Keeping Americans in the Dark

By Alan Caruba

After endless speeches and the biggest protest march in recent U.S. history, one would think that the Obama administration would get the message that Americans do not want them or the present Congress to tamper with Medicare other than to eliminate waste.

The administration’s top spokesmen, however, professed to know little about the march by nearly two million Americans and, at the same time, to know more about the nation’s healthcare system than those inside it who say there simply are not enough physicians and nurses to meet even today’s needs.

Americans have figured out they don’t want Obamacare, but a regime that has its own agenda and intends to impose it on an unwilling public is not interested in the voice of the people.

If you think Obamacare is a nightmare or as Rush Limbaugh now calls it “crap legislation”, you have no idea what the Obama gang have in store for you. H.R.2454, the American Clean Energy And Security Act of 2009, barely passed the House in June. It is also known as the Waxman-Markey bill and, most generally, as Cap-and-Trade.

It is a monstrosity that everyone, including its sponsors, agree is a massive tax on all energy use. The minute you walk in your home or apartment and turn on the lights, you will feel the impact of this bill. It is currently marinating in the Senate.

Here’s what almost no one is talking about. At what point will America begin to experience California-style blackouts and brownouts when there simply is insufficient capacity to generate electricity?

Let’s begin by understanding that Cap-and-Trade is based on something that is NOT happening and therefore requires no legislation. Moreover, there is NO scientific justification for reducing or sequestering carbon dioxide, a trade gas that is vital to all plant growth on Earth and, by extension, to all life on Earth.

Cap-and-Trade refers to so-called “carbon credits”, essentially a new form of financial instrument to be sold, purchased, and traded among utilities and industries that generate and use energy. It exists because Congress believes “global warming” is occurring when, in fact, it stopped ten years ago.

The American Clean Energy And Security Act is a complete and total deception.

The “clean energy” to which it refers is wind and solar energy which provides just about one percent of all the electricity in the nation and exists only because it is heavily subsidized with taxpayer and energy consumer dollars. These are quite possibly the two most stupid ways to generate electricity ever invented.

As for energy “Security”, you need to know that the Obama administration is doing everything in its power to restrict the use of coal, a provider of just over half of all the electricity generated in America, and is opposed to the exploration and development of any new sources of oil in or offshore of the nation.

America is being stripped of any “security” that would result from access to our own vast reserves of coal or of oil and natural gas.

In early September, the Associated Press reported that the EPA has identified 79 coal mine permits “for review.” When the EPA says it is reviewing something, it really means it is setting up the process to withdraw permission. Using the Clean Water Act as cover, 49 mines in Kentucky, 23 mines in West Virginia, six in Ohio and one in Tennessee will get the axe. The impact on the economies of these states, the loss of jobs, and the loss of the coal is incalculable at this point.

That, however, is just one example of the Obama War on Coal in America. In August, the board of South Carolina’s largest power producer, Santee Cooper, voted to suspend construction of a proposed $2.2 billion Pee Dee Energy Campus, a 600-MW coal-fired power plant in Florence County. No plant. No energy. No jobs. Et cetera.

I could regale you with the many other ways Obama is trying to shut down the nation, but you get the point.

As Pogo famously declared, “We have met the enemy and they is us!” In this case, the enemy is in the White House and in the U.S. Congress.