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If you like your electricity, you can keep your electricity. The White House announced the release of his “Clean Power Plan” late yesterday, which plans to cut carbon emissions from power plants in the US by 30%. Obama promised in his own message that this would result in lower energy prices, which sounds very similar to the promises made with ObamaCare — that later turned out to be the Lies of the Year once implemented:

Alpha Natural Resources has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. On Monday, a statement from the company said: "The Board of Directors of Alpha Natural Resources authorized the filing of the Chapter 11 cases to enhance the company's future as it weathers a historically challenged coal market." "The relief provided by Chapter 11 will allow the company to reorganize and emerge as a financially viable business that is better positioned to compete in dynamic energy markets." Bloomberg reported last Thursday the company had been planning to file today. The coal industry is in turmoil. Demand for natural gas is surging, and...

HOUSTON, Texas — U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, released the following statement in response to President Obama’s announced EPA regulations:“The President’s lawless and radical attempt to destabilize the Nation’s energy system is flatly unconstitutional and–unless it is invalidated by Congress, struck down by the courts, or rescinded by the next Administration–will cause Americans’ electricity costs to skyrocket at a time when we can least afford it. I urge leaders of both parties, including Democrats who represent communities that will be devastated by this reckless policy, to stand up against this Administration’s dangerous agenda of economic decline.”###

Washington (AFP) - With one eye on his legacy, US President Barack Obama will Monday unveil what he called the "biggest, most important step we've ever taken" in the fight against climate change. The White House will release the final version of America's Clean Power Plan, a set of environmental rules and regulations that will home in on pollution from the nation's power plants, setting limits on power-plant carbon emissions for the first time. Plants will have to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 32 percent from 2005 levels by 2030, in an ambitious drive which will boost the renewable-energy sector...

Craig community leaders hosted a meeting Thursday at Moffat County High School to provide a brief update on the situation at Colowyo Coal Mine, answer questions and facilitate public comment on the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement’s environmental assessment. Ray Beck, Craig mayor, opened the gathering by telling the audience about the economic significance of Colowyo mine’s 220 jobs to Craig and Northwest Colorado. “This is not the time to slow down,” Beck said, emphasizing the importance of community feedback on the development of the mine’s new environmental assessment. When the OMSRE’s recommendation to approve mining plans for...

The EPA’s regulation of carbon dioxide emissions from power plants highlights the job-killing transition proposed by the administration. This carbon agenda, which the administration’s public relations team calls the “Clean Power Plan”, threatens to tear down the existing electricity generation infrastructure in the name of carbon dioxide emissions. This carbon agenda will magnify the market-distorting subsidies from the PTC—contributing to an estimated peak of one million job losses—will drain hundreds of billions of dollars from American families through increased energy bills, and will threaten the electric grid by rapidly switching from reliable to intermittent sources of electricity. Further, electricity from...

Though a relatively small organization with only 26 people on staff, WildEarth Guardians’ litigious nature has established the environmental advocacy group as a dominant voice in the national debate about environmental policy. From 2010 to present, Guardians have initiated a total of 152 cases in federal district courts and 55 in the Circuit Court of Appeals for a total of 207 cases. In 2010 alone they filed 61 claims — an average of about one per week. However, Guardians’ pervasiveness in the courts has not gone without criticism. In a 2012 analysis of WildEarth Guardians' legal activity, the conservative group...

<p>DENVER — A spokesperson for the radical Santa Fe-based anti-coal group WildEarth Guardians showed no regard and no respect for the families and communities in Colorado who have everything to lose if the Colowyo mine is shut down.</p>

A lawsuit brought by environmentalists and federal regulators has forced a major utility to phase out coal use at six power plants in Iowa. Activists claim these retirements bring the total number of U.S. coal plants shut down to 200 — or 40 percent of the U.S. coal plant fleet. On Tuesday, the Environmental Protection Agency and Justice Department of Justice announced an Iowa subsidiary of Alliant Energy agreed to pay $7.1 million in civil penalties to environmental projects for violating the Clean Air Act. The settlement also requires the company to stop burning coal or shut down six power...

Most of the 1.5 million electricity consumers served by the Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association probably don’t think about it. But when they wake up and flip on their light switches each morning, they can thank in significant part Tri-State’s Craig Station power plant in Moffat County, the second largest in Colorado. And that power plant can operate only thanks to hundreds of local workers digging in, not just figuratively at the plant itself, but literally at the two area surface mines — Colowyo and Trapper — that provide the plant’s coal. ... With 220 people working at Colowyo, some...

The community of Craig is holding its collective breath today, waiting on the feds to decide by midnight whether they will bother to challenge a court decision that threatens to shutter the Colowyo Mine. The Interior Department has gobbled up the entire period allotted to them to decide whether to appeal. We can only hope they have used this time wisely to decide in favor of the 200 plus workers whose jobs are on the line. And the lines in the proverbial sands have been clearly drawn. On one side is the radical environmental group WildEarth Guardians, who brought the...

