-By Warner Todd Huston
Back in 2008 Barack Obama was given little notice when he told the editorial board of the San Francisco Chronicle that if he became president he’d work to destroy the coal industry, both for miners and power providers. Now, as his presidency comes to an end we see he has kept that promise.
This month, despite that coal is still one of the world’s leading sources of energy, America’s biggest coal company, Peabody Energy, filed for bankruptcy. Peabody joins a growing list of bankruptcies of other American coal concerns including Alpha Natural Resources, Arch Coal, and Patriot Coal.
Granted the industry had problems before Obama came along, but those problems became but a small part of the insurmountable obstacles put in their way by Obama’s policy to “bankrupt” the coal industry.
And before you think we here at Publius Forum are just being hyperbolic, no, “bankrupt” is exactly the term Obama used in his interview in 2008.
Here it is in Obama’s own voice…
The obvious plan of the destruction of the industry became crystal clear by 2012 when Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency began to perpetrate a major powergrab by forcing a long list of punishing fines onto the energy industry that has, indeed, led to bankruptcy for many of our power plants and coal supplying companies.
As Breitbart News’ Steve Milloy wrote, “The coal industry was ill-prepared to fight the EPA — an aggressively arrogant, if not entirely rogue, activist agency. The EPA took advantage of the fact that its rules didn’t target the coal industry directly, but instead pressured the coal industry’s customers — coal-burning electric utilities. The EPA’s regulations forced the utilities to reduce emissions from their coal plants.”
Obama is responsible for making all of us pay more for our power not to mention the loss of thousands of jobs in the mining and power industries.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing news, opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that wrote articles on U.S. history for several American history magazines. Huston is a featured writer for Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart News, and he appears on such sites as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, Federalist Papers, and many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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