The president and the enablers

The New Neo Posted on by

Chuck Schumer warns Republicans in Congress that if they don’t give the Democrats what they want regarding immigration reform, President Obama will take it anyway.

Excuse me, did I say “will take it anyway”? What Schumer actually said was [emphasis mine]:

If [House Republicans] don’t pass immigration reform [by the August recess], the president will have no choice but to act on his own.

Obama doesn’t want to do it, you see. But he may have to do it, because those darned Republicans will have forced his hand by not cooperating to present him with what he wants. Hey, isn’t that how presidents always operate?

Maybe Schumer thinks Congress should pass an Enabling Act next, although it seems that Obama doesn’t even need one de jure, he has one de facto.

I’m assuming everyone knows what the Enabling Act was, or at least will follow the link if they don’t. But just in case, I thought I’d add this explanation [emphasis mine]:

After being appointed chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933, Hitler asked President von Hindenburg to dissolve the Reichstag. A general election was scheduled for 5 March 1933.

The burning of the Reichstag six days before the election, depicted by the Nazis as the beginning of a communist revolution, resulted in the Reichstag Fire Decree, which (among other things) suspended civil liberties and habeas corpus rights. Hitler used the decree to have the Communist Party’s offices raided and its representatives arrested, effectively eliminating them as a political force.

Although receiving five million more votes than in the previous election, the Nazis had failed to gain an absolute majority in parliament, depending on the 52 seats won by their coalition partner, the German National People’s Party, for a slim majority.

To free himself from this dependency, Hitler had the cabinet, in its first post-election meeting on 15 March, draw up plans for an Enabling Act which would give the cabinet legislative power for four years. The Nazis devised the Enabling Act to gain complete political power without the need of the support of a majority in the Reichstag and without the need to bargain with their coalition partners.

Note the fact that Hitler never had a majority during his rise to power and his consolidation of power. Note also how he systematically eliminated his opposition through canny use of the law and certain crises (and possibly manufactured crises, at that) to justify his usurpation of power. Note also when you read the next passage how Hitler managed to use a combination of intimidation of and false promises to his opponents, and parliamentary jockeying and procedural rule-changing, in order to get his way. Hitler was both utterly ruthless and politically brilliant at this point in his life:

…[T]he Social Democrats initially planned to hinder the passage of the Act by boycotting the Reichstag session, rendering that body short of the quorum (two thirds) needed to vote on a constitutional amendment. The Reichstag, however, led by its President, Hermann Gé¶ring, changed its rules of procedure, allowing the President to declare that any deputy who was “absent without excuse” was to be considered as present, in order to overcome obstructions. Because of this procedural change, the Social Democrats were obliged to attend the session, and committed to voting against the Act. Leaving nothing to chance, the Nazis used the provisions of the Reichstag Fire Decree to detain several SPD deputies. A few others saw the writing on the wall and fled into exile.

Later that day, the Reichstag assembled under intimidating circumstances, with SA men swarming inside and outside the chamber. Hitler’s speech, which emphasised the importance of Christianity in German culture, was aimed particularly at appeasing the Centre Party’s sensibilities…

In the end…the non-socialist parties all voted for the bill, except for two deputies who weren’t present. With the KPD banned and 26 SPD deputies arrested or in hiding, the final tally was 444 in favour of Enabling Act against 84 (all Social Democrats) opposed. The Reichstag had adopted the Enabling Act with the support of 83% of the deputies. However, the atmosphere of that session was so intimidating that even if all SPD deputies had been present, it would have still passed with 78.7% support…

Under the Act, the government had acquired the authority to pass laws without either parliamentary consent or control. These laws could (with certain exceptions) even deviate from the Constitution. The Act effectively eliminated the Reichstag as active players in German politics. While its existence was protected by the Enabling Act, for all intents and purposes it reduced the Reichstag to a mere stage for Hitler’s speeches. It only met sporadically until the end of World War II, held no debates and enacted only a few laws. Within three months after the passage of the Enabling Act, all parties except the Nazi Party were banned or pressured into dissolving themselves, followed on 14 July by a law that made the Nazi Party the only legally permitted party in the country…

Due to the great care that Hitler took to give his dictatorship an appearance of legality, the Enabling Act was renewed twice, in 1937 and 1941. However, its renewal was practically assured since all other parties were banned. Voters were presented with a single list of Nazis and Nazi-approved “guest” candidates under far-from secret conditions.

