Thursday, April 05, 2012

Our Once King Coal

According to authorities, the United States is the Saudi Arabia of coal resources.  Over one half of all U.S. electricity is produced by coal-fired power plants.  Yet, President Obama has been diligently working to keep his campaign promise to kill the coal industry (see: Washington Times Article) just as he is apparently trying to kill oil production on government-owned lands and off shore (and stop cheap oil from reaching our refineries via the Keystone pipeline.)  So there is at least one campaign promise that our imperial President is keeping.  He says that he is working overtime to create jobs yet is pulling out all stops to kill them. 

Surely all those green-energy companies that The Barry has so richly subsidized (and have gone belly-up) are not going to supply the jobs that his Pollyanna-ish Energy Department has claimed.  Nor are they going to fill the electricity gap that the closing of existing coal-powered plants and the moratorium on building new ones would produce.  The Chinese are building one (dirty) new coal-powered plant a week and, as a result have become by far the largest producer of CO2 emissions in the world (not that there is anything wrong with that.)  See the below 2009 chart to understand the dramatic dynamics of world CO2 production (click on the chart to make it bigger):


Our President is perfectly happy with our exporting coal to China (see: AP Story) so that they can produce more electricity and loaning money to Brazil so that they can off-shore drill for more oil, yet not allow his own country to do the same.  He can cripple us with a debt burden that even our great-grandchildren will be paying back.  He can try to nationalize 1/6 of our economy.  He can take over the student loan industry and more than half our car industry.  He can sub-rosa try to kill our missile-defense system.  He can cozy up to the Islamic radicals of the world (when he isn't killing them) while abandoning our allies (such as Israel).  And he can attack the Supreme Court with bombastic rhetoric.  Is Obama really so anti-us that he would purposely make such bone-headed moves?  The sad conclusion is unfortunately, yes, and four more years of his smiling chicanery will certainly leave us in a hole from which we likely cannot extract ourselves.

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