If President Obama were to demand that more than two-thirds of U.S. thread and cloth manufacturing be replaced by massing together spinning wheels and hand looms, most Americans would openly mock it. Yet, he is doing just that with electricity production.
The U.S. Supreme Court recently placed Obama’s Clean Power Plan (CPP) on hold while 27 states challenge it through the federal courts to better evaluate the plan’s potential economic and social damage. However much the plan might reduce potential dangers of climate change, it will cause much more harm to middle-class and poor Americans if it is implemented.
When campaigning for president in 2008, Obama bragged to an enthusiastic San Francisco audience that if any energy company tried to build a coal-burning power plant, he would drive it into bankruptcy. His approving audience consisted of wealthy donors, but as Obama attempts to implement the CPP, poor and middle-class Americans won’t cheer the results.
Obama’s plan favors wealthy environmentalists for whom higher electricity prices are an inconvenience, but lower-income people will find themselves increasingly forced to choose between paying for electricity and other necessities of life.
The CPP, which ostensibly will drastically lower the emissions of carbon dioxide from the USA’s power plants in the name of fighting climate change, all but declares war on fuels used to create two-thirds of U.S. electricity production. Coal, which, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, is used in about 39 percent of the electricity generation, is the main target, although one can be sure that the Environmental Protection Agency will demonize natural gas after doing away with coal. That natural gas provides 27 percent of the nation’s electrical power is meaningless to Obama and environmentalists.
For all of his stated concerns about the income gap between wealthy and non-wealthy Americans, President Obama seems anxious to exacerbate that gap through his environmental policies, although the real costs to the American public will not come to fruition until after he leaves office. In the short term, Obama will enjoy political adoration from environmentalists and their media allies, but when the bills come due — and if the CPP is enacted, they surely will — future presidents will have to deal with the unhappy results.
First, and most important, consumers of electricity are going to face substantially higher prices. After the German government made a substantial commitment to green energy a decade ago, electricity prices there shot up by more than 40 percent. Spain, another green energy laboratory, has seen 70 percent increases in power rates since jumping on the wind, solar and renewable bandwagon.
Residential users of electricity would not be the only ones facing big rate increases. Businesses and large-scale industries also would face higher energy costs and less-reliable electric power, which, in turn, would mean less productive output — and fewer jobs — for the U.S. economy. These things would not be mere inconveniences to people who will be forced to bear the brunt of layoffs and business closings; they would be disastrous.
Second, the situation is much worse even than the critics claim. Most coal-fired power plants are 40 years old or older, and Obama through the CPP wants them to be phased out of operation as quickly as possible. After cheap hydroelectric power, which provides about six percent of the nation’s electricity, coal-burning plants, even with all of the current anti-pollution devices the government now requires, are the second least-expensive method of power generation.
While some plants to be taken offline could be replaced by facilities using natural gas, Obama and his environmentalist allies do not approve of natural gas, either, even though it is a much cleaner fuel than coal. Given the activism against the hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”) method for extracting newly discovered reserves of oil and gas, it is clear that natural gas producers will face the same kind of legal obstructionism that has plagued other energy sectors for decades, as the “clean energy” advocates would move on after destroying the coal industry.
Given that nuclear power, which provides about 19 percent of the nation’s electricity, also is out of favor with Obama and environmentalists, there is not much left in power generation, and at the present time, wind, solar, biomass, and other “green” production entities provide about seven percent of the nation’s power supply. Yet, Obama and others believe that within a very short time, seven percent can magically jump to more than 90 percent through programs based upon mass subsidies and mandates.
Although production and operating costs for wind and solar power have fallen, these sources are limited in scope and potential. In a widely-touted example, Denmark carpeted its landscape with windmills to produce “clean” electricity, but could not take any coal-fired power plants offline because wind is unreliable and because it cannot take advantage of large economies of scale any more than factories full of workers using spinning wheels and hand looms could match current textile production.
For all of the romanticism tied to wind and solar, these are not viable options for production of 90 percent of U.S. electricity needs, yet they are the only real options if Obama’s CPP is fully implemented. It is not hyperbole to say that the economic results would be near-catastrophic.
William L. Anderson, Ph.D., is professor of Economics at Frostburg State University, Frostburg, MD, and a contributing writer for The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.
