Some 8,000 people die in the UK every year due to what is being called “fuel poverty” or, more simply, when it costs too much to heat your home. Naturally the left is already on the case, staging “die-ins” outside energy companies and demanding that carbon credits be used to make homes “super-energy efficient.”
Left out of the equation is that rising fuel prices can in no small part be attributed to the environmental mania which is at the heart of the movement. It isn’t oil and gas companies that are killing the elderly with high fuel prices. It’s carbon mania and environmentalism. Energy companies are not run by saints, but they don’t have an interest in putting oil and gas prices out of reach of ordinary people. It’s hard to sell home heat to the dead or the destitute. On the other hand environmentalists do indeed have that agenda.
When Obama’s energy secretary communicates that he has no interest in lowering the price of gasoline, instead focusing on energy efficiency and clean energy, he’s following the same inhumane line which has made it so expensive to drive a car or heat a home in Europe.
Talk of using carbon credits for “super-energy efficiency” is an admission that a movement using dead seniors as a prop is actually pushing to make energy use as expensive as possible and to reduce usage as much as possible. The “die-in” crowd isn’t for lowering energy prices — it’s for adding more taxes that will benefit energy efficiency and clean energy experts.
Say what you will about energy companies, but their business plan generally involves getting a product to market. The energy plan on the government side is to make energy more expensive and keep as much of it off the market as possible. The costs of their policies are not just a talking point. They are a grim reality.
The family that has to choose between feeding their children or being able to afford to drive to work or heat their home is not a talking point; they are the new Kulaks, the victims of ideological government policy that has no problem with watching people die so long as it gets its way.
Stalin killed millions to industrialize the Soviet Union. The New Left will kill millions to deindustrialize the West. It’s already doing it. While its activists are trying to peg the blame for fuel poverty fatalities on a government which is badly out of cash, it need look no further than its own activists and celebrities who preach the green life from their mansions.
In a more reasonable world, Lucy Lawless’ drilling publicity stunt would be connected directly to high energy prices. Instead the media cheers her on and denounces the government for not diverting enough carbon credits to its latest scheme. But while they lecture on the menace of global warming, ordinary people are freezing to death.
Clear energy has become the new Communism, an ideological program that can never be achieved, but for which we must all strive no matter how many die all along the way. In Scotland, the perennially deranged Scottish National Party has called for generating 100 percent of the country’s electricity from wind, wave and tidal power by 2020. He may have only left out the fairies. This plan would add 900 pounds to the average fuel bill. Which is how fuel poverty gets started.
Wales, which has the highest fuel poverty rate in the UK, is working on one of Europe’s largest wind farms and has a plan for total clean energy by 2025, if anyone is still alive and hasn’t frozen to death. Wind farms don’t tend to do too well in the cold, and human beings don’t tend to do too well without heat.
The current “green” policies will see higher prices for two out of three homes in the UK by the end of the decade. And while it’s easy to blame energy companies for that, it’s government policies that are responsible, especially when companies and homeowners get saddled with the cost of wind farms and various voodoo measures to fight global warming that mainly end up putting money in the pockets of the well-connected.
Americans complaining about high gas and oil prices can buckle up because what is happening in Europe is only a taste of what is coming this way. Last year UK petrol prices hit 6 pounds per gallon. That’s nearly 10 dollars, though for the imperial gallon, which is greater than the US gallon. If you think it costs a lot to fill up a tank now, consider that the UK has a better ratio of production to population than we do. The high prices aren’t an accident; they’re part of the green program.
The Obama agenda isn’t to make energy prices affordable. It’s to make them so horribly impossible to afford that we’ll use less energy. Fuel poverty is the agenda here and we know that’s so because he told us so.
“We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times and then just expect that other countries are going to say ok,” he said. And, “If somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted. That will also generate billions of dollars that we can invest in solar, wind, biodiesel and other alternative energy approaches.”
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