As the price of oil shoots through the roof because of political instability, and the inability of the Obama Administration to say yes to Canadian oil and thousands of jobs, we have to turn to other energy sources. Fortunately, there’s a cleaner and safer opportunity in natural gas right here in the United States

But some Chicken Littles in the environmental panic industry are preventing people from heating their homes and driving up the cost of electricity, while simultaneously denying needed jobs in the worst unemployment in decades. They claim to have found environmental damage in the process to retrieve the gas from shale deposits – called hydraulic fracturing, but the short answer is they’re wrong. The long answer is that they’re really fracking wrong: hydraulic fracturing is safer, cleaner, and cheaper than any of our current alternatives; and that’s just what’s scares these pseudo-scientists.

We must look at the scientific facts before making a policy decision, and the facts about shale gas, when you cut through a great deal of disinformation, are simple. First, it’s less expensive than the fossil fuel alternatives. At $66 per megawatt-hour, natural gas beats the dirtier and more dangerous coal, which costs around $90 per MWh. It even costs less than solar, wind (off and onshore), nuclear, oil and bio-diesel.

And shale gas doesn’t just save money, it saves lives. On average, fifty to sixty coal miners die every year. Every miner must wear artificial breathing apparatus to protect them in case of a disaster, disasters which happen with alarming frequency. Explosions, cave-ins and methane leaks combine to make coal mining the most dangerous job in the United States today.

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The Sierra Club disclosed Thursday that it received over $26 million from natural gas giant Chesapeake Energy Corp. between 2007 and 2010 to help the group’s campaign against coal-fired power plants.

Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune said Thursday that he learned of the funding shortly after beginning the job in 2010 and moved to end the arrangement.

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The headline in today’s ClimateWire (subscription required) blares “U.N. says turning lights on for world’s poor need not boost CO2.” That is, we can provide electricity to 1.5 billion people who have never flipped a light switch and not see an increase in emissions of carbon dioxide (until the global warming fad/excuse for doing things statists like to do, this was called plant food, the driver of photosynthesis).

CO2 is released not just by oceans when they warm (absorbed when they cool) or decaying plants, or people exhaling, but combusting “fossil fuels” like the coal, gas, and, in some places, oil used to create electricity. CO2 emissions generally correlate with economic prosperity–more on that, momentarily.

But there is even less to this absurdity than meets the eye. Here’s how the ClimateWire story opens: (more…)

A lead story in Wednesday’s trade press publication E&E Daily was “Energy, fighting EPA at the core of GOP jobs agenda”. This is true, but also reveals what may be the greatest gap between Obamanomics and an approach to governance that most Republicans claim to support:

• Obama treats the energy sector like a centrally planned jobs program, putting the boot on the neck of the stuff that works while ‘creating’ politically desired but economically unsustainable positions making politically desired but economically undesirable products. Republicans argue that if wind- and solar-powered electricity, pioneered in the 1890s, work then they will work but in the meantime creating jobs in the energy sector means getting your boot off the neck of the stuff that works.
• Obama and his team have long argued that their costly regulations will actually create jobs. Of course, every program, regulation and even hurricane “creates jobs”, just not on net. The administration either doesn’t get ‘net’, or thinks you will be persuaded by ‘the seen’ and imagine there is no unseen.

EPA administrator Lisa Jackson embarked upon a campaign to advance these absurd arguments in February, arguing that, e.g., if she adopts a rule requiring you to do something costly or even prematurely destroy capital, why, you’ll have to hire someone to do it!

The WSJ accurately characterized this philosophy: “In other words, the government should harm an industry and force it to ruin working assets so maybe other people can clean up the mess.”

Obama administration “green jobs” emissary Jackson also said these will require many more new environmental regulators. Yes, she said that, risible dogma that was repeated by administration apologists as recently as this week on NPR’s Diane Rehm Show. So they aren’t giving up on it.

Except… On the Friday before this past long holiday weekend, President Obama somewhat buried a rational decision if a decision, like Thursday’s speech announcing Son of Stimulus, rooted entirely in his own political needs.

