Environmentalist, educator, and author of Eaarth (because evidently one “a” is not enough), Bill McKibben, has been traveling to colleges and universities across the country speaking to students about the dire circumstances that we are facing on the planet.  He has recruited the involvement of people in our religious communities and calls himself one of the “Methodist Mafia.” Introduced to the audience as “most important person in the world,” McKibben began by saying that he was there as a professional “bummer outer” (obviously taking it to a level the students would understand).  He has been studying and writing about climate change since 1989 and is in a panic over the drastic changes we are seeing in the earth’s climate.  Apparently, scientists underestimated how much we humans affected the climate and we must do something NOW, before all of this is irreversible.

McKibben explained that, at the rate we are going, we will see a five degree increase in global temperature within this century and that every degree of increase will reduce crop output by ten percent. We cannot let this happen for ethical, moral as well as practical reasons. The only solution is that we must get off of coal, oil and gas FAST! As it stands, food prices are going up and millions of people are starving. Americans burn more fossil fuel in two days than the people of the Sahara do in one year.

Our political leaders are not making changes because of threats from the fossil fuel industry.  The “greens” are becoming desperate as they see their oh-so-carefully laid plans for wealth redistribution falling apart. McKibben’s message to the students is that they can no longer talk lightly about the very survival of the planet. He is building a movement to organize the globe and force President Obama to honor his campaign promises to reduce our fossil fuel dependence. America must reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by eighty percent by 2020. We only have five to ten years before the damage is irreversible.

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Several reports of late reveal that new regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency will cause utility providers to shut down a number of coal-fired power plants. It is time to expose the history of the thuggish tactics utilized by the EPA in promoting a “green” energy agenda, specifically during the Clinton/Gore administration.

A press release from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) dated November 3, 1999 reported:

“U.S. SUES ELECTRIC UTILITIES IN UNPRECEDENTED ACTION TO ENFORCE THE CLEAN AIR ACT”.  The release states that “seven separate suits allege that the electric utility companies — American Electric Power, Cinergy, FirstEnergy, Illinois Power, Southern Indiana Gas & Electric Company, Southern Company, Tampa Electric Company — or their subsidiaries, and the TVA, violated the Clean Air Act by making major modifications to many of their plants without installing the equipment required to control smog, acid rain and soot.”

In Florida, Tampa Electric Company (TECO) was the first utility in the country to reach a settlement agreement with the EPA and the Department of Justice.  Under the terms of the settlement agreement, as outlined in a statement from then EPA Administrator Carol M. Browner, Tampa Electric Company agreed to pay $3.5 million in civil penalties, along with another “$10 million for environmentally beneficial projects designed to mitigate the impact of their pollution.”  The entire Consent Decree can be viewed here.  A visit to Tampa Electric Company’s website contains a declaration that in 1999 they were the “first utility in the nation to develop a plan with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to address its coal-fired utility initiative.” When questioned about the connection between Tampa Electric Company’s website statement regarding their cooperation with the EPA and the announced settlement with the EPA and DOJ, a source inside the industry replied “Do you mean did they hold a gun to their head?  Absolutely!”

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The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) was held on June 14, 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.  At this conference, referred to as the Rio Earth Summit, the participants crafted a blueprint for the world, commonly known as Agenda 21.

In its preamble, Agenda 21, Chapter 1 states “Humanity stands at a defining moment in history. We are confronted with a perpetuation of disparities between and within nations, a worsening of poverty, hunger, ill health and illiteracy, and the continuing deterioration of the ecosystems on which we depend for our well-being.  However, integration of environment and development concerns and greater attention to them will lead to the fulfilment of basic needs, improved living standards for all, better protected and managed ecosystems and a safer, more prosperous future. No nation can achieve this on its own; but together we can – in a global partnership for sustainable development.”

In other words, the goal of the United Nations is social and economic justice through a redistribution of wealth scheme using the threat of anthropogenic (man-made) global warming or climate change to implement the market based solution of carbon emissions trading. The International Monetary Fund has proposed a plan for a Green Fund to achieve this goal.