I challenge anyone to read that without getting a chill up the spine. It unfolds like a Greek tragedy, no less horrible for knowing the plot.

Coming back to the present day, it’s long been clear that President Obama considers that the Constitution, with its checks and balances, offers no real constraint to his usurpation of power. Actually, it never really was the Constitution that prevented previous presidents from doing the same thing—it was their own respect for it, plus the checks and balances offered by integrity-driven members of those presidents’ own parties who would pressure them to do the right thing, and/or a press that would call them on their excesses, and/or voters who would reject them if they violated constitutional constraints. Obama doesn’t have to deal with such things, and that emboldens him.

[ADDENDUM: To the very valid criticism of posts such as this which draw some sort of comparison with Hitler, I offered this response in the comments section, but I thought I’d highlight it here as well.

I know what people mean when they say it is counterproductive to ever use historical analogies to Hitler or Stalin or other tyrants of history when we speak about Obama et.al. My response is that I considered that when I wrote this post, and I consider it whenever I make such analogies, which I have done in the past.

But sometimes there is no other way to make a point about tyranny other than to compare it to other tyrannies. They are not the same, but there are similarities (especially in terms of process), and those similarities heighten the point. If we don’t make such comparisons we trivialize what’s happening. If we do make them we run the risk of sounding crazy.

That’s the dilemma—there seem to be no other choices. Tyranny usually looks fairly innocuous at its beginning. It’s only later on that people realize what they’ve lost. Cassandras are bound to be disbelieved by most people at the outset. That’s just the nature of the thing.]

There’s a whole lot going on, isn’t there?

The New Neo Posted on by

A roundup of news:

The 9/11 museum has finally opened, and Peggy Noonan most definitely approves. I’m planning to see it next time I’m in New York.

Now, that’s a commencement speech.

Europeans’ growing disillusionment with the EU and the euro.

Los Angeles has become “the staged auto accident capital of the U.S.” I don’t doubt it; I even know someone who’s been a victim. Just another step on our road towards becoming a third-world nation.

I wouldn’t have thought I’d agree with an article in The New York Times Sunday Book Review, but I can’t find much fault with this one by Michael Kinsley on the subject of Glenn Greenwald. My only quarrel is that I think Kingsley is much too easy on Edward Snowden, who’s no naif.

More details on just what Piketty might have gotten wrong in his data and computations.

China and Russia, happy at last.

The irony of the Weather Underground

The New Neo Posted on by

Reading David Horowitz’s 1989 book Destructive Generation—and particularly the chapter entitled “Doing It,” about the Weathermen who morphed into the Weather Underground (notably Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, as well as several fellow travelers)—I am struck by the irony of their life trajectories.

What a group of nihilistic, self-aggrandizing, angry, reckless, power-mad, ignorant, arrogant people they were. But say what you will about them, they showed they could learn from experience. When all these destructive characteristics of theirs came together to cause three of their number to blow themselves and a Greenwich Village townhouse up instead of their planned target, soldiers at Fort Dix, it scared the survivors among them into another mode of action.

What they learned from the incident was this, according to Horowitz, who quotes their 1970 position paper “New Morning – Changing Weather”:

Claiming that they were communicating “not as military leaders, but as tribes at council,” they dealt publicly with the townhouse for the first time, admitting that the explosion had “destroyed our belief that armed struggle is the only real revolutionary struggle…It was clear that more had been wrong with our direction than technical inexperience…This tendency to consider only bombing or picking up a gun as revolutionary, with the glorification of the heavier the better, we’ve called the military error.” After noting that “a group of outlaws who are isolated from the youth communities…cannot develop strategies that grow to include large numbers of people,” they said they planned to build a mass movement of youth into a Weather Nation.

Dohrn and Ayers went through several other incarnations before Horowitz’s 1989 chapter ends, leaving them wandering in an aimless wilderness, unfocused and unfulfilled. But in the years that followed they certainly got the last laugh, didn’t they? Most of America may have rejected their ravings, their violence, and their romantic narcissistic views of themselves as great revolutionaries. But academia and especially the universities bought (in the form of professorships and honors) what they ultimately decided to sell, which was nothing less than the slow Gramscian march through the educational institutions, which ended up transforming younger generations and moving this nation in the direction they had planned all along.

Picking on Piketty

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve already written quite a bit about Piketty’s main thesis about growing income inequality, his suggestions for a remedy, and the praise his book has garnered.