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Last week, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) and a number of other Congressmen with states who rely heavily on energy production for economic stability, sent a letter to EPA head Lisa Jackson expressing some concerns over her agency’s impartiality. At the heart of their complaints, a series of backdoor regulations the EPA has put into place in recent months: regulations that are not only harming American energy industries, but which are actively destroying jobs in a already troubled economy.

Now, the EPA doesn’t seem to mind that it wields extensive power that it’s using to change the very fabric of the American financial system, but residents of states whose economies are dependent on energy job growth – and the leaders of these industries – are starting to see a problem.

Before, it might have just been industries that environmentalists considered “problematic,” but a recent EPA rule is about to put a wrench in the operations of nearly every carbon-dioxide-expelling creature or industry on the planet. The National Ambient Air Quality Standards for Ozone, part of the Clean Air Act, currently demands that ozone emissions be limited to 75 parts per billion. That standard was put into place only two years ago, and companies are only now beginning to come into compliance. Instead of allowing industries to meet this standard, though, the EPA immediately moved the goalposts: they are now considering standards that would limit ozone emissions to only 70 or, more stringent yet, 60 parts per billion.

Apart from economic and social context, these numbers seem meaningless. But consider this: if the EPA were to choose the lesser of the standards, 70 parts per billion, only 24% of the 675 US counties who monitor ozone would be in compliance. If the bar were lowered to 60 parts per billion, only 4% of counties would make the cut. All of the areas that didn’t meet the standard would become subject to strict EPA scrutiny, as well as billions in fees and fines. Some of the more egregious offenders might even lose federal highway funding, and find themselves under the never-ending watchful eye of Lisa Jackson’s already-intrusive environmental watchdogs.

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Despite a small glimmer of hope from last Friday’s unemployment rate drop to 9.1%, business leaders know nearly all other economic figures continue to point to an anemic recovery or worse, a double-dip recession.

In reaction to the jobs numbers, Home Depot co-founder, Bernie Marcus had this to say on Politico:

While some may be relieved at today’s jobs numbers, the reality is that our economy is struggling to recover. And a big reason for that is the federal government. The impediments that the government imposes are impossible to deal with. Every day you see rules and regulations from a group of Washington bureaucrats who know nothing about running a business. And I mean every day. It’s become stifling.

And this is a theme that business leaders continue to make: over-burdensome regulations from Washington are stifling the economy and preventing serious job growth while the Obama administration only continues to make the problem worse.

Lets take a look at the cold hard numbers. In the past few weeks, major American companies had to announce more layoffs:

- Borders – 400 stores will close, costing almost 11,000 jobs.

- Boston Scientific – Announced restructuring that will cost up to 1,400 jobs.

- Goldman Sachs – Will let go 1,000 employees, or nearly 3 percent of their workforce.

- Merck – Will layoff 13,000 workers to cut costs.

- State Street – Announced it will cut 850 jobs, in a second round of layoffs within a year.

With all of this going on, President Barack Obama is promising (yet another) renewed focus on job creation. But what is his administration doing? Contrary to Obama’s promised regulatory reform from earlier this year, the administration continues to say one thing and do another.

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Las Vegas CEO Steve Wynn drew attention for a boardroom rant denouncing the intolerable business climate fostered by the White House. He’s hardly the first. What’s happening is emblematic of a bigger problem.

On a Monday conference call, the casino magnate credited with revitalizing Las Vegas slammed President Obama, declaring him “[T]he greatest wet blanket to business, progress and job creation in my lifetime.”

Wynn’s statement was remarkable for two reasons: First, the hotelier has been a staunch supporter of the Obama administration from the beginning and still considers himself a Democrat. Even more remarkable, it’s historically out of character for CEOs such as Wynn to express their views in such blunt terms on political matters.

“A lot of people don’t want to say that. They’ll say, ‘Oh God, don’t be attacking Obama.’ Well, this is Obama’s deal, and it’s Obama that’s responsible for this fear in America,” said Wynn, “The guy keeps making speeches about redistribution, and maybe ‘we ought to do something to businesses that don’t invest or (are) holding too much money.’ We haven’t heard that kind of talk except from pure socialists.”

