published literature on that point worldwide is now starting to be referred to as an emerging “consensus.”

Peter Ferrara is a Senior Fellow for the Heartland Institute, and a Senior Policy Advisor for the National Tax Limitation Foundation.  He served in the White House Office of Policy Development under President Reagan, and as Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States under President George H.W. Bush.  He is the author of Power to the People: The New Road to Freedom and Prosperity for the Poor, Seniors and Those Most In Need of the World’s Best Health Care.