But now comes the news that a Financial Times writer has accused Piketty of doing the math wrong:

Prof Piketty, 43, provides detailed sourcing for his estimates of wealth inequality in Europe and the US over the past 200 years. In his spreadsheets, however, there are transcription errors from the original sources and incorrect formulas. It also appears that some of the data are cherry-picked or constructed without an original source.

For example, once the FT cleaned up and simplified the data, the European numbers do not show any tendency towards rising wealth inequality after 1970. An independent specialist in measuring inequality shared the FT’s concerns.

Contacted by the FT, Prof Piketty said he had used “a very diverse and heterogeneous set of data sources … [on which] one needs to make a number of adjustments to the raw data sources.

“I have no doubt that my historical data series can be improved and will be improved in the future … but I would be very surprised if any of the substantive conclusion about the long-run evolution of wealth distributions was much affected by these improvements,” he said.

This is the sort of thing that’s often duked out between academics in the pages of arcane economics journals. But this particular fight’s gone out into the greater world, because of the huge and admiring press and political reception Piketty’s work has gotten.

Stroll down memory lane with intellectuals, Obama, and Obamacare

The New Neo Posted on by

Noemie Emery has a good summary of why intellectuals were attracted to Obama’s candidacy, and how Obamacare has threatened the entire liberal enterprise as well as the reputation of intellectuals themselves.

Obamacare has even gotten a few of those intellectual to say things like gee whiz, the real world isn’t quite like our models, fancy that!, in a rare moment of relative (and probably temporary) humility:

“It is actually harder to do some of these things in reality than we thought when we put it down on paper,” a book review in the Washington Post quoted a former Obama health care adviser as saying.

Emery follows that quote up with this observation, which closes her article:

They wanted their chance, and they got it. They had it. They blew it. They’re done.

I have the deepest respect for Noemie Emery. I’ve been reading her articles for years, and been impressed by them. But I think she’s making a huge and dangerous error in underestimating this group—their tenacity, their disregard for principle or truth, and their ability to rise like phoenixes from the ashes of whatever mess they’ve created.

Do not ever count them as “done.” It’s not in their nature, and it’s not in their plans. In fact, it’s not in human nature to permanently reject the leftist dream. Beware. Way too many Americans still buy what they’re selling.

[ADDENDUM: I just noticed that back in January of 2010 I wrote this article in the Weekly Standard that dovetails nicely with Emery’s latest. Here’s an excerpt:

A great many liberal pundits (who, conveniently, don’t have to run for reelection) are in agreement that the health care reform bills should not be allowed to die a quiet death. The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg calls for passage, and Paul Krugman makes the argument that dropping the push for the bills at this point would be to “fail the test of history.”

That last phrase indicates what might be driving these Democrats over the cliff (or the precipice, as Obama might say): Their long-held conviction that there is an upward historical trajectory which cannot be denied, a trend from less governmental control to more, and towards ever-expanding and newly-found guaranteed “rights” for citizens. Anyone who opposes this process is impeding the proper course of progress.

But a funny thing happened on the way to destiny: The people had the insolence to reject the idea. Well, say these Democrats condescendingly, then the people will just have to be ignored. Once the bill is somehow passed, and they see how much it helps their lives, they’ll come around and thank us…

… forget the most fundamental fact of all: There might be something inherently difficult and even contradictory about the notion of universal health care that is comprehensive, affordable, high quality, and yet comes without a huge price; that there may be no way to slice the available pie into enough large and tasty pieces to satisfy everyone without resulting in national near-bankruptcy, as well as substantial and unacceptable loss of liberty.

Dismissing such concerns with the sanguine reassurance that “all will be well, just trust us” is not enough. Maybe the problem with passing these bills is not merely strategic, and maybe most Americans will never approve. Maybe they would prefer more minimalist and gradual change, or even (gasp!) the implementation of some of the more modest proposals Republicans have suggested, such as interstate transportability of private health insurance, and tort reform. Maybe voters’ very real concerns are based on reality, not a reaction to scary rhetoric designed to frustrate the wishes of Democrats and halt the inevitable progressive sweep of history.

But it is much too threatening to the Democrats’ long-held vision of universal health care at last to actually look at these facts. It might mean they would have to admit that they could be chasing a pipe dream, albeit one they’ve held close to their hearts for the better part of a century.