Following this Earth Summit President George H. W. Bush declared:

“Effective execution of Agenda 21 will require a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has ever experienced –a major shift in the priorities of both governments and individuals and an unprecedented redeployment of human and financial resources. This shift will demand that a concern for the environmental consequences of every human action be integrated into individual and collective decision-making at every level.”

–signed by G.H. Bush, 1992

Despite pressure from the United Nations partners, U.S. delegates did not sign on to the convention.

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WaPo has a front page piece titled (in the print edition, and teased as such on the home page), “The climate issue takes a back seat”. It begins by noting that “Heather Zichal, deputy assistant to the president for energy and climate-change policy, makes a forceful case for the need to slash greenhouse-gas emissions and boost the efficiency of cars and small trucks: The moves will cut America’s oil consumption, foster the nation’s energy independence, save consumers money at the pump and help revive domestic auto manufacturers.”

Its second paragraph is an intended-to-be-impactful, lone sentence, isolated in the physical layout: “What she doesn’t volunteer is that they will curb climate change”.

WaPo’s best defense for this stunt is that it wasn’t really saying the ‘global warming’ rules would curb climate change, but just saying the White House aide doesn’t volunteer that they do (the reason for this being a Stan Greenberg poll “urging Democrats to play down ‘global warming’“, dropping “warming”, “climate” and “cap-and-trade” in favor of re-branding the effort as “clean energy”. That is, in effect counseling Dems to be even less candid than their Plan A of an end-of-days  fear-based campaign aimed at attaining public acquiescence for state-created energy scarcity).

Later in the piece, WaPo quotes a greenie as saying “I don’t blame the president for the failure of climate legislation, but I do hold him accountable for allowing opponents to fill the void with misinformation and outright lies about climate change”.

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The upheaval in the Mideast has brought gasoline prices front and center once again.  Traders are building a risk factor into forward purchase contracts and gasoline prices per gallon now hover around $4 a gallon with no end in sight.

Recent events have conspired to seriously complicate the search for safe alternative energy sources. The horrific earthquake in Japan and the catastrophic tsunami that followed 30 minutes later, caused untold death and destruction and the partial meltdown of some of Japan’s nuclear reactors, and triggered a release of radioactive material into the atmosphere with health ramifications that are, as of now, uncertain to say the least.

When the full extent of the damage at the reactors is finally known, the news will not be good.  Not only will Japan, which relies on nuclear reactors for a substantial portion of its energy needs have to find an alternative source of energy, but the U.S., which has not built a new reactor since the Three Mile Island incident in 1978, will surely have to reassess whether additional nuclear reactors can be built, given the understandable fear that has been engendered by events in Japan.  Anti‑nuclear advocates now can point to new dangers and, in fact, an enormous reassessment of prevailing safety assumptions will have to be immediately undertaken.  The need for caution and further study will delay any new nuclear reactors now on the drawing boards.

Environmentalists have thrown roadblocks in front of any efforts to recover oil from known sources within our control (e.g., Alaska or offshore.)  Instead they advocate pouring money into so‑called green energy – wind farms and solar panels.  While these alternatives may play a meaningful role as future sources of energy, they will not, for the foreseeable future, replace the fossil fuel needed to supply our current needs and provide for economic growth.

For solar or wind energy to be a meaningful alternative source of energy, storage technology would have to be vastly improved.  Wind power like solar power is available only intermittently thus requiring that the output produced be either stored or immediately transported over transmission lines.  Neither solar nor wind power can sufficiently provide the electricity needs of this nation without staggering investments in storage and transmission.  The NIMBY (not in my backyard) factor teaches us that environmentalists and others will fight tooth and nail about above or below ground lines.  Thus, even if wind and solar become viable as major sources of the U.S. energy supply, it will be decades before these sources play a meaningful role in the national energy picture.

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I just had forwarded to me an email written by ThirdWay.org calling for more federal intervention in the energy markets, further supporting politically deigned winners from the pool of losers that must petition for aid in order to exist. Which of course doesn’t read all that differently than the old, First Way (post-FDR, that is). But it’s got a Blair-ite marketing panache that’s worth a try, anyway.

