The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is poised to release global warming restrictions that will effectively ban the construction of coal-fired power plants, the Washington Post reports this morning. According to the Post, the new restrictions could be announced as early as today.
Assuming the Washington Post article is true, an unelected federal bureaucracy has in one fell swoop taken away one of the nation’s greatest economic resources. The United States of America is the Saudi Arabia of coal, but now the EPA has ruled we cannot use coal anymore. Even though coal is our least expensive source of electricity, this bountiful resource will now sit in the ground unused.
President Obama’s professed “all of the above” strategy is being painfully exposed for what it has been all along – “none of the above.” The Keystone Pipeline has been scuttled, oil and natural gas permitting on federal lands is virtually nonexistent, and affordable coal electricity will soon be a thing of the past.
It should not come as a surprise that this administration has kept its word about purposefully driving up the price of energy in order to leave no affordable alternatives to radical environmentalists’ preferred wind and solar power. As a nation, we have only ourselves to blame for allowing this to happen.