Read the whole thing.]

Back when the left ♥ed the VA health care system

The New Neo Posted on by

There was a time, and not so very long ago, when the left sang the praises of the VA health care system.

Take Paul Krugman, economist extraordinaire, back in 2006:

I know about a health care system that has been highly successful in containing costs, yet provides excellent care. And the story of this system’s success provides a helpful corrective to anti-government ideology. For the government doesn’t just pay the bills in this system–it runs the hospitals and clinics.

…The system in question is our very own Veterans Health Administration, whose success story is one of the best-kept secrets in the American policy debate.

Krugman was hardly alone. In his column, Taranto mentions many others who said similar things.

Do not—I repeat, do NOT—sit on a hot stove waiting for their retractions. If they say anything to try to address the disparity, it will be that of course what’s going on now is somehow the fault of Republicans, or perhaps Shinseki, or some random sport occurrence, or isn’t really happening, and that they were generally correct when they first praised the VA. However, that would put them in the awkward position—as Taranto also points out—of saying that things in the VA were better under Bush.

But never fear. One of the hallmarks of being a liberal pundit is never, never ever, having to say you’re sorry or answer for your errors. You just go forward saying new stuff.

It’s obvious why the left needed to praise the VA back then, despite the fact that (as I wrote yesterday) anyone who knows people who’ve actually used the system has heard horror stories that go back fifty years or more. The left needed the VA to be a great system because it was trying to push health care reform, and it wanted the new law to set up a system that put the federal government firmly in charge. In fact, Obamacare was a compromise due to the fact that Democrats couldn’t get the public option (thank you, Joe Lieberman) or single payer past Congress. But the public option or single payer is what they actually wanted, so “VA=good” had to be their mantra.

And of course, “Bush=bad” went along with it. From Krugman in 2006:

…[F]arsighted thinkers are already suggesting that the Veterans Health Administration, not President Bush’s unrealistic vision of a system in which people go ”comparative shopping” for medical care the way they do when buying tile (his example, not mine), represents the true future of American health care.

Unfortunately, I think he’s right about that. It’s a vision that should make every thinking person shudder. That’s one of the many things about the VA scandal that scares Democrats—that people will make that linkage in their minds between the VA system and Obamacare and where it’s heading.

The returned

The New Neo Posted on by

Another woman, who disappeared at the age of 15, has surfaced ten years later with a story of kidnapping.

Some of the neighbors who knew her and her kidnapper as a couple don’t believe her story. They say that nothing appeared on the surface to be unusual or wrong about the couple. But police say they believe her, and police are often skeptical. They point out that the woman is now 25 rather than 15, and has been under this man’s influence since the time she was younger and more malleable. What’s more, when she was kidnapped she had just arrived from Mexico to reunite with her mother, so the man (her mother’s boyfriend at the time) had an interesting m.o. for threatening her:

During a brief interview with KABC-TV, the woman said she was too scared to seek help during the last 10 years.

“I was 15. I couldn’t do anything,” she said. “I was very afraid about everything, because I was alone. I [thought] I was alone, but I never was. My family was with me.”

Police say Isidro Garcia, 42, drugged and kidnapped the girl, beat her when she tried to escape and forced her to marry him.

For years, authorities allege, he used violence and threats to keep her under his control, forcing her to work beside him and telling her she would be deported if she left.

He is alleged to have also beaten the mother prior to the girl’s kidnapping.

People often think that of course they’d be much braver under the same circumstances. And maybe they would. But maybe not, according to Elizabeth Smart, who should know:

Smart, who is now 26, said Wednesday that people cannot know what victims are going through…

“We don’t know what these evil people are holding over them”” whether it’s their families’ lives, their lives, whatever it is,” she said. “We just don’t know.”

After her ordeal, Smart faced questions about why she didn’t escape despite several opportunities.

Smart said that “there can be stronger bonds and chains than physical bonds and chains.”

I’m curious, though, what made the woman come forward now. The article says it was this:

Police say the woman recently found her sister on Facebook and gained the courage to come forward.

That seems so minor, but it makes sense. For people who have been told for years that their family members don’t exist for them and perhaps have forgotten them, suddenly coming upon evidence to the contrary can be a ray of light that breaks through the darkness and gives people the strength to come forward.

