Posted on 06/07/2014 4:30:01 PM PDT by Kaslin
The bureaucratic hammer of the Obama administration has struck again with this week’s new EPA regulations.
They require coal-powered plants to cut carbon emissions by 30 percent from their 2005 levels by the year 2030. Even The New York Times conceded such a step is “unprecedented” in the annals of our regulatory history and that it could shut down hundreds of plants.
In other words, the war on coal has been renewed for its final push in Obama’s second-term. The move puts jobs on the line, posts more shutters on a vital component of American energy at a time when we need to be unleashing our potential more than ever, and is saddling consumers with higher costs.
This kind of assault on blue-collar workers and American electricity is unprecedented, but can we really say we didn’t expect it from the president who said electricity rates would “necessarily skyrocket” on his watch?
A study from the Institute of 21st Century Energy has already shown how my home state of Oklahoma will be impacted.
According to this study, Oklahoma, along with Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas, is likely to see an annual GDP decrease of roughly $8.2 billion over the course of the next 16 years. That also equates to an annual loss of 36,000 jobs. In total, the study estimates $51 billion in annual economic losses, and 224,000 in annual job losses.
As for increases in electricity costs, Oklahoma could be facing up to $1.6 billion in higher costs annually. Other regions of the country are facing increases as high as $6.6 billion.
So – Team Obama is raising costs, killing jobs, and sidelining economic growth for the sake of pacifying the agenda of radical environmentalists who want to kill coal.
I don’t think that’s the kind of ‘Hope and Change’ folks had in mind.
These kind of regulatory shenanigans are exactly what I’ve taken the fight to since being elected to the Oklahoma state House. I helped author a bill halting overbearing and unwarranted green subsidies because we should’ve stopped allowing government to dictate its preferences in the free market yesterday.
Senate Bill 1456 leveled the playing field between competing energy sources. For too long we’d left the playing field unleveled, not accounting for the higher infrastructure costs that come with solar and wind. It amounted to a subsidy that just wasn’t fair.
We made the tough decisions and got results for the taxpayers. I’ve been attacked for it, but scoring political points wasn’t what I had in mind when I ran a primary challenge to an entrenched incumbent and pulled off an upset.
Talking the talk isn’t the punchline of conservatism; it’s all about getting things done. These new EPA regulations are a monstrosity that must be sledgehammered out of existence, and we need leaders who’ve proven they can make a difference.
That’s what I’ve done in Oklahoma. It’s what I’ll do in Congress, and it’s why I’m running for Oklahoma’s 5th congressional district at a time like this.
You don’t grow the economy by expanding government and empowering bureaucrats, but they don’t get that. You get the red tape out of the way so the private sector can grow and stop using taxpayer dollars to dictate the marketplace and pacify one bloc’s agenda.
This week the Obama administration announced we’re again going the opposite way, and they couldn’t be more wrong. In Congress, I’ll stand up to this nonsense tooth and nail, just like I did in Oklahoma.
It needs to be closed. Seriously.
Dismantle the entire agency and roll back all of its regulations.
Any state that wants to keep the regs can enact them — I bet most if not all states already have their own EPA.
I think that making regulations like this that take affect AFTER you leave office is on of the most gutless, pusillanimous things a politician can do. If you believe in this crap, do it on day one. Then YOU have to deal with the consequences. To do it after you leave office is worse than sleazy. It is beyond loathsome.
all these pictures of Coal Plants have CLEAR SKIES around them
Can't be done.
If the EPA ceased to exist tomorrow, all the problems it has created, and is creating, would continue, BECAUSE they are required by statutes passed by Congress between 1955-1972.
Until the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Wilderness Act, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, and others, are repealed, this problem is not going away.
I believe that can all be done in a single “grand sunset” act of legislation.
Not that it ever would be — but American can dream of being free, can’t we?
And we are told to just keep voting, as if that will solve anything.
Why not just shut all the coal fired plants down and see what would happen. How many politicians and bureaucrats would be left alive? At least they wouldn’t be putting out any poisonous CO2.
Seriously, these folks get their way and the riots would begin. It’s hard to redistribute zero dollars and that’s what those of us who didn’t starve would be left with.
...while the new, tyrannical wood stove regulations are being ignored. Sad.
I know in our current Brave New World government, Obama makes all decisions by executive fiat and congress holds regular thumb-sucking sessions (or worse) but will somebody please answer me this:
Does the House of Representatives have the power to pull the plug on all EPA financing?
Or not?
Thanks.
As Mark Twain wrote: "If voting made a difference they wouldn't let us do it." The problem's been around for a while but it's gotten more blatant in recent years.
Assuming the GOP takes the Senate this year, and keeps it and the House through the 2016 elections....AND wins back the White House......
Among the long list of tasks for 21 January, 2016 will be to strike every EPA regulation implemented during Obama’s tenure.....just as a starting point.
Not only the EPA regulation implement, but everything else that arrogant pos did
“Among the long list of tasks for 21 January, 2016”...
Yes one of the advantages of Obama’s dictatorial use of Executive Orders, to modify Obamacare, is that it can be undone in the same way.
Why do you think H. Reid changed the 60 vote majority and is currently stacking the DC district courts with liberal judges? Because it is they who monitor the regulations and judge lawsuits against them. As soon as the R president starts striking regulations, the environmentalists, big, big pockets of lawyers will sue, sue, sue and then it gets judged by their judges, America looses.
They just used that technique here in Oregon state. 55% of Oregon voters changed the Oregon constitution with an initiative to make it say one man one woman in marriage. 6 years later 8 homosexuals file a lawsuit, judge shop to the openly gay homosexual judge and "wa la" law overturned, same sex couples getting married next day!
The new Prez also gets to fire and replace all of these commie judges.
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