This was noteworthy for a couple of reasons, including its acknowledgment that the renewable energy mandate you will soon hear very much about, as the next ‘other way to skin the cat’ of energy rationing, is so far as your wallet is concerned the same as the very cap-and-trade scheme for which it is Plan B:

“China is about to [sic] put a price on carbon. The UK and EU are already there. So how can the U.S. begin to compete for the $2 trillion clean energy market? …We can help do that by establishing a national clean energy standard.”

Windmill mandate equals cap-and-trade. According to its champions. Got it.

More eye-catching was the whole $2 trillion thing. Because also today per Greenwire (subscription required) Sen. John Kerry continued his silly (very silly) advocacy of this agenda — if in less humorous fashion, seeking to take advantage of tragedy for political aims: “Infrastructure, clean energy can unite Congress after Tucson tragedy — Kerry” (noting that, hey, Cong. Giffords was really big on renewable energy supports, so…).

He “call[ed] for renewed support for investment in the energy economy — especially ‘green energy’ — where the United States, he said, is losing its competitive edge in a $6 trillion market to the rest of the world and China in particular “.

Is Sen. Kerry saying, as this reporter implies, that the renewable energy market is $6 trillion? Exaggeration in support of the green agenda? Quelle horreur, Sen. Kerry! (more…)

From the Associated Press:

Stymied in Congress, the Obama administration is moving unilaterally to clamp down on power plant and oil refinery greenhouse emissions, announcing plans for developing new standards over the next year.

In a statement posted on the agency’s website late Thursday, Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa Jackson said the aim was to better cope with pollution contributing to climate change.

“We are following through on our commitment to proceed in a measured and careful way to reduce GHG pollution that threatens the health and welfare of Americans,” Jackson said in a statement. She said emissions from power plants and oil refineries constitute about 40 percent of the greenhouse gas pollution in this country.

President Barack Obama had said two days after the midterm elections that he was disappointed Congress hadn’t acted on legislation achieving the same end, signaling that other options were under consideration.

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Enron, joined by BP, invented the global warming industry. I know because I was in the room. This was during my storied three-week or so stint as Director of Federal Government Relations for Enron in the Spring of 1997, back when Enron was everyone’s darling in Washington. It proved to be an eye-opening experience that didn’t last much beyond my expressing concern about this agenda of using the state to rob Peter, paying Paul, drawing Paul’s enthusiastic support.

In fact, this case was not entirely uncommon in that the entire enterprise was Paul’s idea to begin with. Which left me as the guy on the street corner muttering about this evil company cooking up money-making charades, to nothing but rolled eyes until the, ah, unpleasantness and the opportunity it afforded to take a few gratuitous swings at George W. Bush. Buy me a beer and I will regale you with tales of reporters from Newsweek and the Washington Post desperately seeking assistance to spin, respectively, Enron as having urged Bush away from the Kyoto agenda as opposed to having crafted it, and Enron’s global warming activism as its one redeeming feature.

The basic truth is that Enron, joined by other ‘rent-seeking’ industries — making one’s fortune from policy favors from buddies in government, the cultivation of whom was a key business strategy — cobbled their business plan around ‘global warming’. Enron bought, on the cheap of course, the world’s largest windmill company (now GE Wind), the world’s second-largest solar panel interest (now BP), to join their world’s second-largest natural gas pipeline network. The former two will only make money under a system of massive mandates and subsidies (and taxes to pay for them); the latter would prosper spectacularly if this war on coal succeeded.

It then engaged green groups to scare people toward accepting those policies. That is what is known as a Baptist and Bootlegger coalition. I sat in on such meetings. Disgraceful.

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This week the EPA celebrates its 40th birthday. In honor of the occasion, they’ve launched a dedicated website called EPA@40, and it’s head, Lisa Jackson, will take off on a week-long party circuit designed to “highlight the impact of [the EPA's] efforts to clean up the air Americans breathe and the water they drink and the communities they live in” as well as her agency’s crusade to attend to “the unfinished business of the environmental movement.”

