If the United States endures a recession in 2023 – or a full-fledged depression – we should blame woke trends embraced by corporations, politicians and public utilities caving to political pressure.

Southern Colorado heard from Tatiana Bailey, director of the UCCS Economic Forum, on Thursday at the first in-person forum since the pandemic. In a Gazette news article Wednesday, Bailey warns of economic volatility that has our country and state on the verge of recession.

Bailey said extreme drought and flooding, which she attributes to climate change, “is likely to create persistent instability when it comes to food prices. Those prices are also inextricably linked to energy prices…”

She’s at least partially correct if we put the concern in proper context. Energy poverty threatens our economy. It’s less about climate change and more directly and immediately linked to climate-change alarmism.

The climate has always changed, and humanity has always adapted. Modern farming techniques have the world producing more food, not less, despite worldwide increase in flooding and drought. Farms produce two times more grain than the world population needs to survive.

If climate change caused food shortages, we would not see plummeting global rates of malnutrition. Despite the United Nations’ propensity to catastrophize climate change, the same organization reports the proportion of undernourished people in the world declined from 15% in 2000 to 9.9% in 2020. The rate of early childhood stunting, resulting from malnutrition, fell from 33% in 2000 to 21.3% in 2019.

“There is more than enough food produced in the world to feed everyone on the planet,” says a 2022 report by Action Against Hunger.

Only from 2019 to 2022 has the world seen a plateauing in the decades-long starvation decline. As explained by Action Against Hunger, the problem isn’t one of limited food production. It’s more caused by limited energy access. That’s likely because of obstructive environmental regulations that reduce supply and increase prices.

“Hunger is strongly interconnected with poverty, and it involves interactions among an array of social, political, demographic, and societal factors. People living in poverty frequently face household food insecurity, use inappropriate care practices, and live in unsafe environments that have low access to quality water, sanitation, and hygiene, and inadequate access or availability to health services and education,” explains Action Against Hunger.

Those factors – health care, education, safe environments and more improve with increased access to affordable oil and gas.

Increased production of traditional fuels are directly responsible for decades of increased food production and declining poverty and malnutrition. That’s because fossil fuels power tractors, trucks, tankers carrying food containers, factories and other assets used to produce and transport food.

“If you switch the energy mix too quickly, you will increase the price of energy,” said Máximo Torero, chief economist at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, as quoted by Politico.

“Then you will increase the price of fertilizers, you increase the price of food, more people dying of hunger.”

Even the Action Against Hunger report, which stretches to blame climate change on the sudden uptick in poverty and starvation, concedes that lack of access to “oil and other primary-commodity exports” has “decreased people’s ability to access food.”

In the United States, this disproportionately affects the “people of color” our social-justice environmental movement professes to care about.

“Minorities tend to suffer from higher rates of energy cost burden than non-Hispanic whites in United States’ cities,” explains a report by the National Center for Biotechnology Information.

“In the U.S., African Americans suffer more from energy insecurity than do any other racial groups.”

Just this week, Colorado Springs shut down the Drake Power Plant. The plant, long ago paid for, generated electricity with coal before a recent transition to natural gas. The City Council expedited closure by more than a decade to accelerate the community’s transition to “clean energy” generated by the sun’s nuclear power.

Like other communities and regions closing gas-and-coal-powered generators, Colorado Springs ratepayers face an increase in the costs of utilities. Consumers from coast to coast pay for new “clean energy” generation as their public utilities forgo affordable, abundant and efficient natural gas and coal to appease environmental extremists.

Energy poverty is just plain poverty. It leads to worldwide recession. While that’s a burden to the wealthy and middle class, it causes the poor to suffer, go hungry and die. That is the real cost of society’s reaction to the panic about global warming and climate change. That’s the real cause of the looming threat of recession.

Colorado Springs Gazette Editorial Board