Letters To The Editor

Accepted definitions of “genocide” generally involve the mass killings of people belonging to a particular group. Selecting the black people in Africa for misery, disease, and death by deliberately depriving them of life-saving DDT, as described in <http://www.jbs.org/node/1603>, is, therefore, consistent with the ordinary definition.

World energy rationing, by preventing the construction of refineries and atomic power plants, affects a much broader socioeconomic group. This group is perhaps best defined by those who are not in it. Al Gore, for example, flies about in expensive personal jet planes, lives in a home that uses 20 times the energy as that of ordinary people, and rides in gas-guzzling limousines. He obviously does not consider himself to be in the group who must submit to energy rationing.

World taxation, rationing, and shortages of energy will hurt primarily the poor, lower, and middle classes sufficiently to markedly increase their death rates. The upper classes within which the hysteria for global energy rationing has originated expect to maintain their own lifestyles with only minor inconvenience.

While, therefore, the group of people who have been selected for diminished lives, suffering, and death from energy rationing and the resulting technological decline is larger than ordinarily associated with genocide, the number of likely deaths is also much larger than in previous genocides.

I think the term “genocide” appropriately describes the outcome of world energy rationing.

Sincerely,

Frank M. Pelteson, Las Vegas, NV

To The Editor:

A message to the world, “Please don