[NOTE: I wrote a two-part series on Patty Hearst’s kidnapping and state of mind that’s somewhat relevant here. Heart’s kidnapping was very different, of course, in its political and extremely public aspects. But the psychological similarity is the idea that a person who has essentially been brainwashed at a young age can be free to leave but think it impossible or futile to do so.]

Hillary Clinton’s biggest accomplishment…

The New Neo Posted on by

…is having been born with two X chromosomes.

I didn’t say it—they did:

Note that the video was made at George Washington University. Although GW isn’t exactly Harvard, it’s a very respectable university and it’s located in Washington DC, where you might expect the students to be a bit more conversant with the news. No such luck.

Then again, they might know a lot about current affairs and still not be able to mention any of Hillary’ Clinton’s accomplishments as Secretary of State, because she hasn’t got any.

When I was in college, the voting age was still 21. The Twenty-Sixth Amendment changed all that in 1971. Its passage was the result of a movement that was popular in part because of opposition to the draft during the Vietnam War, and the idea that it seemed unfair to require men not old enough to vote in their country to fight for it and perhaps to die for it.

Ironically enough, the draft ended in 1973 (the last draftees were called up in December of 1972) not long after the Twenty-Sixth Amendment was passed. But despite the fact that the draft is gone, I very much doubt a movement to repeal the amendment and raise the voting age to twenty-one again would have enough votes to pass (for one thing, the eighteen-year-olds could vote on it). I’d support it, though.

The history behind the end of the draft is an interesting one:

During the 1968 presidential election, Richard Nixon campaigned on a promise to end the draft. He had first become interested in the idea of an all-volunteer army during his time out of office, based upon a paper by Martin Anderson of Columbia University. Nixon also saw ending the draft as an effective way to undermine the anti-Vietnam war movement, since he believed affluent youths would stop protesting the war once their own probability of having to fight in it was gone.

The idea proved unpopular at the time with the Department of Defense and Congress, so it was postponed for a few years. But when the draft did end, the war protests ended too, just as Nixon had foreseen. What he didn’t foresee was his own downfall as a result of Watergate, the ascendancy of the Democratic Party in its wake, and the resultant abandonment of our financial help for the South Vietnamese that resulted in our abandonment of their cause, the cause for which so many Americans had died. The draft had ended, the war was over, and 18-year-olds could vote.

Thoughts on the VA scandal

The New Neo Posted on by

Here are the results of a poll on who it is that Americans blame for the VA scandal:

Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki and the VA (33 percent) receive more blame than either local VA hospitals (28 percent) or President Obama (17 percent). About a quarter of Americans have no opinion…

Americans are split as to the root cause of the long wait times for patients. Forty-two percent think the problems of long waiting times at VA medical facilities are the result of not having enough resources to take care of patients, but 41 percent think it’s more a matter of these hospitals not properly managing their resources. Republicans are more likely than Democrats or independents to say the problems are a management issue.

It seems to me that the poll is asking the wrong questions—or at least not providing enough choice in the answers—as polls often do. Those of us who can remember back many decades know that veterans have been complaining about the VA for—well, for as long as I can remember, anyway. This current crop of problems is only an exacerbation of what I’ve been hearing about since I was in college, which is that the VA has all too often been a faceless, heartless, incompetent and sometimes dangerous bureaucracy that has a tendency to treat people like dirt.

I doubt this was always the case. I’m sure sometimes people are satisfied with the care they get at the VA. But I know that I heard the bitter criticism often enough to have decided there was something very wrong with the system. It seemed to me that this “something” was inherent in a huge federally-run bureaucracy, and I believe I thought that even back when I was a Democrat (in those days Democrats weren’t all for nationalizing the health care system). It seemed to me that the entire concept was at fault, although I certainly understood the need to take care of veterans. But why was a special system needed?

I’m still not sure of the answer to that, but part of it is historical, because the VA system was founded back when the regular health care system and health insurance were nowhere near the big and pervasive businesses they are today. At the time, it probably seemed a huge advance over the alternatives. But now the VA system is all too often a poster child for the saying “good enough for government work.”

The poll didn’t offer a choice that reflected that possibility: that the problem was endemic, and that throwing more resources at the system might not fix it, and that it wasn’t just this particular management. Nor did it offer the choice I’d like to see about Obama: that he was at fault not for the thing itself, but for knowing about the problem, saying he would be on the case, and doing absolutely nothing about it in all these years.

[ADDENDUM: I just noticed this. I guess I’m not the only one thinking this way.]

