News analysis
As President Joe Biden issues an executive order for all federal agencies to pursue what he calls “climate justice” and simultaneously advances regulations to force Americans to transition to wind and solar energy and electric vehicles (EVs), critics say that these same policies also foster child labor in Africa, feature enormous wealth transfers from the poor to the rich, and will bring “energy poverty” to many Americans.
On April 21, Biden
declared that “the new Executive Order makes clear that the pursuit of environmental justice is a duty of all executive branch agencies and should be incorporated into their missions.” This, he said, will ensure that “all people – regardless of race, background, income, ability, Tribal affiliation, or zip code – can benefit from the vital safeguards enshrined in our nation’s foundational environmental and civil rights laws.”
Human rights advocates, however, say that the mining of essential minerals for wind turbines, solar panels, and EV batteries promotes abusive labor practices and environmental devastation in places where minerals for renewables are mined. And because the administration’s costly energy transition continues to drive up the cost of fuel and electricity, the poor will likely bear the brunt of basic energy needs becoming increasingly unaffordable, economists say.
“There’s this tremendous con going on right now,” Steve Milloy, Senior Policy Fellow at the Energy and Environmental Legal Institute, told The Epoch Times. “Poor people are going to suffer.”
During
congressional testimony on April 20, Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.) charged Interior Secretary Deb Haaland with holding up permits on new oil and coal development and asked her whether she “believed energy poverty is a good thing—in other words, that people going into poverty are being unable to afford food or medicine or things like that because of the rising cost of energy.”
Haaland responded: “We are working very hard to make energy more efficient and more affordable, which is why we’re moving forward on our clean energy goals.”
“But that isn’t the case. Coal is an affordable energy, isn’t it? It has been for decades,” Hageman said, later adding, “Energy poverty is a policy of this administration, from what I can tell from your answers.”
In 2022, the average retail price of electricity
increased by more than 14 percent, twice the rate of inflation. Electric heating is projected to increase a further 10 percent this coming winter.
In addition, the
National Energy Assistance Directors Association reported that more than 20 million American families, or one in six, are behind on their utility bills, and their indebtedness has increased to keep up with rising costs. In total, these families owed $16.1 billion in August 2022, up from $8.1 billion in December 2019.
The Expanding Authority of the EPA
The EPA has recently taken a leading role in imposing this energy transition on Americans by setting emissions regulations that effectively force utilities to switch from fossil fuels to wind and solar, and force automakers to switch from internal combustion engines to EVs. This week, the EPA is expected to announce new CO2 emissions standards for electric utilities, including requiring the 3,400 coal and gas-fired plants in the United States to cut or capture all CO2 emissions by 2040.
