The Obama EPA is getting ready to shut down the construction of new coal-fired power plants, as reported by the Washington Post:
The proposed rule — years in the making and approved by the White House after months of review — will require any new power plant to emit no more than 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt of electricity produced. The average U.S. natural gas plant, which emits 800 to 850 pounds of CO2 per megawatt, meets that standard; coal plants emit an average of 1,768 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt.
Industry officials and environmentalists said in interviews that the rule, which comes on the heels of tough new requirements that the Obama administration imposed on mercury emissions and cross-state pollution from utilities within the past year, dooms any proposal to build a coal-fired plant that does not have costly carbon controls.
“This standard effectively bans new coal plants,” said Joseph Stanko, who heads government relations at the law firm Hunton and Williams and represents several utility companies. “So I don’t see how that is an ‘all of the above’ energy policy.”
Well, you see, it’s “all of the above” except for coal. And oil. You can have any flavor of energy you want, provided it’s “green.” Which means “fantastically expensive, controlled by a top Obama contributor, and doesn’t work very well.”
Coal currently provides about 40 percent of America’s power supply. Although existing plants are exempted from the most stringent of these new EPA regulations, the Post reports that utility companies “plan to shut down more than 300 boilers, representing more than 42 gigawatts of electricity generation - nearly 13 percent of the nation’s coal-fired electricity - rather than upgrade them with pollution-control technology.” Coal-fired energy production will begin dying of old age, and the EPA just issued a do-not-resuscitate order.
This should do wonders for electric bills, particularly for those living in areas that depend heavily on coal plants for power. Americans for Prosperity recently cited studies that showed the Obama EPA tacking an extra 12 percent onto electricity bills nationwide, with up to double that effect in certain areas. They’re on track to wipe out a million jobs, too… and that was before the “New Source Performance Standard” came down from Olympus.
This is all being done in the name of “global warming,” a primitive and discredited superstition you have no choice but to subscribe to, as it is the official religion of our central government. Just to repeat the point for anyone who was unclear, there is no global warming. The Wall Street Journal ran an article emphasizing this on Tuesday:
What is happening to global temperatures in reality? The answer is: almost nothing for more than 10 years. Monthly values of the global temperature anomaly of the lower atmosphere, compiled at the University of Alabama from NASA satellite data, can be found at the website http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/. The latest (February 2012) monthly global temperature anomaly for the lower atmosphere was minus 0.12 degrees Celsius, slightly less than the average since the satellite record of temperatures began in 1979.
[…] There has indeed been some warming, perhaps about 0.8 degrees Celsius, since the end of the so-called Little Ice Age in the early 1800s. Some of that warming has probably come from increased amounts of CO2, but the timing of the warming—much of it before CO2 levels had increased appreciably—suggests that a substantial fraction of the warming is from natural causes that have nothing to do with mankind.
Frustrated by the lack of computer-predicted warming over the past decade, some IPCC supporters have been claiming that "extreme weather" has become more common because of more CO2. But there is no hard evidence this is true. After an unusually cold winter in 2011 (December 2010-February 2011) the winter of 2012 was unusually warm in the continental United States. But the winter of 2012 was bitter in Europe, Asia and Alaska.
Also this week, the long-running operation by global warming con artists to discredit the existence of the “Medieval Warm Period” collapsed, as hard evidence of global warming and cooling cycles during the pre-industrial era was discovered. From the UK Daily Mail:
Current theories of the causes and impact of global warming have been thrown into question by a new study which shows that during medieval times the whole of the planet heated up.
It then cooled down naturally and there was even a 'mini ice age'.
A team of scientists led by geochemist Zunli Lu from Syracuse University in New York state, has found that contrary to the ‘consensus’, the ‘Medieval Warm Period’ approximately 500 to 1,000 years ago wasn’t just confined to Europe.
In fact, it extended all the way down to Antarctica – which means that the Earth has already experience global warming without the aid of human CO2 emissions.
But the high priests of the global warming cult have spoken, Barack Obama is their acolyte, and your mandatory tithe will be extracted from your utility bills.