What started as a way to help the government respond to environmental disasters and spread conservation awareness, however, has metastasized into a bloated, over-reaching disaster of it’s own, championing extensive governmental intervention, curbing freedoms and, most recently, costing hard-working Americans their jobs, all in the name of preserving the environment.

In the midst of an economic downturn, the EPA will once again retool it’s famous, founding Clean Air Act, rewriting the historical legislation to suit Obama’s own bureaucratic needs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20% by 2020. Sounds fantastic, right? Well, it’ll have a devastating effect on the private sector:

Achieving that level of reduction in greenhouse gases won’t be easy or cheap. This immense new burden on the private sector comes at precisely the wrong time for an economy still struggling to create new jobs and reduce near double-digit unemployment…The cost estimates are indeed staggering, according to an econometric study by the Manufacturers Alliance that projects more than 7.3 million lost jobs by 2020. The hardest-hit states include Texas, which would lose 1.7 million jobs, and Louisiana, with 938,000 positions lost. Others include California (846,000), Illinois (396,000) and Pennsylvania (351,000). Total losses would reduce the nation’s gross domestic product by $1.7 trillion, according to the Manufacturers Alliance.”

Of course, these new standards wouldn’t just affect isolated industries or particular states.

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As some may recall, the filibuster-proof Senate did not move on cap-and-trade. In the past four years of Senate control, they did not try to ratify the US-signed, never unsigned Kyoto Protocol. Even after the filibuster-proof majority was lost by just a vote, the Senate failed to lift a finger to consider cap-n-trade. There just weren’t enough Democrats willing to buy in, or risk their jobs on this folly.

As my colleague Myron Ebell put it in Politico:

“The American people figured out that cap-and-trade was code for higher energy prices and reacted with righteous fury when House Members [passed the bill before going] home after the vote for the Fourth of July recess. After hearing the outcry, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid decided to postpone Senate debate on cap-and-trade and instead take up health care reform, which enjoyed much more public support.”

Funny ’cause it’s true.

So, naturally, over the weekend the Washington Post op-ed pages spilled forth the ritual line: It’s those mean Republicans wot done it. And boy are they blowing it.

So goes today’s argle bargle from Team Soros, acting out in response to the election and seeing their incremental progress toward energy rationing about to be swept aside. Now, after failing in a Left-wing cram-down, they wag their fingers and lecture us that the global warming agenda really should be a conservative priority but, hey, if we’re willing to cede the ground to them they’re more than happy to take credit! Don’t know what you’re missing! Although this will continue for two years, it is already tiresome.

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While falsely portraying it as a David versus Goliath event, the Institutional Left has been caught in an orchestrated effort to attack Charles Koch, while creating a public relations event around California’s ballot initiaitve, Prop 23. Koch openly supports the cause of Liberty and we know how much today’s left hates that. Not only that, sources have now confirmed that, while portraying itself as covering this story, a writer at the Huffington Post has actually conspired in the making of it. There is no room for credible journalism for such a practice.

Look for more on that at Big Journalism.

Charles Koch Challenged to Debate Prop. 23 by California Student Leader Joel Francis

Joel Francis, a Marine Corps veteran and senior at Cal State Los Angeles, has issued a debate challenge to Koch Industries’ billionaire CEO Charles Koch on his support for the disastrous Prop 23 attack on California’s climate and clean-energy progress.

This didn’t just happen because Francis is, allegedly, merely a student leader with a veteran’s cred. Francis and his effort are part of an effort by the so called California Student Sustainability Coalition. If you scroll to the bottom of their site and read the fine print, you’ll find this: “The California Student Sustainability Coalition is a project the Earth Island Institute.

To understand the actual viewpoint the Earth Island Institute represents, take a look at this press release from them after 9/11. These are the same people propping up Joel Francis today and paying the freight to push the effort. The record below demonstrates that.

U.S. Responds to Terrorist Attacks with Self-Righteous Arrogance

We need to correct the rightist spin of the Bush administration and media. This was not an “act of war.” This was an act of anger, desperation and indignation.

