Following publication of his highly successful book, Energy Keepers, Energy Killers, Roy Innis and the Congress of Racial Equality launched a nationwide campaign to fight to affordable energy for all Americans.
CORE's affordable energy campaign is predicated on this core truth that Roy Innis spells out in his book and in speeches now around the globe:
High energy prices, caused by misguided government policies that restrict supply, disproporationately harm low-income Americans and prevent them from fully exercizing their civil rights.
As Roy Innis has said, affordable energy is the civil rights issue of our time.
To better understand the philosophical underpinnings of CORE's affordable energy campaign, please read the following speech that Roy Innis gave to national conference in 2008.
Access to Affordable and Efficient Energy: An Indispensable But Neglected Civil Right
Address By Roy Innis
March 03, 2008
Like African Americans, other minorities were ill-treated and denied their basic civil rights. Thankfully, our laws have changed. While there is still antagonism and discrimination among groups in America, it is far less prevalent, and it is no longer blatantly legal or consciously sanctioned by government. Today in the social and political arena opportunities abound. African Americans have achieved some success in virtually every walk of life. Other minorities have also climbed the ladder of success in this great nation of ours.
But today we face unprecedented new challenges to our civil rights. These rights are not the usual well publicized ones like those specifically covered by the 1964 (Public Accommodation) and 1965 (Voting Rights) Civil Rights Acts. They are the indispensable but neglected ones implied by the Declaration of Independence—“That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Among the most insidious and daunting challenges to these civil rights are laws and policies governing energy and the environment. These laws and policies as presently structured create an unnecessary conflict to the interest and desires of minority Americans for affordable energy and their desire for a clean livable environment.
Energy is the master resource of modern society. It transforms constitutionally protected rights into civil rights that we actually enjoy: jobs, homes, transportation, healthcare, modern living standards, and other earmarks of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. With abundant, reliable, affordable energy, much is possible. Without it, hope, opportunity and progress are hobbled. Laws and policies that restrict access to America’s abundant energy drive up the price of energy and consumer goods. They cause widespread layoffs, leaving unemployed workers and families struggling to survive, as the cost of everything they eat, drive, wear and do spirals out of control. They could roll back some of the civil rights progress that civil rights revolutionaries and Dr. King struggled and died for.
Energy and environmental policies should not be pitted against each other unnecessarily. We should avoid either or situations. We should seek compromise to resolve potential conflicts, and we must be clear and honest on how the burden of the compromise will be shared in society. These considerations are missing from present day environmental laws and policies. Minority groups bear the brunt of the cost of compromise between environmental and energy needs. Environmental extremists are the driving force behind energy and environmental policies. Yet few of them bear the resultant burden of those policies. For them it is an exercise to achieve ideological goals and to satisfy selfish esoteric passions. Ironically many of the originators of the environmentalist movement were trained in the civil rights movement. Most of their leaders studied our tactics and strategies. Above all, they understand the power of the most important weapon that was used in our liberation: the tenacious hold on the moral high ground from which we appealed to the moral conscience of the American people. But there is a fundamental difference in the use of this hallow instrument of liberation and its use by the environmentalists. The environmentalists use this instrument to deny access to available energy. The civil rights movement’s tenacious hold on the moral high ground was real and palpable. The environmentalists’ claim to the moral high ground is not; it is often illusory, immersed in hubris and dependent on pseudo science.
Extreme environmentalist sponsored laws and policies prey upon the good intentions of the general public. These policies turn endangered species, land use and zoning regulations into obstacles to home ownership. They threaten to keep minorities impoverished and laboring at menial jobs, deny them a seat at the energy lunch counter, and send them to the back of the economic bus. That is wrong. We must begin here and now to stand up for energy and economic civil rights.
Earlier in this statement I spoke glowingly about progress made minorities because of the successes of the civil rights movement in the social and political arena. Progress cannot be heralded to the same extent in the economic sector. One area in particular where minority economic progress has been stunted is in the energy resource development. This is because so many injustices are perpetrated in the name of protecting the environment in discussions about energy.
But today I want to focus on one critical issue that could usher in a whole new era of civil rights violations. I want to talk about global warming – or as environmental activists prefer to call it these days, catastrophic global climate change. I have no doubt that our planet has warmed a little over the past hundred years. As most people know, it has been warming and cooling at various intervals throughout our Earth’s history. I don’t even doubt that humans probably played a role in some of this recent warming. However, if these facts are not properly analyzed, climate change laws could trample our implicit but indispensable civil rights that are dependent on abundant and available energy.
However, there is a huge difference between slight or moderate warming – some of it maybe due to fossil fuel use – and the notion that we humans are causing a global cataclysm of biblical proportions, that will be upon us a century from now, if we don’t repent and change our ways. I know there are a lot of good, decent people who truly believe this. But I also know there are hundreds of scientists and other experts – many of them here with us today – who vigorously disagree. And I know there is an army of well-financed activists, scientists, bureaucrats and politicians who are pounding on the Climate Armageddon theme … linking every weather event and unfortunate tragedy to fossil fuel use … and vilifying anyone who dares to question their assertions. I am not going to delve deeply into their motives – other than to say that money, power, control, and an unhealthy sense of their own infallibility are involved.
