by AWR Hawkins
When Barack Obama beat McCain in 2008, he immediately began pushing to fulfill his campaign promise to “fundamentally change” this country. And one of the key areas for that fundamental change was energy (and energy policy). In that arena he planned to use cap and trade to make coal so expensive to use that it would become impractical to mine and, as a result, obsolete. Or so he hoped:
[I’ve called for a scenario was in which] every unit of carbon or green houses gases…emitted would be charged to the polluter. That will create a market in which, whatever power plants are being built, they would have to meet the rigors of that market and the ratcheted down caps that are imposed every year. If somebody wants to build a coal powered plant they can, it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they are going to be charged a huge sum for all that green house gas that’s being emitted.Fortunately, Obama didn’t get his cap and trade wish. However, that hasn’t stopped him from using his EPA to war against coal plants in other ways. And now, the Associated Press is reporting that a new rule from Obama’s EPA will “force 32 mostly coal-fired power plants to shut down and threatens to close 36 others.” Additionally, his EPA has a new “blackout” rule that will give him everything he wanted via cap and trade by forcing coal companies to “adopt new technologies that make it unprofitable to burn coal at all.”
The new rules are so draconian that even Obama’s EPA is admitting the U.S. will lose a considerable amount of the electricity we’ve become accustomed to once the rules are in effect: “[The EPA] has estimated that 14.7 gigawatts — enough power for more than 11 million households — will be retired from the power grid in the 2014-15 period when the rules take effect.”
I guess this plays into Obama’s other campaign promise, that under his energy plan“electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.” Add his rejection of the Keystone Pipeline to the mix and the combination of his war on oil and his war on coal portend budget busting expenses for Americans in the not-so-distant future. (Rush Limbaugh saw that these would be the ramifications of Obama’s war on energy earlier than most, and stands vindicated now for the words he uttered days before Obama was inaugurated: “I hope he fails.”)
Big Government
