coal

The Obama Administration, through the corrupted Environmental Protection Agency, promised to kill the U.S. coal industry and they are already far along toward their goal. Along with it, they are wreaking havoc on the U.S. economy and threatening power outages of mammoth proportions. To justify this, they cite so-called scientific studies that are kept secret so that their findings cannot be easily challenged. But there’s more — other job-killing regulations also not backed by sound, peer reviewable science — that will take the U.S. further away from long-term prosperity. Can this onslaught be stopped or even slowed down?

CFACT Senior Policy Advisor Paul Driessen says that the Obama Administration is continuing, even revving up, its campaign against domestic energy production with new EPA regulations on the horizon that would shutter much of the nation’s coal industry and do great harm to oil and gas production; he also promised to veto any legislation to approve the Keystone XL pipeline. Moreover, the Obama progressive mentality is so pervaseive that international lending and donor agencies (the UN, OPIC, etc.) are holding poor, developing countries hostage to wind, solar, and biofuel projects that cannot lift them out of poverty — and thus these elites are damning the world’s poorest people to eternal poverty when true prosperity through fossil fuels is staring them in the face.

The United States is likely to see brownouts and blackouts thanks to the shuttering of coal-fired power plants (and who knows, maybe even gas-fired plants) that are part of an Obama Administration effort to depower the nation to satisfy environmental extremists and to satisfy his own desire to diminish the role of the United States in world affairs. The EPA is his tool of choice (along with other federal agencies whose policies rarely are blocked by either elected officials or the courts). And as the supply of electricity dwindles, the price of power will rise dramatically, with the greatest negative impacts on the poor, the elderly, and the disabled.

Included in the Obama Administration’s “Unified Agenda” for 2015 are new, job-killing standards for ground-level ozone that are the product of a friendly lawsuit from the Sierra Club. These rules the President put on hold in 2011 in an effort to reduce “regulatory burdens and regulatory uncertainty, particularly as our economy continues to recover” — or maybe for fear they would harm his reelection chances in 2012. The new regulations will mean that, depending on the final rule, 76% to 96% of the country—including some national parks where the natural background levels for ozone are 65 to 67 parts per billion—will be out of compliance. This will deal a crushing blow to U.S. economic recovery — and the Sierra Club and the President know and heartily approve of this tragic outcome.

New Englanders are gambling with the weather, and they may soon be paying a heavy price — both in dollars for heating their homes in very cold winter weather in 2014-15, and in loss of power due to brownouts or blackouts should even one remaining power plant experience any problems (or in the case of exceedingly high demand on a given day). The chief reason: Green enmity that shut down coal and nuclear power plants and has slowed construction of new natural gas fired power plants, together with the severe unreliability of wind and solar, especially in extreme weather conditions.

CFACT advisor Marita Noon suggests six major areas of confrontation and change now the the Republican Party controls both the House and Senate: the long-awaited (and perhaps too late) approval for the Keystone XL pipeline; a major expansion of oil and gas and minerals development on federal lands; lifting the current ban on U.S. oil and gas exports; reining in the EPA’s power, especially as it applies to the proposed Clean Power Plan and the expanded Waters of the United States regulations; major reforms to the Endangered Species Act that would turn landowners from enemies to protectors of threatened and endangered species; and an end to climate alarmism as official U.S. Congress policy. Nearly all of these changes are expected to be vigorously fought by President Obama and the White House.

So the UN IPCC wants us to stop using fossil fuels entirely by 2100 — whether or not we will need them. Alan Caruba recommends that everyone read Alex Epstein’s great new book, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. Epstein argues that we have used the power of fossil-fueled machines to build a durable civilization that is highly resilient to extreme heat, extreme cold, floods, storms, and so on” — and that this demonstrates the foolishness of those who oppose their use.

Now that he no longer has to face the public, President Obama may soon unleash a torrent of radical executive orders with far-reaching consequences, but his regulatory bodies are advancing an all-out war on the U.S. oil and gas industry that can only be curtailed through Congressional action (at least for now). The chief problem is that the EPA’s regulations constitute “s power without accountability — a useful formula politically but an abysmal one for policy-making.” The REINS Act would end this shell game.”

