Camden, New Jersey, in a file photo. Experts say that 'climate justice' policies will result in higher energy costs for Americans and transfer wealth from the poor to wealthy. (Getty Images)
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.
Previously, a landmark 2022 decision by the Supreme Court, West Virginia v. EPA, ruled that the EPA, as an unelected bureaucracy, lacked the authority to force utilities to switch to wind and solar energy. This appeared to check the EPA’s ability to set energy policy for the United States. However, the Inflation Reduction Act, signed by Biden just two months after the Supreme Court decision, explicitly gave the EPA that authority.
Together with its new rules regarding electric utilities, the EPA’s new auto emission standards are an effort to force automakers to shift production toward EVs. The regulations measure emissions only at the vehicle tailpipe and ignore pollution from mineral mining, the construction of the vehicles, or the electricity generation that powers them.
The average cost of a new EV is over $60,000, which is more than 30 percent above the average cost of an internal combustion engine vehicle. This means that the $7,500 government incentive to buy an EV is likely a gift to the wealthy.
In addition, the EPA’s new rules compel carmakers that continue to make gasoline-fueled cars to buy emissions-offset credits from EV manufacturers. This will be another wealth transfer, driving up the cost of more affordable cars to subsidize more expensive EVs. Over the past three years, Tesla has reportedly received $4.8 billion from internal combustion engine auto manufacturers under this system.
Miners carry sacks of ore at the Shabara artisanal cobalt mine near Kolwezi, Congo, on Oct. 12, 2022. Demand for the metal is exploding due to its use in the rechargeable batteries that power mobile phones and electric cars. (Junior Kannah/AFP via Getty Images)
“When I was a poor teenager and college student, I could only afford a cheap car, but that cheap car made a big difference to me,” Milloy said. “Now, if cars are all electric, and they’re all expensive, how’s that going to work? You’re pricing people out of the market, you’re tying people to wherever there’s a charging station. The whole thing is going to lead to a decline in our standard of living and our freedoms.”
Ironically, places like California, which plan to ban the sale of gas-powered cars while contemplating payments of billions in racial reparations to compensate for historical discrimination, are promoting EVs that are made with exploitive and abusive labor practices today in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
A February report by NPR titled “How ’modern-day slavery' in the Congo powers the rechargeable battery economy,” featured an interview with Harvard professor Siddharth Kara, who researched cobalt mining in the DRC for his book, “Cobalt Red.”
In order to mine cobalt, an essential material for EV batteries, “people are working in subhuman, grinding, degrading conditions,” Kara said. “They use pickaxes, shovels, stretches of rebar to hack and scrounge at the earth in trenches and pits and tunnels to gather cobalt and feed it up the formal supply chain.
“Cobalt is toxic to touch and breathe, and there are hundreds of thousands of poor Congolese people touching and breathing it day in and day out,” Kara said. “Young mothers with babies strapped to their backs, all breathing in this toxic cobalt dust.”
To give a sense of the scope of strip mining required for Biden’s energy transition, energy economist Mark Mills writes that in order to make one average EV battery, 250 tons of earth must be moved and 50 tons of extracted minerals must be shipped for refining, typically in China with coal-fired plants. Every step of the “clean energy” supply chain requires extensive use of fossil fuels.
Americans may at some point become fed up with the punishing costs of fuel and transportation for what appears to be a dubious environmental benefit, but some are skeptical.
“I always used to think that there would be a limit to what people would take,” Milloy said. “But then COVID hit, and I saw how people just collapsed and basically took whatever the government ordered. Most people just took it, and they will take it again.”
Kevin Stocklin is a business reporter, film producer and former Wall Street banker. He wrote and produced "We All Fall Down: The American Mortgage Crisis," a 2008 documentary on the collapse of the mortgage finance system. His most recent documentary is "The Shadow State," an investigation of the ESG industry.
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