As Congressional energy bills make energy (and transportation) progressively more expensive, it’s worth recalling that it was cars (and carpooling) that made Martin Luther King’s Montgomery bus boycott viable. For many black people in Montgomery, that was the only transportation alternative to the segregated buses that demeaned them. Technological and economic progress was key to breaking down entrenched segregation in the Deep South.
In today’s Washington Times, Niger Innis, head of the Congress of Racial Equality, points to the continuing importance of the economic progress made possible by cheap energy, and how Congressional policies that thwart energy production have contributed to spiraling energy costs that disproportionately harm minorities and the poor. As a result of ethanol mandates and subsidies, he notes, “Food prices soar and millions starve” in the Third World (a catastrophe chronicled earlier by African Energy News). Meanwhile, Congress has ”locked up” areas where oil drilling could “safely” occur, such “the Outer Continental Shelf” and ”Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,” cutting domestic oil supply by ”20 billion gallons of gasoline annually” and driving up energy prices at the expense of consumers and workers who are laid-off from their jobs.
Without “abundant, reliable, affordable energy,” he writes, ”hope, opportunity, progress, job creation and civil rights are hobbled. Laws and policies that restrict access to America’s abundant energy drive up the price of fuel and electricity. They cause widespread layoffs and leave workers and families struggling to survive, as the cost of everything they eat, drive, wear and do spirals higher. They roll back the progress for which civil rights revolutionaries like the Rev. Martin Luther King struggled and died.”
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Bravo to Niger Innis for having the courage to stand against the environmentalists that want us to commit economic suicide.
Make no mistake about it, these jokers want mankind reduced to a bare subsistence level of existence. They are now the greatest threat to civilization we face.
Whenever I read commentators who refer to policies that “disproportionately harm minorities and the poor” I wonder how it is so many apparently intelligent people believe that Tiger Woods and Oprah Winfrey are being harmed to a greater degree than the majority of Americans. After all, they are “minorities.” If one really means only to refer to “minorities” who are poor, then wouldn’t the term “poor” by itself suffice since it has the virtue of encompassing all people who are poor?
Come to think of it, the title of the Innis article and its entire premise is absurd. The government’s destructive energy policies are not a conspiracy to discriminate against blacks, nor do blacks or “minorities” need energy more than whites or suffer from unnecessary restrictions on energy use and production any more than whites.
One *could* make the case that since blacks disproportionately live in urban areas that are well-served by public transportation while whites disproportionately live in suburban and rural areas that require them to commute longer distances, that whites are disproportionately hurt by rising energy costs. But that too would be an absurd argument to put forth against U.S. energy policy, even if there were a grain of truth to it, because race has nothing to do with the state of our overarching energy policy.
I worked with Niger Innis and his father. The true reason Congress of Racial Equality speaks of hardship to minorities and defend the destruction of everyone’s planet (…â€locked up …the Outer Continental Shelf and Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge… energy prices at the expense of consumers and workers who are laid-off from their jobs”), is because Exxon gives them huge amounts of money to keep their office afloat and pockets full.
http://www.exxonsecrets.org/html/orgfactsheet.php?id=111