A national civil rights leader says that a new national political movement is building to demand more supply of affordable energy—from clean coal, oil and gas and nuclear energy—because supply constraints that raise energy costs discriminate against the poor more than any other segment of society.

Niger Innis, National Spokesman for the 60-year-old Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), said that politicians and environmental groups that oppose expansion of U.S. fossil and nuclear energy production are waging an “immoral war on the poor” and “are fueling a rapidly growing consumer backlash against extremist environmental policies that threaten to choke off America’s ability to produce enough affordable energy to meet demand.”

“Access to affordable and reliable energy is not a convenience to Americans,” Innis told a meeting of the MidContinent Oil and Gas Association.  “It is a fundamental civil right. Without access to affordable energy, Americans on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder cannot afford to climb that ladder to success.  They cannot afford to enjoy the fundamental civil rights that organizations like mine helped to win for them.”

“The growing lack of access to affordable energy is the new civil rights battle of the century,” Innis said. “Americans need access to more energy supply from all resources ... clean coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear energy, renewables as well as better energy conservation,” he said. “We need it all. The good news is that America has it all, in bountiful supply.”

“As we organize grassroots citizens groups in state after state to call for more energy supply, we are finding overwhelming support at the grassroots level,” Innis said. “This is clearly the start of a major political movement, much like we saw in the early days of the civil rights struggle.” “In spite of this, there are politicians who say that we must stop drilling, stop building baseload power plants, stop building transmission lines and new pipelines, and rely solely on less reliable and more expensive forms of energy,” he said. “That is a recipe for economic disaster, especially for the tens of millions of American families now struggling to make ends meet each month.”

Innis noted that Roy Innis, Chairman of CORE, recently a book called “Energy Keepers, Energy Killers” that calls on civil rights leaders and advocates for the poor to “fight those who want to turn off the spigot of American energy.” That book made the Washington Post’s top 10 non-fiction sales list recently.

“Those who are preventing Americans from accessing affordable energy are waging an immoral war on the poor,” Innis charged.  He explained that as energy costs rise, the poor are saddled with a disproportionately higher burden for those costs. “The average median-income family in the U.S. today has to spend about a nickel of every dollar of their income on energy.  The average low-income family has to spend 20 cents on the dollar to buy their energy.  The average poor family has to devote 50 cents or more of each dollar on energy,” he explained.  “For poor families, that is 50 cents they can’t spend on food, on education, on health care, on the bare necessities of life.  As energy prices go up because of policies that restrict supply, the poor suffer the most.”

Innis said that “extremist environmental groups” are leading efforts to stop virtually any new energy sources. “They seem to think that allowing America’s lights to go off is an acceptable outcome. I cannot for the life of me imagine how some of these people can sleep at night given that they are driving America right to edge of disaster with our energy policies.”

Innis said the CORE has been fighting extremist environmental organizations for decades. Innis said many of those same environmental groups “are now working to constrict energy supply in America because they want to see prices rise on the consumer. They believe that higher prices will blackmail consumers into using less energy and adopt a lower standard of living. That is their ultimate goal. And that goal is immoral.”

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