Speaker: Beyssa Buil
Say your name and where in Florida you live. How have high electricity bills impacted you? What are your concerns?
Beyssa Buil: My name is Beyssa Buil and I reside in Miramar Florida. Now I'm here to talk to you of how high electricity bills have impacted me and my community and what my concerns are. I'm here to share why access to affordable energy is important and how South Florida community members are energy burdened and how it affects various intersectionality. Did you know that there's 42.5 million Americans with disabilities and in Florida, 3.5 million adults live with a disability. Did you know that there's nearly 1 million people living with multiple sclerosis? Florida having the largest and highest overall cases of people living with MS I am one of those people living with multiple sclerosis and disability. For me, this means that rising heat, temperatures affect me moment to moment with having worsening of symptoms and can often lead to more medical treatments and hospitalizations. Sometimes this means that people with disabilities are on fixed incomes cannot afford higher bills associated with cooling, using medical equipment and assisted devices. So why are we paying 13% higher than the national average when we have elderly people living on fixed incomes, people with low income, people with disability and people caring for sick relatives in our community, which is a lot. I hope you will understand better why access to affordable energy is important in South Florida.
What do you want to say to the utility corporations responsible? What do you want Florida's politicians to do?
Beyssa Buil: So what do I want to say to utility corporations responsible for them to remember the saying, the true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members. And what do I want politicians to do? I want politicians to be reminded that energy justice aims to make energy accessible, affordable, clean and democratically managed for all communities. Energy justice explicitly centers the concerns of communities at the front line of pollution and climate change. And as we can see with the rising temperatures, policies need to be created to ensure that the true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members. And this applies in the way the utility corporations are mishandling that responsibility.
