Now we know why President Obama isn’t spending any time fighting a war on unemployment. He’s too busy fighting his war on coal.
Indeed, while the past few months have seen tiny signs our economy might be growing despite Obama’s anti-job policies, the White House is ramping up its effort to make sure our labor force is expunged of every last coal job it can find. It’d be humorous if it wasn’t so real.
If we start exposing this radical nonsense coming out of the Obama EPA, conservatives can push back on these bad policies. Environmentalists rarely get their way when people actually pay attention to what they want to do.
The latest battle will be coming any day now, as the EPA has said it will issue its Utility NSPS (New Source Performance Standards) sometime in January. Any new utility plants will have to meet a new set of environmental standards – standards that conveniently work out great for natural gas but are prohibitively expensive for coal plants, even new ones, to meet.
In capitalist terms, this means the United States can say goodbye to the construction of any new coal plants on its soil.
Sadly, this war on coal didn’t start here. Last month, moments before Christmas weekend, the EPA released its new Utility MACT (Maximum Achievable Control Technology) rule, which set new emissions standards for pre-existing U.S. coal and oil power plants. The EPA did this in spite of the fact that the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) warned in November that such a rule would shut down as many as 300 coal power plants at the same time. Some of the older plants would be unable to meet the post-modern standards so quickly.
Nearly half of total U.S. electrical supply is provided by coal. It’s one of the most vibrant and successful industries in the country. It’s a home-grown resource, begging for U.S. workers to mine it out of the ground and convert it into electricity that millions of Americans can use to power their homes and small businesses.
27 states have filed complaints asking for a delay, arguing the strict standards under such a short time span are realistically unfeasible.
I’d start asking why the Obama Administration has decided to demonize the coal industry, risking massive power shortages and thousands of American jobs just to satisfy the environmentalist left. They’ve always hated coal, and under this White House, as early as this year, they might get their wish.
Big Government