The biggest problem isn’t that the Earth has too many rich people, or too many people altogether. Rather, is that there are so many poor tragic victims of largely UN-orchestrated, climate-crisis premised, anti-carbon energy starvation policies.

Study done by UK Department of Energy and Climate Change shows surprising discoveries about the use of burning wood for energy over burning coal.

Unless President Obama stops unilaterally forcing UN climate policy on America, and directs his EPA to back down on harsh regulations and grant power plants a reprieve, blackouts are all but guaranteed.

In the midst of beheadings, Russia’s troop buildup inside Ukraine, and Ebola cases skyrocketing, Hillary Clinton made the claim that climate change “is the most consequential, urgent, sweeping collection of challenges we face as a nation and a world.” How bizarre! Even in Germany, where subsidies have built a gigantic solar industry, solar produced only 0.1% of the nation’s energy in the month of January. America, notes Marita Noon, has abundant coal, oil and natural gas resources that we ought not squander.

Coal state Democrats are in open rebellion with their party over energy. Watch one candidate turn off Obama’s lights in this shocking ad.

Green gadflies would like to thwart coal exports from Oregon and Washington. This time coal is fighting back.

President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency is about anything BUT protection of the American people and their economic future. Instead, the EPA has proposed regulations — based on spurious research — that will devastate families in coal states (and everywhere else as well as a result), kill millions of jobs, and force the cost of electricity to “skyrocket.” These smug bureaucrats refuse to disclose their research, their economic projections, or any other data that they allegedly used to develop these proposed standards — and they have been stonewalling even Congress, demonstrating their unabashed arrogance. It is time that the people rose up, demanded action by their elected representatives to stop the EPA’s onslaught on America, and bring the whole truth to light about these rules and the shenanigans of those who seek to impose them on us.

Coal mining families are the collateral damage from President Obama’s war on coal.

The EPA’s proposed Clean Power Plan, which by setting strict limits on the life-giving gas carbon dioxide would effectively shut down coal-fired power generation in the U.S., is an unconstitutional overreach, according to CFACT advisor Marita Noon. Noon quotes Justice Scalia’s decision that blocked EPA’s “tailoring rule”: “The power of executing laws…does not include a power to revise clear statutory terms that turn out not to work in practice.” NOTE: You can still send in written comments to the EPA regarding this job-killing, economy-killing regulation.

Alan Caruba outlines the many ways the Obama Administration (which includes the EPA) is stifling U.S. energy development and thereby costing Americans jobs, energy security, and of course tax revenues — all the while raising the price of energy and therefore just about everything else we purchase. The situation, he notes, is exacerbated by a compliant, virtually useless media and by public educators all too willing to parrot the “official line.”

The Obama Administration in 2013 alone imposed $1.86 trillion in new annual regulatory compliance costs for U.S. businesses and families, almost guaranteeing a flat economy at best. While only a few Americans consider environmental issues to be urgent, the EPA and the White House are doubling down on power generation, forcing prices upward and pressing for the shutdown of 40% of the U.S. energy base. All of this using “scientific research” (a) they they cannot even find, (b) that is “peer reviewed” only by cronies, or (c) that is tainted by massive contributions to advocacy groups like the American Lung Association. CFACT’s Paul Driessen urges state and federal lawmakers and executives, and citizen and scientific groups, to take legal action and other steps to reverse this pattern of wanton disregard for the U.S. economiuc

Rep. Ed Whitfield was set to grill Janet McCabe — the EPA Assistant Administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation — on the factual accuracy of statements in the agency’s proposed rule governing carbon dioxide regulations for power plants. If only he also had called to testify a representative from the American Lung Association – which has received 591 EPA grants totaling over $43 million plus over 2,800 foundation grants totaling $76 million to ensure that they will never question the EPA’s faulty science.