This was not an “attack on Freedom.” It was a politically targeted attack on the core structures of the U.S. military and the U.S.-dominated global financial structure.

This was not an “attack on all American people.” This was not the sort of flat-out terrorism that targets random innocents at a disco or a beach. The majority of the victims were, unfortunately, working for the Pentagon and various elements of multinational financial empires.

Below is just one press release from PR firm, Tiger Comm, being used to push the story out to the media and here is Serena Conner, of Tiger Comm.

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Many Californians live in California because they love the natural beauty that surrounds them at every turn. The beaches, the mountains and the desert are, in my mind, some of California’s greatest assets. There is nothing quite as satisfying as waking up on a morning like today and seeing the crisp outline of the San Bernardino mountain range capped in snow while enjoying 70 degree weather.

If we are being honest, the weather and natural beauty are probably some of the only things keeping many Californians from fleeing the state because of high taxes, unemployment, an inept state government and an oppressive business environment. It would make sense then, that we should try to protect those natural resources at all costs. This is the garbage that the opponents of Prop 23 would have you believe, where in today’s world everything not “green” might as well be labeled “poison”.

Take a look at just what Prop 23 is up against. In 2006, the California legislature passed AB 32, also known as the Global Warming Solutions Act. The mere name of the bill should give you the idea that they were trying to compensate for something with that lofty title, namely- common sense. What AB 32 did was create a government entity with incredible power not only to levy regulations on businesses that emit greenhouse gasses but also to create cap-and-trade laws to slow CO2 emissions.

The grand plan for AB 32 is to return California to 1990 levels of emissions over the course of 14 years, making 2020 the target year to achieve environmental nirvana. Obviously, reducing emissions isn’t a terrible idea… in a vacuum. But we don’t live in a vacuum and other factors have to be taken into account, mainly the economic cost and the loss of freedom that would come from turning over something so arbitrary as ‘the right to emit’ to the jurisdiction of the government.

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I just returned from speaking to two terrific groups about California’s looming ballot initiative, Proposition 23, to delay implementation of the state’s climatically meaningless, economically suicidal state-level adoption of the Kyoto agenda, called AB 32.

On the flight out I pulled out my pocket Bastiat reader, which I carry everywhere but hadn’t re-read in a while. There, in the opening, brilliant essay “What is Seen and What is Not Seen” — a work that perfectly nails Obamanomics, and the entire ‘green jobs’ fallacy that is the latest re-branding of central planning (if in its most devastating form: mandating energy price hikes on top of generational debt) — I ran across a stunning reminder:

In noting what the state is going to do with the millions of francs voted, do not neglect to note also what the taxpayers would have done—and can no longer do—with these same millions. You see, then, that a public enterprise is a coin with two sides. On one, the figure of a busy worker, with this device: What is seen; on the other, an unemployed worker, with this device: What is not seen. The sophism that I am attacking in this essay is all the more dangerous when applied to public works, since it serves to justify the most foolishly prodigal enterprises. When a railroad or a bridge has real utility, it suffices to rely on this fact in arguing in its favor. But if one cannot do this, what does one do? One has recourse to this mumbo jumbo: “We must create jobs for the workers.”This means that the terraces of the Champ-de-Mars are ordered first to be built up and then to be torn down. The great Napoleon, it is said, thought he was doing philanthropic work when he had ditches dug and then filled in. He also said: “What difference does the result make? All we need is to see wealth spread among the laboring classes.”

Spread the wealth around. So here we have Obamanomics in a nutshell.

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President Obama’s imminent proposal to allow businesses to expense capital equipment purchases through the end of next year is something my colleagues at CEI, particularly Marlo Lewis, have been advocating for some time. Not as “stimulus”, mind you (though it should have some stimulative effect, which is not to condone the refusal to maintain current tax rates — that is, insistence on raising tax rates — as of January 1). But as a greenhouse gas emission reduction scheme.

