DAYTONA BEACH -- Having failed during his first term to get Congress to approve his insidious cap and trade bill, which would have “skyrocketed” the cost of electricity and done irreparable damage to the US economy, Barack Obama is trying again, as we always knew he would. This time, knowing that he does not have to face the voters again, he is flouting the Constitution (no surprise there), end running Congress and misusing his executive authority to order the Environmental Protection Agency to falsely extend the authority of the Clean Air Act to draft and impose severe limitations on the amount of carbon dioxide that power plants may emit.
The purpose is to eliminate the burning of coal to produce electricity as coal-fired plants probably will be unable to meet the new standards. He also plans to use federal lands and the regulations governing the retrofitting of houses to require greater use of expensive alternative energies like wind and solar.
Can anyone say “Solyndra Redux?” Most immediately, Obama's need is to pay off the increasingly restive environmental lobby for their huge electoral bribes in his two election campaigns. In recent months that body has grown desperate for some sign that their messiah truly is the embodiment of their faith and that he will move the nation toward their vision of a global warming paradise. Now they have it.
Can anyone say “Solyndra Redux?” Most immediately, Obama's need is to pay off the increasingly restive environmental lobby for their huge electoral bribes in his two election campaigns. In recent months that body has grown desperate for some sign that their messiah truly is the embodiment of their faith and that he will move the nation toward their vision of a global warming paradise. Now they have it.
For the longer term his new scheme will further his goal of replacing our successful free market economy with a weaker, government-dependent socialist one. It will do this by destroying the coal industry and driving up the cost of electricity, which will have a serious inflationary impact on everything which depends upon electricity for its production, transportation, preservation and sale - that is - everything and everyone.
Apparently the anemic 1.8% growth which our economy experienced during the first quarter of 2013 (revised downward twice from the Administration’s original exaggerated figure of 2.5%) is still too high. Evidently, an economy which can begin to recover in spite of Obama’s policies is insufficiently subject to the control of his government.
The sad thing is that the science which Obama claims to rely upon for his environmental policies is wrong and his goal of reduced coal usage will come about anyway through market forces.
Anyone who has studied the history of environmental issues knows that many of the same institutions and some of the very same individuals who presently push global warming were, in the 1970’s, warning of a coming ice age. They shifted 180 degrees to warning of a human-caused warming catastrophe in the 1990’s but after a few years they discovered that they also could not show that the world is warming. But by then they had become dependent for their paychecks on grants from governments and institutions such as the UN which all had an interest in the promotion of global warming as a threat.
So they did what any good fraudster would do - they faked it!
So they did what any good fraudster would do - they faked it!
They relied heavily on the notorious “hockey stick “ graph developed by a fraud named Michael Mann which purported to show that the global climate was more or less stable until the beginning of the industrial age when temperatures began to shoot upward. Problem is, the program is designed so that the graph is about the same no matter what data is fed into it. Fake much?
Then in 2009, there was “Climate Gate” when it was revealed that a cabal of so-called scientists at several prestigious institutions conspired to fake their figures because their computer models could not be made to show that the world is warming. What they ended up doing was preclude contrary arguments from their conclusions and fake their figures to hide what was in fact a decline in global temperatures rather than an increase.
Ultimately, their solution was to drop the term “global warming” and shift to “climate change.” This way they protect their paychecks and can blame any harsh weather of any kind on human activity, conveniently ignoring extreme weather which took place prior to modern industrialization. The truth is that the earth has always warmed and cooled periodically.
Sometimes the climate swings have been quite extreme. But there is no proof - "no proof" - that these climate swings are caused by human activity. That is because, like the "Medieval Warming Period" from 800 - 1300, or the “Little Ice Age” from 1300 - 1850, they took place before humanity was industrialized and were not caused by increases or decreases of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. There are many scientists who disagree that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas at all, in large part because there have been times when carbon dioxide levels were far higher than they are at present.
And you know what? The animals and plants loved it and flourished! In fact the bulk of the scientific evidence points to multiple causes for climate change.
These include, inter alia, solar magnetic activity and its effects on cosmic rays and clouds at certain altitudes, volcanism, the precision cycle of the earth, the flow of large oceanic currents like the Gulf Stream, the movement of tectonic plates, and several other things all of which have a far greater impact on climate change than human activity.
Environmentalists, left-wing activists and advocates of world government like those who push climate change and Agenda 21 at the UN all love the idea of global warming because, whether they believe that humankind is changing the earth’s climate or not, they see climate change as a mechanism to press for their goal of greater government control over the lives and economic activity of the people.
And that is what Obama’s latest executive order outrage is all about.
It’s another measure in his core plan to aggregate ever more power unto the Executive Branch in Washington. If he succeeds in perverting the Clean Air Act via executive order in order to destroy the coal industry and massively increase the price of electricity, he will have imposed a colossal, disguised and very regressive new tax on the American people. If his concern were only pollutants from the burning of coal, he could simply wait a bit and the market would take care of that. Not only has cleaner coal technology been developed and put in place but, far more significant, the advent of horizontal drilling and “fracking” has opened up incredibly vast new reservoirs of natural gas.
We are already producing so much gas that it has become cheaper to produce a btu of energy from gas than from goal. Many power plants are already being converted from coal to natural gas because of the economics involved but there is also an environmental benefit. The use of natural gas instead of coal cuts pollutants by 50%!
We are already producing so much gas that it has become cheaper to produce a btu of energy from gas than from goal. Many power plants are already being converted from coal to natural gas because of the economics involved but there is also an environmental benefit. The use of natural gas instead of coal cuts pollutants by 50%!
From this, it is obvious that Obama’s is motivated not so much by concern for the environment as by his obsession with ever greater control of the economy and of the lives of the American people. He really is a wannabe dictator. It may be that the deluge of scandals created by his corrupt and incompetent Administration will keep him from “legal” seizure of total power. But with his coal outrage he demonstrates that he continues to seek that power one chunk at a time.