Mayor de Blasio marches New York back to the future

The New Neo Posted on by

Gotta placate those teachers:

Since the city’s recovery from the 1975 fiscal crisis, mayors and the media have treated the city’s budget-day announcement as a sober technocratic event. Mayor de Blasio, by contrast, used his annual unveiling of the city’s revenue and spending blueprint on May 8 as a campaign-style opportunity to push what he himself called a “progressive” agenda. The budget adds money to enforce the city’s new mandated sick-leave law for private employers, and it spends more for public housing and education. But the most controversial and fiscally explosive portion offers retroactive pay raises to the city’s teachers and, later, raises for other city employees at a projected added cost of $9 billion over four years.

The mayor calls his budget “historic” and “transcendent.” Indeed, for the first time since New York recovered from its near-bankruptcy of the 1970s, the city is willing explicitly to spend beyond its means to buy labor peace. The new teachers’ contract, including $4.3 billion in retroactive pay raises back to 2009, is the acute example.

De Blasio’s plan to march New York right back to the brink of bankruptcy might be stopped by a sort of mayoral safety net put in place after the debacle of the 70s:

After the fiscal crisis of the ’70s, New York state and city set up institutional checks and balances to make sure that no mayor can ruin the city again. Mr. Stringer and State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli serve on the state’s Financial Control Board, ultimately controlled by Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

The board can take over if it finds an operating deficit of more than $100 million, or if it finds the city is borrowing for operating expenses. Proper accounting for the teachers’ deal would expose the city as committing both of those sins.

Read the whole thing, and remember that de Blasio won in a landslide, 72.2% to 24%. For reasons I’ve not seen satisfactorily explained—but which I think represented lack of enthusiasm for both candidates—the turnout in that election was a record low of 24%.

Meanwhile, back at the EPA, Obama’s plans to bankrupt the coal industry quietly go forward

The New Neo Posted on by

There are so many crises generated by the Obama administration that it’s easy to lose sight of some. But in just a little over a week a probable new one will be unleashed when the EPA announces rules for existing coal power plants, to go with the rules for new plants that were announced last January:

The January proposal sets carbon-emission limits for new power plants fueled by natural gas and coal. It also requires new coal-fired plants to use carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), a technology not in use by any commercial-scale power plant in the US.

In comments filed this month responding to the January proposal, the American Coal Council cited an Energy Information Administration estimate that the capital cost of a new integrated combined-cycle coal plant with CCS would be $6,599/kw.

That’s more than capital requirements for new hydro, onshore solar, wind, and nuclear plants and more than six times the capital cost of a new gas-fired combined-cycle generating plant without CCS, according to ACC.

Even before EPA’s January proposal, low gas prices were discouraging construction of coal-fired capacity. The proposal essentially makes coal-plant construction unlikely regardless of the gas price.

It also gives the coal business reason to expect rugged treatment of existing plants.

The January proposal affects growth. The June proposal will affect cost. If those costs are high, as they probably will be, a recent trend of coal-fired plant closures will accelerate.

Yes, gas-fired capacity will make up much of the loss. But the oil and gas business should welcome none of this.

EPA won’t stop with coal.

This process is happening through the EPA rather than Congress for two reasons. The first is that Obama can’t convince Congress or the American people to approve, so he’s going around both in his favorite manner, though a government agency. The second is that a month ago the Supreme Court gave him the green light to do it that way.

This course of action regarding coal is something Obama has been intent on for many a long year. No one on earth who’s been paying a particle of attention should be surprised, least of all those in a coal-producing states like Pennsylvania who voted for him despite that fact (the first map is of the results in the 2012 election, and the second is the coal-mining counties of PA):

election2012

coalregionpa

In one of the debates in 2012 Obama falsely presented himself as being a friend of fossil fuels, but that should have fooled no one. Obama had stated his plans for coal back in January of 2008, in an interview which came to light a few days before the 2008 election and which I wrote about at that time in a post entitled “Obama’s lump of coal.” Here’s an excerpt:

But he is advocating an extreme pro-environmental and anti-industry position nonetheless. Rather than banning new coal plants de jure, he plans to drive them out of business de facto, because the environmental requirements of his policies would be so stringent that new plants would be unable to comply and the penalties for noncompliance would be catastrophic. In other words,, any new plants would have to pay penalties so Draconian that they would be bankrupted””and the listener is left to wonder whether even older plants might be required to retrofit in order to comply, and be forced out of business as well.

