Governor Bevin Argues Uninformed, Emotional, Privileged Teens Shouldn’t Make Energy Policy

Sept. 25, 2019 (EIRNS)—Governor Matt Bevin of the coal-mining state of Kentucky pointed yesterday to the painful lives in poor countries where the lack of development of fossil fuels forces families to rely on such energy sources as “dung fires,” in reference to Greta Thunberg’s tirade at the UN Climate Summit.

Bevin chaired the annual meeting of the Southern States Energy Board (SSEB), which brought together coal and other business executives and state officials from around the region. Several federal officials and the Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt and Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon also participated in the meeting, focused on “Low Cost Energy: Foundation of a Manufacturing Renaissance.”

“She’s articulate. She’s an intelligent woman—young woman. She’s very emotional; she’s very passionate and she’s remarkably ill-informed,” Bevin said when asked about Thunberg’s speech, the Louisville Courier Journal reported.

At another point in the SSEB, he elaborated that Thunberg is “trying to shame the leaders of the world into doing things that, frankly, are not possible.”

“Everyone is enamored with emotion and a remarkable lack of facts and a lack of bold perspective and a lack of historical perspective that comes out of the mouths of teenagers who’ve grown up in a privileged environment where things are on demand and every time you flip a switch on something is there,”

Bevin said.

“And yet we find ourselves enamored to the degree that we now espouse and confer a degree of wisdom upon people who are not wise....

“If these very articulate and emotional and passionate young people who get fired up in their first world lives about what’s happening in the world that they’re unaware of, had even this base level of knowledge and information, it would be powerful. It’s our responsibility to make sure that young people and old people all understand these basic fundamental facts,”

he said, reported the Courier Journal.

Bevin concluded the press conference he gave with the two other governors present, with a firm, passionate statement of the responsibility the United States holds as an energy-rich, technologically developed nation. “If you visit Africa, as I have,” he said, “you see the pollution, the degradation of air and water quality suffered by people who don’t have the technology and resources we have. We are not heating with dung fires—with all that means for the health of people.”

“Nothing has done more to lift people out from poverty than cheap, reliable energy,” and, we have “an obligation not only to use it for our people but to export it to the world,” he concluded.