They don’t discuss the subject too openly outside their own circles, but environmentalists make crystal clear on their Web sites that they want to stop all coal-based power production in this country. They claim coal can never be made clean, so it must be eliminated before it’s too late to do anything about global warming. Ted Nace puts it succinctly in a Grist Web site post: “The stakes, for all life on the planet, surpass those of any previous crisis.”
That may sound extreme, but Nace is merely expressing mainstream environmentalist thinking. The Sierra Club, for example, tracks the status of all coal-fired power plants in this country on its “Stop the Coal Rush” page. The environmentalists have been remarkably successful in preventing construction of new coal-fired power plants, with 126 having been stopped since 2001, according to the Sierra Club data. And Nace crows that not a single one was started in 2009. Even so, nearly half of all electricity used in the United States is generated by coal-fired power plants, down from a high of 57 percent in 1987.
Regardless of whether one agrees with the goal of eliminating coal-fired power production, it is critically important that policymakers and voters alike understand the duplicitous game being played on them by environmentalists. It is seen most vividly when environmentalists talk about how they plan to replace coal with an array of “green” alternative energy sources, including biomass, solar, wind and ethanol.
What they don’t want to talk about is the fact that there’s no way those sources are going to replace coal-fired power production by 2030. And they don’t want to talk about the fact that there’s another extraordinarily plentiful and much cleaner energy source — natural gas — that can readily replace coal and lower energy costs more effectively than any alternative source. In fact, the same environmentalists who are shutting down coal plants are also opposing increased natural gas production. In other words, it’s their green way, or nothing.
President Obama and Ken Salazar, his Interior Department secretary, are following right along with the environmentalist playbook on these matters. Salazar recently announced that his department will issue no permits for off-shore natural gas exploration and production before 2012, at the earliest, even though experts agree there are trillions of cubic feet of natural gas waiting to be harvested.
Salazar thus short-circuits the 2008 lifting of presidential and congressional bans on such activities. That means no new off-shore energy development will be approved during Obama’s first term in the White House. Meanwhile, Obama is showering billions of tax dollars on alternative energy resources that the Energy Department says won’t even be close to replacing coal by 2030.