Business is being hammered, he said. “I’m telling you that the business community in this country is frightened to death of the weird political philosophy of the president of the United States.”

The Wall Street Journal has a long piece about the prospect of using the state to move part of the U.S. transportation fleet from oil-derived fuels to natural gas. It gives prominent voice to the massive public affairs campaign of T. Boone Pickens, undertaken in the apparent quest for a legacy, locking in subsidized billions for his natural gas fortune as a swansong to a prosperous career.

This campaign takes the form of a bill embraced by ostensible fiscal hawks, causing an uproar and enabling the media to describe the Republicans ‘circular firing squad’, of a base taking umbrage at Members abandoning their pledges of fiscal sobriety at the drop of a billionaire’s phone call. Well played, gentlemen.

The vehicle was not Pickens’ first choice. His first choice was a windmill mandate, transparently pushed by a handful of gas interests, including Chesapeake Energy’s Aubrey McClendon, to put a green hat on their efforts to use the state to displace coal’s market (one of McClendon’s group’s first television ads stated up front, “more wind means more gas”: windmills don’t work that often, so they need ‘backup’ to run wastefully all the time, cycling up and down, and for various reasons inevitably this means gas-fired electricity).

Coal was difficult to budge, what with centuries of it domestically, so some gas folks have been helping the greens’ war against coal for about two decades. This is their latest foray.

And, astroturfers, please hold the mail. I happened to be in the room in 1997 with the American Gas Association, BP, and Enron as they worked with green pressure groups, as radical as the Union of Concerned Scientists as well as more mainstream, anti-coal activists like NRDC, to get a global warming treaty and a domestic cap-and-trade scheme. I couldn’t believe my ears and said so, which in a matter of weeks led to us parting ways.

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By all means, let us pursue the president’s new approach to the budget, the Orwellian ‘reduce spending in the tax code’. But, wherever will we find good examples of wasteful ’spending in the tax code’?

Hey, look here! The Feds are taking your money to create 1,000 jobs! Of course, these jobs wouldn’t exist without this wealth transfer, and are mostly temporary anyway. But, still, it’s only $2 million per temporary job. Guess we’ll make the cost up in volume.

And T. Boone only wants a billion dollars. Then he promises to quit. Really. He’ll be the first.

The Nation also joins in:

[T]he primary problem facing clean alternative energy is the ‘price gap’—they are still more expensive than fossil fuels. As I’ve outlined in these pages previously (see “The Big Green Buy”), economies of scale, along with subsidies and planning, will help close this price gap. Only when clean technologies—like wind, solar, hydropower and electric vehicles—are cheaper than other options will global capitalism make the switch away from fossil fuels.

Of course, the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind mostly doesn’t blow so windmills and solar panels require massive redundancy as well as enormous swathes of land, and wind- and solar-powered electricity are just as old as the coal-fired variety, just practical losers. Those are possibly greater challenges than a mere ‘price gap’, and indeed they make this idea of comparing renewables with hydrocarbons as if they were apples to apples endearingly absurd.

But, anyway. While ‘planning’ is euphemistic for preferences and mandates, here you also see green econ 101 amid the author’s ostentatious advertisement of having escaped brushing up on the actual experience and history of these boondoggles.

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The Senate will, one presumes, finally vote either this week or next to block EPA from imposing President Obama’s ‘other way to skin the cat’ of Kyoto-style energy rationing, by using the Clean Air Act – a law that EPA’s own public filings inescapably acknowledge was never intended for such purpose. What will be at stake is little less than the rule of law itself.

Policy sanity also stands to take a beating, or else gain a new lease on life. The United States derives over 80% of its total energy from the three fossil fuels now being regulated by the Clean Air Act on the basis of EPA’s Endangerment Finding, which by design strangles our ability to use them.  Further, the Obama Administration has in effect decided that the EPA knows how to run the U. S. economy.

With über-green Germany, even nuke-happy France, appearing set to ramp up their coal use in the wake of Japan’s nuclear incident, the first rational response would be to call off EPA’s war on coal. Not to fight like mad to preserve and advance it.