Obama’s plan is that market forces would dictate that, as new coal production would become impossible, people would be forced to quickly fill in for the lack of power by developing the wonderfully clean alternative sources of energy that he is so sure would be available if only the will were there. We have no way of knowing whether it would work out that way, of course. But in the meantime we could be sure that the economic costs would be very high, as Obama unapologetically states.

This is his position on nuclear power as well…

So the plan was very, very clear very very early in the game, before Obama’s first term.

In the interim, however, a funny thing happened: shale fracking technology has improved and expanded enormously, and with it the ability to extract a lot more natural gas than before. Natural gas is cleaner than coal, and so despite the very strong objections environmentalists have to fracking, natural gas is what Obama and others have come to suggest could be a “bridge” fuel in the interim, until some other sources magically become practical and plentiful. Note that word “magically”; my point in using it is that it is very hard to replace fossil fuels, and nuclear power (which could probably do so to a large extent) doesn’t have the environmentalists’ blessing either.

One of the largest American shale deposits (known as the Marcellus Formation) is located in certain states that also have historically mined coal, such as West Virginia and Pennsylvania, as well as New York and a few others. But New York has banned fracking for years, and there’s been a long-term “temporary” ban in New Jersey as well, and other states may follow suit because of the perceived threat to groundwater, whether they have major shale deposits or not.

New Jersey is not as yet a big candidate for fracking anyway. But in Pennsylvania, where part of the Marcellus Formation lies and where fracking is big, there’s a fairly strong (though so far unsuccessful) movement to ban it as well.

The entire campaign against the coal industry is predicated on the theory of human-caused global warming. Whatever you think about the truth or falsehood of such claims, let’s focus on that word “global” in that warming equation. American coal production and use is actually a fairly minor factor in what may or may not be happening as a result of fossil fuel use worldwide. Unless there’s a worldwide approach, and especially unless India and China are onboard, this is almost inconsequential.

What’s more, burning gas may not really be as much of an improvement over coal as some say. And yet the overall cost of the new coal regulations is probably going to be high, even with the gas alternative.

Depending on the source, this is expected to cost the energy industry anywhere from $6 to $20 billion annually- all costs that will be passed on to utility customers… The Heritage Foundation estimates that once fully implemented, these regulations will cost the country 800,000 jobs- 280,000 in manufacturing alone. Jobs in the coal mining industry are expected to decline by 43%. Because converting plants to natural gas would be a better option for compliance, more of that commodity would be diverted to power plants and the price of natural gas would rise an estimated 42% unless production increased. But, environmentalists are blocking that option with their opposition to fracking.

More here from the Coal Council (which of course is hardly an objective group) about the possible drawbacks of natural gas:

The American Council for Clean Coal Electricity said EPA’s proposal would effectively ban new coal generation, since it will require a technology that is not widely available.

“Banning new coal-fueled power plants is bad energy policy for our nation because it will result in an overreliance on natural gas for new base load generation ”” a fuel that has a long history of price volatility and deliverability challenges,” ACCCE wrote in its comments.

ACCCE said the rule, also known as New Source Performance Standards (NSPS), would actually discourage CCS development, because companies would no longer have an incentive to build new plants. The group asked that EPA withdraw its proposal and write a new one based on emissions from new plants that do not use CCS.

The National Mining Association (NMA) urged EPA to rescind the proposal, for fear that it would reduce diversity in power supplies.

“EPA’s approach risks overreliance on one power source and jeopardizes the reliability that is inherent in having a diverse energy portfolio,” the NMA said. “NMA cautions EPA to proceed with great care in this rulemaking as it is merely step one of the agency’s plans for regulating the power sector under the [Clean Air Act] to reduce CO2 emissions.”

The Electricity Reliability Coordinating Council said the new rule could be a way to eliminate coal electricity, which would make power less reliable.

“The proposed rule is an example of regulation at its worst in that it attempts to direct market forces with only the vague hope of being able to deliver real benefits,” ERCC said. “Unfortunately, the costs of the proposed rule are very real in terms of limiting future electricity generation options, with consequent potential threats to electric reliability, affordability, and all of the economic and health harms that are associated with those results.”

I freely confess that I’m no expert on energy sources and how they work, either scientifically or economically. But my guess is that out there among my readers there are some who know a great deal about it. You can enlighten us in the comments section.