Gary Wisenbaker, Valdosta Today Opinion Contributor
As the Obama Administration’s new Iranian friends chanted “Death to America” and the country learned that Planned Parenthood traffics in aborted baby parts for profit, President Obama declared that the U.S. had a “moral obligation” to shut down coal powered energy plants for the sake of global warming.
The president’s jihad against coal is nothing new. One might recall that his own Democratic controlled congress refused to buy into Obama’s “Cap and Trade” scheme forcing him to go the route of regulatory fiat.
And when he and his EPA refused to follow the law and factor in cost analysis prior to issuing draconian regulations adversely affecting the coal industry, the Supreme Court smacked them down.
That’s two to one, yet the administration regulates unfazed.
What’s remarkable, however, are the extremes that Obama and the progressive left are willing to go to achieve so little, if anything at all.
Obama’s “Clean Power Plan”, recently announced by his EPA, is a “trickle down” regulatory scheme designed to transform America’s energy production paradigm in order to reduce carbon emissions 32 percent by 2030.
The plan requires the states to come up with strategies to meet the bureaucratic—not legislative—mandates to reduce carbon levels over the next 15 years. This means shutting down or severely restricting coal powered plants which produce 40 percent of the nation’s electricity.
The estimated cost is enormous: thousands of jobs in the coal mining and transportation industries as well as those lost in the shut down or marginalization of coal-fired power plants. The combined economic cost is an astounding $2.5 trillion in unrealized economic growth. Georgia, which recently joined the multi-state lawsuit to block the new rules, would have up to 8,800 jobs adversely affected.
Reagan’s “trickle-down economics” gave America years of unprecedented economic growth; Obama’s version calls for unprecedented economic contraction and skyrocketing energy costs for the consumer.
If this plan could actually bring about a realization of the president’s messianic 2008 message that his election heralded “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow”, then maybe the argument could be made that the effort was worth it.
Such is not the case.
While asserting the plan is essential to combat “global warming”, the full implementation of the plan yields only minuscule results: a reduction of one one-hundredth of a degree in future warming over the remainder of this century.
When questioned at a congressional hearing last year about whether the costs of the plan or rule justified the results, EPA’s Gina McCarthy responded, “The value of the rule is not measured that way. It is measured in showing strong domestic action which can trigger global action.”
Say again?
McCarthy’s disingenuousness is reminiscent of the line from Saturday Night Live’s Billy Crystal: “It’s better to look good than to feel good”.
The smart money says that China and India would much rather feel good than to look good. Their “feel” doesn’t include the use of carbon capture and sequestration technology to control their enhanced CO2 emissions. Their “strong domestic action” means getting electricity to their billion plus populations.
The trigger on the gun of global action, therefore, is only likely to release blanks.
This president and his administration are willing to sacrifice American jobs, economic growth and even hit those whom they feign to protect with stratospheric energy costs, all for the sake of “showing strong domestic action’. Or worse, all for the sake of some ephemeral, progressive left driven “moral obligation.”
If Obama is looking for a moral obligation to assert, maybe he could start with ridding the world of an Iranian regime and its acolytes dedicated to the annihilation of Judeo-Christian civilization rather than insuring that they will eventually have the tools to realize their dream.
Or, maybe, the president could find a moral obligation to publicly oppose and repudiate Planned Parenthood’s despicable practice of selling the organs of the babies they abort rather than renouncing those that exposed such heinous practices to a horrified nation.
But for this president and his administration, it’s better to look good than to feel good.
Gary Wisenbaker, B.A., J.D. is a native of South Georgia where he practiced law in Valdosta and Savannah for 31 years. He has served as state chairman of the Georgia Young Republicans and Chairman of the Chatham County (Savannah) Republican Party. Gary is a past GOP nominee for State Senate, past delegate to the Republican National Convention and has consulted on numerous local Republican campaigns as well as chaired or co-chaired campaigns for President and US Senate on the county and district level. He is the principal and founder of Blackstone, LLC, a corporate communications and public relations concern as well as Wiregrass Mediation Services, LLC, a general civil litigation mediation firm.
Gary hosts his own blog at www.garywisenbaker.com and recently published his first fictional work, “How Great is His Mercy: The Plea”, on Amazon.com. His opinions are regularly published on ValdostaToday.com and the Valdosta Daily Times.