These environmental alarmists also display a distressing level of callous disregard for the consequences of their actions. We have seen it throughout the Third World – with their opposition to using DDT to prevent malaria … to biotechnology to reduce malnutrition and starvation … and to electricity generation, to build modern societies and end deadly lung and intestinal diseases. Millions have died – and these activists still will budge, or even apologize. We are seeing the same ideological attitudes here – the same disregard for civil and human rights.
America and Congress properly rejected the Kyoto Protocol. But environmental activists went into overdrive, to pound home their unrelenting message that fossil fuels are sending Planet Earth into climate chaos that will exterminate species, flood coastal cities, and cause droughts, storms, diseases and a seemingly endless stream of unnatural disasters. There is no real, replicable evidence for any of this, but Congress responded with over a dozen bills that sponsors insist will stabilize our unstable climate, prevent catastrophe – and somehow transform the United States into an economic powerhouse fueled by wind, solar and bio energy. It’s pure fantasy.
Worse, every one of these bills would give activists, courts and bureaucrats control over virtually every aspect of our lives – and any activity that produces greenhouse gases: heating, cooling, transportation and manufacturing … bakeries, dry cleaners, hotels, office and apartment buildings … cement plants and dairy farms. Every one of these bills injects high-tax, anti-energy arsenic into a weakened economy that is already on the verge of a recession – and that Congress claims to be stimulating with paltry pump-priming initiatives. Every one would force Americans to stop using fossil fuels – and switch to pricey so-called alternatives like wind and solar power. They would make coal, oil and gas deposits off limits – or price and regulate them out of the picture. Wind, solar and bio fuels do have their virtues. However, the Energy Reality is powerful and unavoidable: Over half of our electricity comes from coal. Oil, natural gas, nuclear, hydroelectric and geothermal power generates another 47% of our electricity. Wind and solar sources provide only 1% of our electricity. Ethanol is an expensive, land intensive drop in the bucket. In fact, they are not alternatives at all. They are at best supplements, and will remain so for many years to come. If we foolishly turn to them as alternatives now, we will find they are illusory. We will blindly push ourselves into soaring prices and a disastrous Energy Gap, from which many families will never recover. Wind and solar are also unreliable – and their energy costs more per kilowatt hour – leaving families with less money for food, housing, transportation and healthcare. These turbines kill raptors and other birds.
Every one of these climate bills would make reliable, affordable energy a distant memory – even with an all-out program to build more nuclear power plants, which many greens and legislators say will happen over their dead bodies. All would force industry to spend trillions of dollars to capture, pipeline and store carbon dioxide. The higher energy costs these bills would bring are an enormous extra tax that would force companies to lay off workers – or simply close their doors. When energy costs go up, jobs, incomes and tax revenues vanish. Government social programs wither – including low income energy assistance. Meanwhile, those same activists, politicians, courts and regulators are locking up more and more of our oil, gas and coal resources. One of the worst examples is the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska (ANWR). If geologists are right, America could get nearly 20 billion gallons of gasoline a year from less than 2,000 acres in that area. But we have made it off limits.
ANWR could produce three times more fuel than all the ethanol we generated in 2007 from corn fields the size of Indiana. We could get all that fuel out of a tiny fraction of ANWR’s frozen, windswept coastal plain – out of an area that is one-twentieth the size of Washington, DC. But we refuse to do so. What are we thinking? Have we let rhetoric, environmental extremism and politically correct ideologies replace science, economics, common sense and our responsibilities to this great nation – especially its poorest citizens, who will bear the brunt of these policies? American consumers paid $140 billion more in 2006 for gas and electricity than they did in 2000. That’s an extra $1900 a year for every family of four. Just weeks ago, Congress passed … and President Bush signed … a make-believe energy bill that doesn’t foster the production of a single drop of oil, whiff of natural gas or kilowatt of new coal or nuclear power. It just expands the energy gap we already have. It raises energy prices even higher. And it means every barrel of oil we save … every kilowatt we conserve … is offset by more energy that we lock up and refuse to produce right here in these United States.
As a result, every year we are sending over 400 billion of our hard-earned dollars overseas, to buy oil from countries that dislike us, and use a lot of it to sponsor hatred and terrorism. And we are doing so because of exaggerated threats to our climate and environment. We are closing off access to vast quantities of energy that belongs to all Americans – not just to vocal activists, and citizens who have been intimidated and bamboozled into believing all the environmental and climate change hysteria. We are slowly destroying the energy system we have – and promoting an expensive, environmentally harmful, illusory energy system that exists only in theory and environmental rhetoric. Worst of all, we are harming our poorest families … rolling back the civil rights we struggled so long and hard to achieve … and sending many minorities to the back of the energy and economic bus.This must not, and cannot continue.
For forty years, I have led the Congress of Racial Equality in fighting for civil rights. I am not about to stop now. I am not about to surrender our civil rights progress to pressure groups and legislators who seem to have no compassion, and no ability to recognize the terrible toll that these anti-energy policies are taking on our economy, opportunities, and civil and human rights.
I call on every one gathered here today … and every caring, thoughtful citizen in our great nation … to join with me in challenging these Energy Killers, these modern days Bull Connors, who are standing in the door, trying to prevent poor Americans from achieving Martin Luther King’s dream of equal opportunity and true environmental justice.
Together, we can make it happen.