The logic is simple and the Dutch actually showed (again, accidentally) how this works to reduce emissions: business do not replace capital equipment as early or often as they might like because the tax code disincentivizes it, with depreciation schedules instead of treating it like other business expenses. They therefore postpone purchasing newer, more efficient (and typically more energy efficient) equipment.

Change that, and they will pull through new technology into use.

In a way that is moving investments forward, a la cash for clunkers. But in other ways it is just smart and the right thing to do.

Here’s the downside: yes, you get emission reductions and not by harming economic growth, but actually encouraging it. However, the political class do not get to reward their constituencies with cap-n-trade wealth transfers from you and me to them, don’t increase the cost of energy, and obtain no new control over our lives.

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So, if you had any qualms with this article headlined on Drudge as “ GOLDMAN reveals where bailout cash went — overseas banks!“, you might want to check out this one in today’s Environment & Energy Daily (subscription required):

CLIMATE: Lawmakers to ponder U.S. aid commitments without cap-and-trade revenue

With prospects for a broad climate bill nearly dead this year, a House Foreign Affairs subpanel will meet tomorrow to probe how the United States can honor its climate finance commitments to the developing world without cap-and-trade revenue…

The world’s wealthy nations, including the United States, have pledged to raise $100 billion a year by 2020 for climate aid to low-emitting impoverished countries that, through one of climate change’s cruelest twists, are among the most vulnerable to the drought and floods that will accompany global warming.

That pledge, which includes $30 billion in quick-start funding over the next three years, was one of the most tangible successes of last December’s U.N. climate summit. The deal was critical in winning over many developing nations to sign onto the Copenhagen Accord, sparing the United Nations and President Obama a total fiasco in Denmark.

However, how this money will be raised remains very much in doubt in the United States, especially with the failure this year of comprehensive climate legislation. Both the House’s Waxman-Markey bill and the Senate’s Kerry-Lieberman bill shunted portions of their cap-and-trade revenue toward international climate aid.

Without this money, it will be extremely difficult to raise significant climate funds, wrote Michael Levi, senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations, on his blog.

“Raising [the funds] without cap-and-trade will almost certainly be impossible,” he wrote. “If others conclude from the current debacle that cap-and-trade is permanently dead in the United States, Washington will be in for a rough ride at the climate talks in Cancun in December.”

Oh. Well. We wouldn’t want that. If we can avoid people being mean to the State Department because those stingy American taxpayers won’t give them enough money, we should, at (apparently) all costs.

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The Hill reports today:

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) is suggesting a climate change bill could have better prospects in a lame-duck session.

Kerry made the comments to Bloomberg as the Senate abandoned plans to move on climate change legislation before the August break. The decision is expected to prevent a vote on the matter this year, though Kerry is still offering hope.

“I have to tell you, this is not dead. We are going to continue to work. It may well be that after the election — if that is what happens — I mean, we will continue to try over the next weeks, but if it is after the election, it may well be that some members are free and liberated and feeling that they can take a risk or do something. Or, you know, the whole political landscape may have changed in some way,” Kerry said Thursday in an interview with Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital With Al Hunt” that will be broadcast this weekend.

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Six taxpayers filed a lawsuit this week to invalidate an executive order issued by Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire. The taxpayers believe—with good reason—that the governor violated the doctrine of separation of powers by snatching a failed bill out of the legislative process and issuing it in the form of an executive order. They are being represented by the Evergreen Freedom Foundation, an Olympia-based government watchdog group.

Last year, after the Washington state legislature failed to pass a climate change bill championed by the governor, she took matters into her own hands by issuing an executive order directing the Departments of Ecology and Transportation to take action to reduce climate-changing greenhouse gas emissions and increase transportation and fuel-conservation options. At a press conference, Gov. Gregoire stressed that the executive order was intended to replace her failed legislation. “What we’ve done in the executive order is everything that was in that final bill—plus. Plus. There’s more in the executive order than what was in the final bill that did not pass the Legislature,” she told reporters.

It gives one pause to consider that Governor Gregoire should record herself talking for vetting purposes prior to making such admissions in public.

