Clean-energy hostages

“Let the fossil fuels go, or the wind industry gets it in the wallet.” That’s the threat congressional Republicans need to convey to their colleagues across the aisle to stop the Obama war against fossil fuels. Despite President Obama’s effort in his State of the Union address to position himself as favoring an “all of the above” approach to domestic energy production, the reality of the past three years has been quite to the contrary. After failing to crush the coal industry with the ill-fated Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, Mr. Obama has since loosed his regulatory agencies, especially the thuggish Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA is on the verge of proposing its greenhouse gas emission rules for power plants - the “cap” part of cap-and-trade - despite ongoing litigation over their legality. One concern is that the rules as implemented will block the construction of new coal-fired power plants - the very same sort of power that safely provides about 45 percent of U.S. electricity. And those existing plants are in danger, too. Not only has the EPA issued its expensive anti-coal Cross-State Air Pollution Rule and Mercury Air Toxics Standard - part of the suite of regulations known as the “EPA train wreck” that pose a threat to electricity reliability - the president has also sicced the Department of Interior and Mine Safety Administration on the coal industry to interfere with underground mining...more