The American Spectator

Today I read in Greenwire, “ENERGY: Enviro regulations poised to close 20% of coal plants — study “. OK. So, we’re prepared to lose 10% of our electricity production, right? We’re replacing it, right, as well as adding to this because of promised economic growth (and it will come: name a recession that didn’t end) which, however anemic it is projected to be, is still growth?

Well, no. Other EPA regulations than those at the heart of the above-cited document are blocking new steel from going in the ground just as the threat of them has for a couple of years now. According to The Washington Post, in 2010, “Construction did not begin on a single new coal-fired power plant in the United States for the second straight year,” with plans for 38 new plants dropped and even more older plants scheduled for retirement. Thanks, War on Coal, of which we have centuries of supply. Domestic supply.

But President Obama plans to double our renewable energy production. Alrighty, then. There’s a percent and a half or so to offset the 10% we need just to tread water. But, of course, these require ‘fossil’ plants to back them up since they mostly don’t produce anything. That’s a problem. Maybe not as much of one if the administration had not initiated an effort to nip the natural gas boom in the bud. But, such is life. Panels are right now being established to determine that hydraulic fracturing is posing the greatest threat our drinking water supply has ever seen. Just as water quality was newly invoked to give the Mayfly sudden prominence, as the linchpin of the bid to stop Appalachian coal mining.

And the result of Obama’s oil spill commission, a huge shocker given it was intentionally stacked with anti-energy green activists, is to add more bureaucracy than exists now with an effective moratorium — a permitorium — on offshore exploration for and production of gas and oil.

This is all what they mean when they say they want to reduce our dependence of foreign sources of energy: they want to stop production of domestic energy. And some people fell for it.

Again, sorry to rub it in, but I told you so.