But fight like mad to preserve and advance this war on coal is what the administration and its Senate enablers are doing.

And as George Mason University professor of science and public policy Thomas Lovejoy said in an astonishing admission to the Washington Post not long ago, in the context of this very Obama Power Grab:

“When Congress resists action on pressing environmental issues, regulation provides a way forward”.

Actually, no. Our Constitution – so quaint and outdated according to certain quarters though it may be (it’s still better than whatever it is we have today) – makes it quite plain that it is only when Congress decides to act that agencies have a way forward.

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We have established that Obama’s war on coal assumed a massive, crash program of 100 new nuclear reactors — for optics purposes, keeping the cost of killing coal down, on paper — without which power the lights will necessarily go out. You cannot rule out half of our electricity supply and pretend otherwise.

Now that that binge is an even more obvious fiction, his defenders charge forth to say he does too support nuclear.

And they point to this recent statement. “Nuclear energy is an important part of our own energy future.”

Which does not say he will promote any new reactors, of course. Just that he knows he can’t shut down the existing fleet, additions to which have been stalled since 1978. Meanwhile he plans to add no coal, and shut down the existing coal fleet. Electricity, after all, comes from those holes in the wall.

Obama also said to Iowa voters in October 2008 that he was “not a proponent” of nukes, and it is unlikely that anything has changed his core position.

And in response to which rhetoric I also note that on Friday he said this: “First, we need to continue to boost domestic production of oil and gas.”

Ah. Yes. Of course we must. Please point to his record of trying to boost production again?

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Although usual suspects are now saying that the chain of events leading to Japan’s nuclear crisis is simply proof that we need to now rule out the last energy source that works, in terms of providing the necessary, base-load power required to run a modern society, it actually proves the opposite. With nuclear for all intents and purposes frozen in amber — as if it wasn’t already, talk of a ‘renaissance’ notwithstanding — this, combined with the Left’s war on energy that works now places us on the precipice, as well.

Will Obama admit that he must immediately cease his war to kill coal, which is a stepping stone on their war to also strangle gas? (all of which was detailed here, ten months, early, I suppose)

Of course not. Will someone, possibly an aspiring president, call him out on it?

After all: his war on coal assumed an unprecedented binge of 100 new nuclear ractors here.

That was facially absurd at the time — “at this rate”, as the greens like to say, we’ll add 100 new reactors as the new millenium approaches — but it is inescapably reckless now. They must be forced to cop to it. And do the responsible thing.

That’s not exactly how things are playing out. Congress is moving to stop Obama’s EPA from the centerpiece of its ‘energy plan’, which is to regulate its war on coal-fired electricity that they were unable to legislate. And the administration reflexively joined the demagoguery of that responsible move, the necessity of which has now only proved more obvious.

But that EPA backdoor global warming scheme is, just like the failed cap-and-trade legislation, premised on a fantasy economic assumption (100 new reactors) to dumb-down the cost of regulating coal out of existence (‘bankrupting’ anyone who wanted to try and use it, in Obama’s own phrase to the SF Chronicle ed board). In fact, this was built in purely to have a piece of paper to wave around and say see this is completely different than the plan that candidate Obama said would cause your rates to necessarily skyrocket, and bankrupt anyone daring to use coal! Not honest.

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In an apparent pro-business pivot, President Barack Obama promised Tuesday in a Wall Street Journal editorial eliminate those “dumb” and “outdated” regulatory regimes that hinder the nation’s economic growth.

“Regulations do have costs; often, as a country, we have to make tough decisions about whether those costs are necessary,” the president wrote. “But what is clear is that we can strike the right balance. We can make our economy stronger and more competitive, while meeting our fundamental responsibilities to one another.”

The president cemented his regulatory overture in a supplementary executive order and memorandum nudging the bureaucratic structure to soften those onerous regulations that “stifle job creation.” Enumerating the utility of a responsible regulatory system, the president’s order calls for a regulatory system in which a balance is stuck between the protection of public health and welfare and the promotion of economic growth and innovation.

But that caveat — that the Administration’s regulatory czars must use the least burdensome tools available — has ruffled the feathers of some progressive pro-regulatory organizations, who have already begun lobbying agency heads to ensure the order has minimal impact.

