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The Age of Missing Information
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Energy and Poverty
Posted Jul 29, 2008 by Richard Heinberg
An article today in the Financial Post, Oil Sands Get Nod from U.S. Anti-Poverty Group, underscores the need for more energy education. The article presents the views of a newly-formed “anti-poverty coalition led by African-American civil rights and faith leaders.”
According to the FP, “The group is waging a national campaign targeting 50 ‘extreme’ environmental organizations and 100 U.S. politicians it says are restricting energy supplies through climate-change legislation, causing oil prices to spike to levels that are ‘strangling’ the poor.” According to the coalition, all energy is good energy, because it enables economic growth, and lowers energy prices for poor people.
Climate and depletion experts need to talk to these folks—and soon! They must be helped to understand that poor people will be the most immediate victims of climate change. And that the shift away from fossil fuels is not optional in any case: the price increases in oil, gas, coal, and electricity that we are seeing are NOT due to climate regulations, but to depletion and decline.
Poor people must prepare themselves for life after fossil fuels. But who is talking to them? Climate and Peak Oil experts chatter to each other on Internet forums peopled mostly by white, middle-aged, middle-to-upper-income managerial types. Unless this communication gap is addressed soon, the fossil fuel-promoting dinosaurs, who want to maintain business as usual even if it means societal and ecological collapse, will have powerful new allies.
Get The End of Growth http://www.postcarbon.org/eog | Watch the animation Who Killed Economic Growth? http://bit.ly/whokilledgrowth
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