And you want to kill black kids from asthma. How else can we interpret this David Robert’s Grist post?
Black people get asthma so everybody else can get cheap power
Dominique Browning gets right to the point in “The Racial Politics of Asthma.†I’m tempted to excerpt the whole thing, but this is the important bit:
In 2008, African Americans had a 35 percent higher [PDF] rate of asthma than Caucasians. A study revealed that one-quarter of the children in New York City’s Harlem have asthma. The following national statistics are even more jarring:
African American children have a:
• 260% higher emergency room visit rate.
• 250% higher hospitalization rate.
• 500% higher death rate from asthma, as compared with white children.Why? One likely reason is that 68% of African-Americans (compared to 56% of whites) live within [PDF] 30 miles of a coal-fired power plant—the distance within which the maximum ill effects of the emissions from smokestacks occur.
It has long been the case that victims of air pollution are disproportionately poor urban minorities, especially children. A study last year out of Duke confirmed that “non-Hispanic blacks are consistently overrepresented in communities with the poorest air quality.†For the most part, this is just another way of saying that blacks are overrepresented in communities with high levels of poverty. That’s where the coal plants get put.
It’s not the first time Warmists (who use cheap power themselves) have tried a bit of race baiting, and it won’t be the last. Which is rather hypocritical, considering they keep attempting to get African nations to only install expensive “green” energy, not cheap coal, meaning Africans continue to live in squalor.
