The American Spectator : Obama’s War on Prosperity

The American Spectator : Obama’s War on Prosperity

President Obama’s Administration is beginning to feel like one endless freshman orientation, you remember the kind where they used to sit you down the first week of college and tell you you’d been oppressing blacks and women all your life and had to spend the next four years doing penance?

Four years ago he began his Inauguration by announcing that fossil fuels were a thing of the past and that we would now get our energy from “wind, sun and soil.” He spent the next four years trying unsuccessfully to push cap-and-trade through Congress and subsidizing a bunch of scraggly “renewable energy” projects that haven’t produced much of anything except a few notable scandals.

Now with unemployment still pushing 8 percent, with participation in the work force at a historic low of 62 percent, with the economy limping along in a five-year doldrums, and with the financial system starting to tremble as Ben Bernanke lets up the pressure on interest rates, the President has decided to stake his second term on — another initiative against coal! This time there isn’t even any blather about “creating jobs” or “building a new economy.” We’re just going to punish ourselves, pure and simple. Coal plants are going to shut down, electricity prices are going to soar, people are going to be put out of work, but that’s just too bad. We’ve sinned by putting “toxic” carbon dioxide into the atmosphere — even our very breathing implicates us! — and we’re just going to have to suffer the consequences.

There are several things that can be said about this. First, if coal plants are shut down, what is going to take their place? The reflexive answer is “natural gas.” Wholly against his inclinations, President Obama has managed to preside over the greatest fossil fuel revival in American history. Production of gas and oil have soared to new heights so that talk about scarcity and “peak oil” are almost forgotten. All of this, of course, has taken place on private lands, in the midsection of the country, outside the purview of federal regulations, far from Washington, so that the country is being divided more and more into the productive breadbasket west of the Appalachians and east of the Rockies, and the “consuming” centers of the East and West Coasts that want to drive away anything to do with energy production from their borders.

Click link above for entire article