“Our very health and economic well-being are at stake,” claims the president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. The Center has teamed up with the Natural Resource Defense Council and other extreme environmental groups to convince minorities that “costly” global warming will have “disproportionate impacts” on minorities.

Temperatures are higher in cities, they argue, due to the “urban heat island effect” – and air-conditioning use among black families is half the rate for white Americans. Therefore, global warming will cause more heat-related deaths among minority families, they claim.

This attempt to justify anti-energy policies by promoting climate change hysteria is embarrassing nonsense.

The disparity in heat-related deaths has nothing to do with climate change, and everything to do with the inability of poor families to afford air-conditioning and electricity. The disparity in cold-related deaths is even more striking, and likewise due to energy affordability.

Lock up our energy, take away fossil fuel and nuclear power, impose cap-and-trade policies – and you drive prices even higher. You make heat and electricity less affordable. You force more people to depend on unreliable, nonexistent wind power. You force more to choose between heating and eating. You cause more to die.

But radical greens want to reduce access to the fuels that produce 93% of our energy. They want to increase energy costs.

They call this “energy conservation.” I call it “economic enslavement” – and worse.

Moreover, global temperatures have barely risen for 10 years, even as global CO2 levels soared. Many experts say we are heading for a period of falling temperatures, because of declining solar intensity. Over 31,000 scientists say there is no credible evidence that carbon dioxide emissions cause climate change, much less global warming disasters. And China and India are not about to end their fossil fuel use.

Punishing poor families in the name of speculative climate chaos is insane.

We need to bring sanity and compassion back to our energy policies. Drill, mine and use American energy. And demand that Speaker Pelosi and Senator Harry Reid end their war on poor families, and have a real debate and vote on our energy and economic future.