Cornwall’s “Open Letter to Pope Francis on Climate Change” drove home multiple scientific and economic reasons for Pope Francis to send Ban Ki-Moon and Jeffrey Sachs packing last Tuesday. But most important is this: The world’s poor desperately need abundant, affordable, reliable energy, and Sachs and Ban would deprive them of it.

Pope Francis should protect the poor by ensuring that no policy he embraces on climate will delay their gaining access to abundant, affordable, reliable electricity. That means he must reject calls to turn from fossil fuels to “renewables.”

Forcing substitution of wind and solar for fossil fuel energy means driving energy prices up. Because the poor spend a higher percentage of their income on energy than others, the effect is a regressive tax—one that hits the poor the hardest.

AGW alarmists have warned that climate change will cause mass migration, threatening national security and social order. It hasn’t happened, and won’t. But here’s a sure way to cause mass migration: turn off electricity, permanently, to any city, county, state or province, or country that has it. Indeed, migration streams already from areas without electricity to areas with it. If Jeffrey Sachs and Ban Ki-Moon want to staunch that flow, they should call for coal and gas power plants and large-scale power grids where none now are—and Pope Francis should second their motion.

Featured Image Courtesy of Roger Alcantara/Flickr CC