Bill Gates recently noted that the cost of decarbonization using today’s technology is ‘beyond astronomical.’ On June 30, one day after the Supreme Court struck down the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulation of mercury emissions from power plants, resident Obama committed the United States to the goal of generating 20% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030. This would nearly triple the amount of wind- and solar-generated electricity on the national grid. The EPA ran afoul of the law by failing to conduct a cost-benefit analysis before it acted to reduce mercury emissions from coal-power plants. There is no objective...

A study commissioned by the National Black Chamber of Commerce, which represents 2.1 million black-owned businesses in the United States, found that the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Clean Power Plan would increase black poverty by 23 percent and cause the loss of 7 million jobs for black Americans by 2035. The study also found that the EPA' plan would increase Hispanic poverty by 26 percent and cause the loss of 12 million jobs for Hispanic Americans by 2035. The EPA proposed the Clean Power Plan on June 2, 2014 to cut carbon emissions from power plants. ... There was a...

Greece’s energy minister Lafazanis said that [the coal-fired power plant] Ptolemaida V is required since renewable power plants are intermittent and endanger the country’s energy security. In May, Lafazanis sent a letter to the European Commission asking permission to operate the Ptolemaida III, a separate coal plant that is shut down due to its very old technology that pollutes the environment enormously. One of Lafazanis arguments was “the economic crisis in Greece, which makes the need for keeping the cost of energy for households’ heating as low as possible.”—.. Poland’s leading opposition party is seeking to negotiate exemptions from the...

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis was about to take a major step backing the science behind ­human-driven global warming, and Philippe de Larminat was determined to change his mind. A French doubter who authored a book arguing that solar activity — not greenhouse gases — was driving global warming, de Larminat sought a spot at a climate summit in April sponsored by the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Nobel laureates would be there. So would U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, U.S. economist Jeffrey Sachs and others calling for dramatic steps to curb carbon emissions. fter securing a high-level meeting at...

New Hampshire utility ratepayers will pay a Taiwanese company $1.22 million to build the state’s largest solar installation so that a small town can save about $500,000 in power costs over the life of the project. Taiwan’s Walsin Lihwa, parent company of Borrego Solar, will use Chinese-made solar panels in the 3.5-acre project, which is supposed to be finished in July. It will supply power to several municipal buildings in the area but only some of the time: the town of Peterborough (population: 6,284) gets only 197 sunny days per year. “What a great project,” deadpanned David Kreutzer, a senior...

Liquor stores and restaurants across Craig are pulling Colorado craft beers off their shelves due to the beer companies’ financial support to WildEarth Guardians, the environmental group that put Colowyo Coal Mine at risk of being shut down. Stockmen’s Liquor pulled 12 brands of beer — including New Belgium Brewery — because they are listed as WildEarth Guardians supporters. “We pulled those beers because their support of WildEarth Guardians... who said their ultimate goal is to shut down coal mines,” said Lori Gillam, owner of Stockmen's. “Craig is a coal mine town.” WildEarth Guardians has a list of business supporters...

Five of the world’s seven richest countries have increased their coal use in the last five years despite demanding that poor countries slash their carbon emissions to avoid catastrophic climate change, new research shows. Britain, Germany, Italy, Japan and France together burned 16% more coal in 2013 than 2009 and are planning to further increase construction of coal-fired power stations. Only the US and Canada of the G7 countries meeting on Monday in Berlin have reduced coal consumption since the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009. The US has reduced its coal consumption by 8% largely because of fracking for shale...

The war has been waged on several fronts for nearly a decade, and the aggressors are poised to declare victory over the wounded U.S. coal industry. After powering the Industrial Revolution and helping to turn the U.S. into the world’s top economic power, coal now seems to be drowning in what environmentalists call a “deadly cocktail” — a rabid, politically potent anti-fossil fuels movement, the rise of cheap, abundant, relatively clean domestic natural gas and an Obama administration that freely admits it wants to decrease coal use in America through a host of new rules. That near-perfect storm is taking...

Three coal-fired power plants in West Virginia have shut down operations. Media outlets report that Appalachian Power's Kanawha River Power Station at Glasgow, the Kammer Power Station near Moundsville and the Phillip Sporn Power Station at New Haven were closed Sunday. Appalachian Power had announced in 2011 that it planned to close the plants, along with three coal-fired plants in Virginia, Ohio and Indiana. The company had said it would be cost-prohibitive to equip them to comply with new federal emission standards for mercury and other hazardous air pollutants. Another coal-fired plant in Virginia is being converted to natural gas....