Heavenly Father, I pray for the thousands of Americans who are suffering from fuel poverty, like Sharon Garcia, a single mom in Pueblo, Colorado, whose home doubles as a daycare center—the source of her meager income.
Because Colorado’s lawmakers decided to fight global warming by reducing carbon dioxide emissions, Pueblo’s electricity provider replaced inexpensive coal-fired power plants with more expensive gas-fired plants, and passed on the costs to customers. Sharon’s monthly electric bill rose to about $200.
Despite all her diligence—putting sticky notes with $$$ signs on her light switches, unplugging the microwave and toaster when not using them, not using the oven to cook in summer, reminding her kids, constantly, to turn off lights, TV, everything—Sharon lives in constant fear that her power will be cut off again, as it was when she lost a contract for daycare. Left temporarily without income, she and her children lived in darkness, cold, and fear, huddling under blankets at night and lighting candles for a little light and heat, even if it meant risking a house fire.
Father, Sharon isn’t the only person in Pueblo, with an 18 percent poverty rate and the highest electricity rates in Colorado, facing such problems. About a third of newly homeless people there lost their homes because they couldn’t pay their power bills.
And with slight adjustments, Sharon’s story could be multiplied millions of times as unjustified fears of manmade global warming become the public rationale for governments here and around the world to require their people to use more expensive energy sources. Those decisions led to the deaths of 26,800 people, mostly the elderly, in England and Wales in the winter of 2009–2010, and another 24,000 the next winter, because they couldn’t pay their skyrocketing electricity bills and still buy food.
And fuel poverty, like what haunts Sharon Garcia and her children, will get much more common if governments maintain current policies, or adopt additional ones, to fight global warming by switching from abundant, affordable, reliable fossil fuels to diffuse, expensive, intermittent wind, solar, and other alternatives.
So, heavenly Father, I pray that decision makers here in America—at local, state, and federal levels—and around the world will carefully consider the impact of their climate and energy policies on the poor and vulnerable, and base them on the best available science, economics, and energy engineering. Protect the poor, O Lord, from harm by misguided policies, I pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
