Coal-Bama
Energy Scare Tactics Wide Right
By Richard Martin, 11-03-08
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This morning, on E-Day Minus 1, I got two emails from coal industry associations claiming that Barack Obama wants to “bankrupt” the coal industry. They’re equally bogus.
“Obama Plan To ‘Bankrupt’ Clean Coal Would Cost Hundreds of Thousands Of Jobs,” trumpeted a release from the Western Business Roundtable. The statement cited “news reports that Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama intends to make it so costly to build advanced clean coal power plants with carbon capture and sequestration that it will ‘bankrupt’ any company that tries to do so.
“I am shocked that any candidate for public office, Democrat or Republican, would suggest bankrupting any industry, much less one that literally keeps America’s lights on each day,” Wyoming state senator Bill Vasey , a Democrat, said in a release from the pro-drilling-and-mining group Americans for American Energy.
The AAE release did not cite any actual statements from Obama, taking it on faith that he intends to “bankrupt” the coal industry. The WBR statement, though, provided Obama’s actual words – words that the flaks producing these misleading press missives either didn’t read or chose to ignore.
Here’s what Obama said, in an interview earlier this year with the San Francisco Chronicle:
“What I’ve said is that we would put a cap and trade system in place that is as aggressive, if not more aggressive, than anybody else’s out there. … That will create a market in which whatever technologies are out there that are being presented, whatever power plants that are being built, that they would have to meet the rigors of that market and the ratcheted down caps that are being placed, imposed every year. So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.
Adds Obama later in the interview: “If technology allows us to use coal in a clean way, we should pursue it.”
So if you actually look at what he’s saying, it’s No. 1, we should create a cap-and-trade system that will use market forces to make future conventional coal-fired plants non-viable, and No. 2, we should pursue clean coal plants to the degree that the technology develops to enable them.
That’s a long way from threatening to “bankrupt clean coal,” isn’t it?
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Comments
Obama obviously supports carbon taxation so punitive that new coal plants would be economically unviable at any price. Let me remind you that energy prices were a major prick to the economic bubble that just popped so spectacularly.
Let me also remind you that the technology for "sin free" sequestered coal is not extant yet.
Let me also remind you that a coal tax that makes new plants with high reduction technology complete losers would also pound EXISTING coal generation, something like 57% of our national base load, into dust.
Even if you can't understand what Obama said, we readers can.
Our wind is our future; with Obama's help we will be able to power our boats with it because it, wind power is the wave of the future.
People all across the nation will want our electricity from our wind because 50% of the nations power plants will be out of business because those black hearted bastards used coal of all things to power evil industry, Obama will really teach them a lesson.
With our windfall profits (pun intended) we could lobby Obama, Pelosi, and Reid for about ten minutes so they would close down the evil Idaho National Laboratory and end nuclear research forever and we could harvest the prodigious winds of the Idaho desert there as well.
Obama is going to usher in our progressive nirvana where we kill evil industry liquidate all their black ink and give it to all us progressives so that industry has no more money than us.
The world will like us so much after we bitch slap corporate America and capitulate on the war on terror, Obama at last will have a chance to make reparations to the United Nations for all the wrongs we have done. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton will be able to disband their organizations because Exxon Mobil’s evil profits could be redirected for repatriations for African Americans.
At last we will all be equal!
See Daryl the propagandist post! Post, Daryl, post...
“To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.” — Thomas Jefferson, letter to Joseph Milligan, April 6, 1816
I guess Jed didn't like my parody.
The rich and well-to-do will do just fine under the Obama Administration.
Obama will not take away anyone's guns.
Do me a favor, check back in 8 years and let me know what happened.
I hope you are right, the rich have a better chance of remaining solvent due to their ability to diversify abound the world, on the bright side it will improve opportunity outside the United States.
Those that will be slaughtered are those that are trying to enter the entrepreneur class, Joe the Plumber, Cory the Well Driller - http://daryl-l-hunter.blogspot.com/2008/10/joe-well-driller-aka-cory-miller-dear.html
The Cory Miller is the quintessential American story, work hard and succeed. Cory had many opportunities to fail operating on the knifes edge of success/failure.
If Obama wins today many more Americans like Cory Miller will fall off the failure side of the knifes edge as the government has plans to stack the deck against them.
If I were you as a director of the WildWest Institute, I would be a little more concerned about corporate America’s Double Bottom as I would bet that your funding is a product of Corporate America’s Double Bottom Line.
When Obama raises taxes on corporate America the first thing to be jettisoned will be the – Double Bottom Line. = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_bottom_line
Environmentalists seem to celebrate the demise of entrepreneurialism and the fiscal health of whole communities so I suspect that crippling entrepreneurial dreams will be a net gain for environmentalism even though it will imperil funding for environmental organizations. Oh yeh, Obama will step in when private donors drop out because of excessive red ink.
Jed - I found out all about the Double Bottom Line on the bumper sticker of a Prius.
Clearly this four year infomercial "campaign" has lowered the bar...
but thankfully our state (CO) now allows them to remain open and
JW can introduce it's scotch for the masses...JW Black Tuesday!