As William Tucker notes in an American Spectator column, now seems like an odd time for President Obama to launch a new campaign against coal-fired power plants.
Four years ago he began his Inauguration by announcing that fossil fuels were a thing of the past and that we would now get our energy from “wind, sun and soil.” He spent the next four years trying unsuccessfully to push cap-and-trade through Congress and subsidizing a bunch of scraggly “renewable energy” projects that haven’t produced much of anything except a few notable scandals.
Now with unemployment still pushing 8 percent, with participation in the work force at a historic low of 62 percent, with the economy limping along in a five-year doldrums, and with the financial system starting to tremble as Ben Bernanke lets up the pressure on interest rates, the President has decided to stake his second term on — another initiative against coal! This time there isn’t even any blather about “creating jobs” or “building a new economy.” We’re just going to punish ourselves, pure and simple. Coal plants are going to shut down, electricity prices are going to soar, people are going to be put out of work, but that’s just too bad. We’ve sinned by putting “toxic” carbon dioxide into the atmosphere — even our very breathing implicates us! — and we’re just going to have to suffer the consequences.
Why would the president pursue this course? Tucker believes he has an answer.
President Obama has managed to win election by assembling two major constituencies: 1) a lumpen proletariat that has no idea how the economy works, is dependent on the government, and votes for him because he promises more handouts; and 2) an upper-crust constituency that thinks “we already have enough,” isn’t interested in any further economic development, and believes, if anything, that we already have too much of material possessions and it’s time to start cutting back on things. This has been the theme of environmentalism for 40 years. The rationale changes — we’re undergoing a “population bomb,” we’re drowning in pollution, we’re running out of oil and other resources — but the message is always the same. We’ve got enough. Time to call off all this progress. Let’s go back to spinning our own yarn, growing our own vegetables, and putting up windmills.
Together these two groups form a perfect vice to smother the ambitions of people who are interested in furthering the advance of progress and technology — the ones you might call “average Americans.”
