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I want coal for Christmas, and not because I've been a naughty girl. I want coal so I can affordably power up the high-tech toys Santa is bringing me, including an electronic butler who cleans and cooks and a modern, coal-fired steam locomotive that will allow me to bypass the TSA Snooper Troopers when I travel cross-country. OK, so Santa probably won't be sending a full-size coal-fired train down my chimney. But, like many of you, I may receive small electronics as gifts. As millions of us ring in the New Year by adding new gadgets to the power grid,...

Democrats from red states are feeling the heat. Their constituents don’t like Obama, or his polices, and they have to somehow convince them that they’ll be somewhat independent when it comes to fighting for their interests. Natalie Tennant, the Democratic candidate in West Virginia’s Senate race, is trying to disseminate that message of independene with this ad rebuking Obama’s energy policy. It was released at the end of July. She says that she’ll protect coal jobs in West Virginia and “stand up to leaders of both parties who threaten our way of life.” She then proceeds to turn off...

Obama finally did something with his phone and his pen besides take a selfie and sign an autograph. He has instructed the carbon police to cut carbon emissions in United States by 30%. That means the death of coal-fired electricity. “The EPA will launch the most dramatic anti-pollution regulation in a generation early next month,” says Politico, “a sweeping crackdown on carbon that offers President Barack Obama his last real shot at a legacy on climate change — while causing significant political peril for red-state Democrats.” That means utility bills are going to go up for everyone: rich, poor,...

em>"Probably for the next decade, the most dominate technology around the world will be coal..." -Jeff Immelt The fastest growing source of energy in the world last year was coal, and it is going to stay that way for a very long time. With that in mind, one has to wonder why President Obama has insisted on the gut-wrenching destruction of the coal industry that has costs thousands of jobs, and has sent electricity costs to all-time highs. This, combined with last month's report from the International Energy Agency, state that reaching the goal of carbon emission reduction would cost...

Back in December, I wrote about the absurdity of the EPA claim that coal-fired power plants produced significant mercury which necessitated drastic reductions at any cost. I was then puzzled that the EPA did not produce maps of the mercury concentrations that would show the mercury was found in higher concentrations downwind of coal-fired power plants. It turns out that maps of the concentrations of mercury do exist and can be examined. The National Atmospheric Deposition Program produces annual maps of the mercury concentrations across the USA here. Note that the mercury high concentration areas changed somewhat between 2009 and...

The Obama administration is effectively banning the construction of new coal-fired power plants, a move officials admit will have little to no impact on global warming. “The EPA does not anticipate that this proposed rule will result in notable CO2 emission change … by 2022,” the agency writes in its proposal to limit greenhouse gas emissions. “EPA knows there aren’t benefits,” Dan Simmons, director of regulatory and state affairs at the Institute for Energy Research, told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “EPA and environmentalists are being disingenuous when they claim this rule will have an impact on the climate or...

Obama is using the EPA to attack the Coal industry which will make costs skyrocket for new coal-fired power plants:

The UN's climate change panel is set to release a report next month that reluctantly concludes there has been no warming of the earth in at least the last 15 years. Fewer and fewer people are believers that climate change is man made. This hasn't stopped the Obama administration from releasing new rules governing "carbon pollution" at new power plants that would mean the virtual destruction of the coal industry.

Linking global warming to public health, disease and extreme weather, the Obama administration pressed ahead Friday with tough requirements to limit carbon pollution from new power plants, despite protests from industry and Republicans that it would dim coal's future. Under the law once the Environmental Protection Agency controls carbon at new plants, it will also control carbon at existing plants — a regulation the agency said Friday it would start work on immediately to meet a June 2014 deadline. The revised standards, the company said in a statement, "essentially eliminate coal as a future generation option."

The Environmental Protection Agency’s dramatic new power plant emissions standards already have touched off a firestorm within the coal industry and on Capitol Hill, with top Republicans promising to fight tooth-and-nail against President Obama’s climate-change agenda. The EPA, the leading actor in the White House’s ambitious global-warming initiative, released the limits on Friday. Hopes that they’d be much less stringent than previous proposals proved to be misplaced. Coal-state lawmakers from both parties are promising to push back. “The president is leading a war on coal and what that really means for Kentucky families is a war on jobs. And the...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration will press ahead Friday with tough requirements for new coal-fired power plants, moving to impose for the first time strict limits on the pollution blamed for global warming. The proposal would help reshape where Americans get electricity, away from a coal-dependent past into a future fired by cleaner sources of energy. It's also a key step in President Barack Obama's global warming plans, because it would help end what he called "the limitless dumping of carbon pollution" from power plants. Although the proposed rule won't immediatedly affect plants already operating, it eventually would force...