The groups will no doubt be busy, stirring dozens of regulatory pots: Coal, biomass, health care, education, Net neutrality, and card check. For a glimpse into havoc these groups have already wrought, BIG GOVERNMENT has laid out below those industries most affected by their iron-fisted regulatory regimes.

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Buried beneath the avalanche of press coverage about the lame-duck Congress, I found a story about President Obama’s mid-December meeting with twenty corporate CEOs. The purpose of this Blair House get-together was to discuss how to jump-start our still-ailing economy. Among other aims, Mr. Obama reiterated his goals to increase employment, end the recession, and double U.S. exports over the next five years.

These are lofty and laudable ambitions. But it seems that Mr. Obama’s regulatory bureaucrats haven’t gotten the memo. For example, consider the counter-productive impact of their efforts on agriculture.

As any shopper knows, food prices this past year have been rising faster than the overall rate of inflation. “Fears of a global food crisis swept the world’s commodity markets as prices for staples such as corn, rice and wheat spiraled after the U.S. government warned of ‘dramatically’ lower supplies,” the Financial Times reported in early October. “There is growing concern among countries about continuing volatility and uncertainty in food markets,” said World Bank president Robert Zoellick later that month. “These concerns have been compounded by recent increases in grain prices.”

Confronting this looming food-supply crisis is the American farmer. His productivity is such that the United States is the world’s largest agricultural exporter, with $108.7 billion in farm products shipped abroad in 2010. Helping him increase the supply of agricultural products is the key to addressing both rising food prices and global shortages. His productivity is also critical to our country’s broader economic recovery.

So, you would think that the administration’s apparatchiks would be doing whatever they can to remove the regulatory impediments that farmers face. But you would be wrong. Consider several ways in which federal regulators are threatening agricultural productivity, both directly and indirectly.

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Environmental Protection Agency officials Wednesday provided power companies and states with new guidance on EPA’s plans to regulate greenhouse gases.

A D.C. lobbyist for two major power companies told Bloomberg News that “the energy and manufacturing sectors will essentially be in a construction moratorium” as a consequence.

Here we are, with 15 million Americans unemployed and millions more underemployed, and the EPA is moving blindly ahead with new regulations that will increase dramatically the energy costs of U.S. industries, reducing their competitiveness and profitability, and making it less likely they will hire.

EPA’s action amounts to rewriting the Clean Air Act to suit its own bureaucratic and ideological objectives. At a time when the Obama administration should be focused on job creation and the nation’s economic recovery, promulgating stringent new environmental rules should be its last priority.

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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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The death of Senator Robert Byrd on Monday has upended the administration’s cap and trade offensive, as observers of West Virginia politics suspect his yet-to-be-named interim successor will defer to the state’s pro-coal politics on pending climate legislation.

Byrd, whose unprecedented fifty-one-year senate career bore out a series of outright and often stunning political evolutions, had warmed in recent years to overhauling the nation’s climate regulations despite broad opposition from his home state. His death, and the loss of a reliably-Democratic vote, has forced Senate leadership to reassess the viability of the White House’s aggressive climate legislation push in this difficult election year for Democrats.

“It is a tougher road, believe me,” Senator Dick Durban, the Democrats’ chief vote whip, said Monday. “A 58-vote majority is not as good as a 59-vote majority.”

Wildly popular and the leading candidate for the seat in 2012, West Virginia’s Democratic Governor Joe Manchin has not yet floated the names of potential replacements, saying only that he will not appoint himself. Instead, Manchin will tap an ally whose politics–and posture on coal, the state’s bread and butter issue–mirrors his own.

Though among the first governors to endorse then-Senator Barack Obama’s presidential bid, Manchin has been in open rebellion against the Environmental Protection Agency and the president’s legislative agenda to reconstruct the environmental regulatory regime. It’s his rebellious streak–a level of insubordinance on climate issues that has further endeared Manchin to voters in an otherwise hostile cycle–that Capitol Hill Democrats worry may derail the fragile cap and trade coalition they have assembled.

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