How much damage can a defeated president do to the coal industry in six month? We are about to find out.



<<<< Back then, 2008, he made opposition to the coal issue a matter of ideology and promised to destroy the industry, 30 years before the nation was/is ready to kiss that energy source good-bye,  the poor and middle class folks be damned. 

Then 

In January of 2008, a full year before he took office,   Obama made the following statement:  

Let me sort of describe my overall policy.
What I’ve said is that we would put a cap and trade system in place that is as aggressive, if not more aggressive, than anybody else’s out there.

I was the first to call for a 100% auction on the cap and trade system, which means that every unit of carbon or greenhouse gases emitted would be charged to the polluter. That will create a market in which whatever technologies are out there that are being presented, whatever power plants that are being built, that they would have to meet the rigors of that market and the ratcheted down caps that are being placed, imposed every year.
[Cap and Trade, then,  is a profit scheme to increase taxable revenues AND a tool to be used in societal engineering - blog editor]

So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.
[nearly 45% of this nation's heating and cooling is generated by coal, benefiting 140 million Americans,  most of them middle class to poor, but Obama does not care about that fact and never mentions it in his discussions - blog editor]

That will also generate billions of dollars that we can invest in solar, wind, biodiesel and other alternative energy approaches.
[Like I said,  he is talking about a huge taxable base.   How dumb is this,  to destroy the coal industry 30 years before "alternative" energy is in a position to replace this lost energy resource?  - blog editor]

The only thing I’ve said with respect to coal, I haven’t been some coal booster. What I have said is that for us to take coal off the table as an ideological matter as opposed to saying if technology allows us to use coal in a clean way, we should pursue it.    So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can.    It’s just that it will bankrupt them.
[Setting aside the fact that his second sentence in the above paragraph is a grammatical mess, he is saying,  "Under my presidency,  coal will no longer be considered (there's the 'ideological' part) a via solution to the heating and cooling needs of the Eastern United States.  Ready or not,  I am taking coal 'off the table.' - blog editor]

Now
(as in 'yesterday,'  May 25)



From the Daily Caller:  

The Environmental Protection Agency held 12 hours of stacked hearings in Washington, D.C. and Chicago on Thursday in favor of a regulation that analysts have concluded would kill the building of new conventional coal plants in the U.S.
Among the participants scheduled to testify in consecutive five minute blocks throughout the day were multiple representatives from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and environmental activists from the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council and Greenpeace.

The proposed rule, reported by The Washington Post in March, limits the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by power plants to no more than 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour. While the EPA is keeping public comments on the regulation open until June 25, the dice have already been cast by the Obama administration against conventional coal plants, fulfilling a January 2008 campaign promise by the president.

“The average U.S. natural gas plant, which emits 800 to 850 pounds of CO2 per megawatt hour, meets that standard; coal plants emit an average of 1,768 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour,” the Post reported.

Natural gas — a competitor to coal — and the Sierra Club have had historically close financial ties. Natural gas companies paid the Sierra Club $26 million over four years to battle the coal industry. Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune dismissed the connection in a February blog post.

Obama’s own energy policies have also favored the natural gas energy initiatives of major campaign donors, including Warren Buffett, George Soros and T. Boone Pickens.

Hot Air columnist Ed Morrissey wrote that Obama “wants to drive up energy costs in order to make his favored alternatives somewhat competitive, even though none of them can match the production scope of hydrocarbon sources that are found in abundance in the U.S.” . . . . . . .  finish reading the article here. 

________________________

Point of post: 
to set into its historical context, Obama's hatred for fossil fuels,  especially coal;  

to remind the ignorant that he had no specific and immediate plan to replace coal,  only to eliminate coal before his first term is over and worry about its replacement source,  30 years from now; 

to make it clear that all this is a matter of ideology and his statement back in 2008 makes that undeniably clear.  

Lets not forget that after his defeat - should that be the case - in November,  Obama will have nearly 3 months to force his agenda via regulations, upon the American populace,  proving, of course,  that he is an ideologue of monstrous proportion and an enemy of both,  free elections,  and,  the will of the people. 



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