energy poverty

The plan will result in higher electricity costs for businesses and families, lost jobs, lower incomes, higher poverty rates, reduced living standards, and diminished health and welfare, our exhaustive recent study found. This damage will be inflicted at the national level and in all 50 states. The CPP will impact all low-income groups, but hit America’s 128 million Blacks and Hispanics especially hard.

In today’s edition of The Heartland Daily Podcast, managing editor of Environment and Climate News, H. Sterling Burnett talks with E. Calvin Beisner. Beisner is the founder and national spokesman for the Cornwall Alliance, a volunteer network of about 60 Christian theologians, scientists, economists, and other scholars who teach or do research at various universities and colleges around North America. The Cornwall Alliance focuses on the biblical perspective on environmental and natural resource use issues. Beisner was the recipient of the 2014 Outstanding Spokesperson of Faith, Science, and Stewardship Award at The Heartland Institute’s Ninth International Conference on Climate Change, July 8th in Las Vegas.

In our world of laptops, iPads, flat-screen TVs, microwaves, and jet-skis, it is easy to forget that 1.3 billion people on this planet, nearly one in five overall, do not have access to electricity. Even fewer people have access to clean cooking areas, as 2.6 billion people (38 percent of the world’s population) use traditional biomass—such as wood and animal dung—or coal indoors to cook their meals. As a result, indoor air pollution prematurely claims 3.5 million lives every year, more than double the lives claimed by either malaria or HIV/AIDS. These people are victims of energy poverty.