And speaking of bureaucratic power grabs
The FCC’s voting itself to takeover of the ‘net? Posh. The EPA is aiming to take over everything by way of driving up the cost of everything. Washington Times:
The Environmental Protection Agency’s new rules, which take effect Jan. 2, will impose limits on carbon dioxide. The EPA’s primary targets are coal-plant operators, who will be forced to choose between retrofitting their facilities with expensive emissions-control equipment and cooling towers or shutting them down. Democratic Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV – whose West Virginia coal-country constituents have the most to lose from the tough emissions restrictions – announced Friday that he had failed in his 11th-hour attempt to force a Senate vote to suspend the regulations before they take effect. His measure would have delayed for two years the new emissions requirements for power plants, refineries and manufacturing factories under the Clean Air Act.
A study released Dec. 8 by the Brattle Group, an economic consultancy, found that the new EPA rules could force the retirement of older power plants that produce 50,000 to 67,000 megawatts of electricity, or roughly 20 percent of the nation’s coal-fired power plants. As many as 70 million homes could be subject to blackouts, according to American Solutions, an advocacy group for conventional energy. Equipping remaining plants to comply with the mandates would cost $100 billion to $180 billion, the Brattle report warned. Those expenses would be passed along to consumers in the form of higher electric bills.
Look no further than the White House to find the source of this assault on America’s energy supply. The Obama administration’s energy policy is driven by global-warming true believers. Their intent is to flip the economics of energy and raise the cost of carbon-dioxide-based power, making purported green energy appear more cost-efficient by comparison. A review of 2010 recalls a series of obstacles to a fully powered nation that Team Obama has tossed in the path of nuclear waste disposal, offshore oil and gas drilling and now coal-produced electricity. All the while, billions are funneled to politically favored industries in order to subsidize expensive alternatives such as solar panels that produce electricity at double the cost.
Increases in the cost of energy don’t only yield higher electric bills. They yield increases in the cost of food, clothing, and any items that are produced, transported, or stored using energy. That is, everything.
Obama’s front-line efforts to get a Soviet style industrially-regulated society died with the most recent elections. Cap-and-trade as a matter of Congressional legislative mandate is dead.
But as we knew he would, Obama is using his regulatory agencies — peopled by unelected bureaucrats, and run by through a labyrinthian set of rules and regulations — to effectively impose on us the mechanisms for our own economic destruction (all while seizing control over a heretofore unregulated communications conduit).
The societal “transformation” Obama promised is happening. He’s just moved on to less savory methods to make it so — with the idea that, in the end, it is nearly impossible for elected politicians to find the will to roll-back government once it becomes entrenched.
The TEA Party movement, if it is to align itself with an established political party, has to insist that the candidates it supports have the will and determination to take on the entrenched bureaucracies. Cut their funding. Abolish them altogether.
Otherwise, we risk having a veneer of a republican representative democracy — while we are truly governed by a Brazil-like bureaucratic state run by unelected, faceless drones following rules set out to control and constrain individuals and individualism.
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