There are strong parallels in this case to what is happening on a national scale. President Obama’s drilling ban end-run around the law, for example, which has signaled his administration’s strategy to push through certain policies notwithstanding any legal restrictions. Or the passage of the so-called “health care reform” bill, which was rammed through in a suspect reconciliation process designed to bypass opposition. Or the arguably abusive use of signing statements by President Bush to tell agencies to ignore certain provisions of bills he disagreed with—1,200 times. President Obama intends to continue the practice, though he claims he will “act with caution and restraint, based only on interpretations of the Constitution that are well-founded.” I’m sure we’ll all sleep  better at night.

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Today’s Daily Express (London) opens with a stark reminder that there are consequences to the foolishness being crammed down on you now — and which will be voted upon in the Senate, we are told, at the end of this month.

BRITAIN faces years of blackouts and soaring electricity bills because of the drive toward green power, a leading energy expert warned last night.

A growing obsession with global warming and “renewable” sources threatens the stability of our supply.

Derek Birkett, a former Grid Control Engineer who has a lifetime’s experience in electricity supply throughout Britain, warned that the cost of the crisis could match that of the recent banking collapse.

And he claimed that renewable energy expectations were now nothing more than “dangerous illusions” which would hit  consumers hard in the pocket.

Yes. In fact, I just detailed this, with an emphasis on this particular UK canary in the coalmine of Obama’s energy, economic and environmental policies, in a book whose title may now come into a clearer focus: Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America.

Coal, nukes, anything that works is shrugged off on the promise of building massive, mind-bogglingly expensive and wildly insufficient offshore windfarms, instead. Of course we will, dear. Worse, here we have an aggressive war to actually close down existing electricity generating capacity in precisely the same vein Obama is fighting in court to impose what the first judge to hear it called an irrational and economically devastating moratorium on offshore drilling. So, Power Grab opens almost as a more fleshed-out warning of the sort found in today’s coverage:

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Last week’s national unemployment numbers demonstrated that the economic recovery President Obama promised us is still a ways away.  In Pennsylvania the unemployment rate increased last month hovering just above 9%.

Given these numbers, the last thing Washington politicians should be doing is supporting legislation that would cost thousands more jobs. But that is exactly what my very liberal opponent, Congressman Joe Sestak, is doing.

Not only did Congressman Sestak sponsor and vote for a cap-and-trade energy tax, he argued that the tax did not go far enough!

A cap-and-trade energy tax would impose an onerous indirect tax on the production and consumption of carbon-based energy. It would cap the amount of carbon dioxide businesses could emit, impose a penalty when the cap is exceeded, and would require that carbon emissions be cut by 20 percent of 2005 levels by 2020.

Independent studies have found that this would cost the country millions of jobs, but in an industrial state like Pennsylvania, the cap-and-trade tax would be even more harmful than elsewhere. Our state’s coal, natural gas and manufacturing industries would be especially hard hit.

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With the passing of West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd, the defining narrative among politicos will — after a few hours’ decorum — emerge as does Byrd = Kennedy? That is to say that, while so many West Virginians would never vote against Byrd, now that he’s gone there are plenty of the same Blue State voters who would vote against a non-Byrd Democrat in this Age of Obama.

I don’t follow West Virginia politics closely but assume their version of Scott Brown would be Rep. Shelley Moore Capito. His or her identity, as well as whether the same phenomenon would play out, likely depend on if the election is held this fall, vs. 2012: there are some murky legal issues to sort through involving how long a placeholder would hold the seat. Still I’m pretty sure it will be someone staunchly anti-cap-and-trade (in both parties, in fact; the last West Virginia politician to show insufficient zeal against the scheme, Rep. Alan Mollohan (D), recently lost in a primary).

Cap-and-trade of course is the vehicle by which the president vowed to cause your electricity prices to “necessarily skyrocket” as part of his effort to “bankrupt” the coal industry and anyone who sought to continue burning coal for that one-half of our electricity that it provides. Incidentally, today’s Wall Street Journal also notes how Obama’s anti-coal jihad just cost about 1,000 jobs in Wisconsin; West Virginia needs no such reminders yet as they pile up they also cannot help but be relevant.

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