Obama recently unveiled his new energy plan, and it is, in a nutshell:
Ban coal, pay more for energy.
How so?
According to Robert Zurbin of National Review:
since those plants supply about 40 percent of America’s electric power, they will need to be replaced at great cost, which will be borne by ratepayers…all proposed replacements for coal are significantly more expensive, so using them will drive rates up further…increasing the cost of electric power is one of the most regressive forms of taxation possible, since, for example, stockbrokers making $30 million per year will pay nearly the same additional amount as families making $30,000 per year, despite a thousand fold difference in income.
And those are just a handful of the reasons.
Obama hopes that we can use all of our natural gas to break from coal.
The problem is that we have a severe oil dependency which needs to be addressed first—and that natural gas should be used to break that habit.
As a result of the boom in natural-gas production, the United States now has a way to break this fatal dependency. Natural gas can be used to power automobiles — directly or (more easily) by converting it to methanol and employing it as a liquid fuel in flex-fuel vehicles. This latter alternative is well understood by our new energy secretary, Ernest Moniz, since he authored an MIT study that supported it.
Our energy future is complex. American coal plants are the most advanced and cleanest in the world, and provide crucial jobs to economically-depressed states. To eliminate this major source of American energy is to cause all of us to pay more for energy—and pull out a Jenga piece on which our energy future rests.
