The strong environmental rules against coal released by President Obama last week represent an attack on conservative states, says Stephen Moore, distinguished visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation.
That's because it's Republican-leaning states that are most dependent on coal, he says. "Almost all of the states that are politically liberal and vote unfailingly Democratic are low coal use states,"
he notes in The Washington Times.
"Meanwhile, the heavy coal-using states bleed red. West Virginia, Kentucky and Wyoming are all states that get about 90 percent of their electric power from coal."
Obama is pushing coal companies out of business, destroying coal towns across America, Moore says. Democratic states largely escape the pain.
"It’s time to label the Obama green policies what they truly are: steep taxes on red state America," Moore says. "By the way, many purple states like Pennsylvania, Ohio and Virginia also get hammered by Mr. Obama’s climate change agenda." All three states went for Obama in 2012.
Alex Epstein, founder of the Center for Industrial Progress, also has harsh criticism for President Obama's new Clean Power Plan that requires U.S. power plants to cut their carbon dioxide emissions to 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.
"A much milder version of the Obama-Hillary Clinton plan has been tried in Germany — and it has already impoverished millions,"
he writes on Forbes.com.
Germany has sought to replace reliable fossil fuels with unreliable solar and wind energy, but it hasn't worked, Epstein says.
"While Germany has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on solar panels and wind turbines, they provide only an unreliable 15 percent of its electricity and 3 percent of total energy. Consumers pay a fortune for that unreliable energy."
Here at home we should focus on technology like shale oil and gas drilling that boosts our energy supply, Epstein says. U.S. oil output reached a record high earlier this year, and totaled 9.5 million barrels a day in the week ended July 31.
"We don’t need a 'Clean Power Plan' — a euphemism for a blackout plan, which supports unreliable technologies" with environmental problems of their own, he says.