The Whack-Jobs Whack More Energy Jobs
By John Ransom
TownHall.com
As the Obama administration tries to makeover their reputation as out-of-touch, ultra-liberal, urban dilettantes and sophisticates, perhaps they should rethink letting whack-job enviros make energy policy for the nation.
Because even with rising energy prices and complaints amongst the business community that the administration's regulatory burdens verge on the ridiculous, Obama continues his relentless assault on the domestic supply of energy with an assist from the most radical fringe element of environmentalists.
“Aging coal-fired power plants across the West could be forced to install costly pollution control equipment,” reports the AP “under an agreement between federal regulators and environmentalists aimed at jump-starting a delayed clean air initiative.”
The agreement entered into by the Obama administration with the environmental whack-jobs WildEarth Guardians will cost utilities at least $1.5 billion and put at risk the operation of 18 coal-fired electric plants in Colorado, Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming by next year.
This is how energy policy in the mostly-clueless Obama administration is made, in case you were wondering why joblessness was so high in the U.S.
As the Washington Times writes: “Less than 24 hours earlier, White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley heard heated complaints from business leaders about burdensome government regulations at a meeting of the National Association of Manufacturers in Washington. As Mr. Daley listened to tales of the administration’s interference in industry, he replied, ‘Sometimes, you can’t defend the indefensible.’”
Sure, but you can let environmental extremists write energy laws.
So who is WildEarth Guardians?
Oh, just your average, everyday anti-capitalist working with the Obama administration on the issue de jour.
Here’s what WildEarth’s founder, Sam Hitt, blogged last year under “Revolutionary Rant #8”:
“Here’s [h]ow a revolution could happen. First, a general disillusionment with the power structure, like the distrust of capitalism and corporations that is widespread in America today. Then a mismanaged crisis, such as the global financial meltdown that fundamentally delegitimizes the system….But to overcome the gravitational pull of the old capitalist paradigm, there must be a critical threshold of steadfast citizens willing to risk the new, not reform the old.”
It only gets better.
Turns out that WildEarth Guardians are mostly a bunch of lawyers and engineers with the job to pursue litigation in order to obstruct energy projects to protect rocks, trees, unicorns and rainbows, at the expense of humans.
You thought “death-panels” were scary? These guys have advanced degrees in the fine art of human-species loathing.
As WildEarth staff member Taylor Jones, who has an M. Sc. in Conservation Biology and Sustainable Development from the University of Wisconsin-Madison- yes, that Madison- says, “Beings are numberless; I vow to save them all."
Rhetoric like that certainly deserves the added benefit of determining energy policy for the rest of us. Maybe this is where Obama got the vow to put a million rubberband-powered cars on the road in four weeks.
Except of course, Taylor Jones won’t be saving the grandmother living on a fixed income in Wyoming who can’t afford the rate hike that utilities will have to impose on us because they can’t use the cheapest source of energy around, coal. The grandmother, who probably counts as a sentient being…well, she’s on her own.
Underpinning the WildEarth philosophy is the misanthropic belief that earth would be better off without humans.
“Now they're prepared to be the guardians of the earth - the WildEarth that is,” writes La Jicarita News, “the earth sin gente [without people]. That's the philosophy that underlies their mission: saving nature apart from man, who is the scourge of the planet.”
Thank goodness Obama has so many guardians to look after getting rid of the rest of us.