The Obama administration on Friday announced that it was not backing down from a confrontation with the coal industry and would press ahead with enacting the first federal carbon limits on the nation’s power companies. The proposed regulations, announced at the National Press Club by Gina McCarthy, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, are an aggressive move by Mr. Obama to bypass Congress on climate change with executive actions he promised in his inaugural address this year.

President Barack Obama's top energy and environmental officials said Wednesday there is a future for coal, despite a pending regulation aimed at limiting global warming pollution from new power plants that Republicans and the coal industry say will doom the fuel source. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz and EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, questioned at a House hearing, both said coal-fired power would continue. Coal makes up about 40 percent of U.S. electricity. "The rule will provide certainty for the future of new coal moving forward, and in terms of existing facilities, coal will continue to represent a significant source of energy...

<p>According to the Wall Street Journal, the Environmental Protection Agency will propose new rules next week banning the construction of new coal power plants in the United States that do not meet expensive new and ridiculous efficiency standards. The new standards will force power plants underground, literally.</p>

Prepare for your electric rates to go up, Chevy Jolt drivers. That's what happens when Obama goes on vacation. Under executive fiat, the EPA will shortly be forcing the shutdown of the rest of the coal fired plants in the United States. Obama closed about 20 percent of them in 2011 when he went on vacation in Martha's Vineyard.  With a bigger vacation budget this year, he probably figured "What the hell? Why not close the rest of them?" Since coal generates about half the electricity demanded in the US, the country will have to find other, more expensive ways...

Actor and long-time liberal Robert Redford said he hopes President Barack Obama has the “courage” to bypass Congress and make coal-powered power plants reduce their carbon emissions. In a video message for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Redford, an environmental activist, said that because Congress has not taken action to address climate change, Obama should. “Record setting heat and drought, rising sea levels and severe weather events like Hurricane Sandy: climate change is happening, fast,” Redford said. “We’ve got to stop making the problem worse and that means reducing carbon pollution from its biggest source, coal-fired power plants. It’s...

The European Investment Bank has signed a €440-million ($581 million) loan guarantee with the Slovenian government for a crisis-plagued 600 megawatt lignite TEŠ 6 coal plant, but the deal could yet be sunk by concerns about the climate and corruption. … Although the EU is formally pledged to reduce carbon dioxide emissions across the continent to 80-95% of 1990 levels by 2050, European development banks are covering some two-thirds of the Šoštanj plant’s €1.2 billion ($1.6 billion) costs. Objections about irregularities in the plant’s tendering process have created one of many icebergs that the plant’s funders will need to navigate....

It’s a bad omen for free enterprise, prosperity and liberty when normally warring special interest groups such as big business and progressive activists agree on public policy. During President Obama’s first term big business interests led by the pharmaceutical industry joined the union lobby in successfully making ObamaCare the law of the land. Shortly after Obama’s re-election, history may be repeating itself this time regarding energy policy. While it’s known that politics makes strange bedfellows none can be more bizarre than former White House green jobs czar Van Jones and Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson agreeing on a carbon tax....

Ministries in Appalachia are bracing for a tough winter as hundreds of residents have been furloughed or lost their jobs because of cutbacks in coal production amid the nation's changing energy industry. A single employer, Arch Coal, laid off 750 workers across Appalachia in August. Other companies have been forced to idle employees or close operations.

Over the weekend, hundreds of Ohio coal miners stood in line to get into a rally hosted by not pro-union President Obama, but by presidential hopeful Mitt Romney. After all, you can't unionize if you don't have a job.  Mitt Romney today stood in front of eastern Ohioans seemingly straight out of the mine — hard hats, smudged faces, and blue and gray uniforms — as he accused President Obama of “waging war” on coal. On the outskirts of Beallsville, there’s no doubt that coal is king. Signs dot the rural roads: “Stop the war on coal. Fire Obama.” There...