Obama’s energy policy is not science — it’s an ideological crusade

Not unlike its approach to Obamacare, the administration has used a regulatory sledgehammer when a mere scalpel would have done the job.

Here’s why: For those in the Obama administration, it is less about balancing environmental concerns with economic growth than it is about crushing forms of energy they don’t like — like coal.

Thanks in no small part to this administration’s endless regulations and threats, Eastern Kentucky is today suffering through an economic depression. Thousands of jobs have been lost, and thousands more are in jeopardy. Eventually, coal production could be driven out of the United States for good, with untold consequences for Kentucky and the broader national economy.

The great tragedy in all this is that the administration’s job-killing regulations won’t do much of anything to meaningfully improve the environment or to curb global carbon emissions, since our overseas competitors will inevitably provide whatever coal we can’t.

None of this is surprising from a president who once promised to bankrupt power plants, even though this would force middle-class energy bills to skyrocket as a result. He’s simply keeping his promise. What is surprising is that the president and his bureaucratic enablers in Washington are able to get away with claiming they’re doing all this in the name of science, when it’s little more than an ideological crusade.

A recent government report backed this up when it concluded that the administration’s claims about the costs and benefits of various Environmental Protection Agency regulations were flawed. That may not matter to a president who often appears less interested in making good policy than stirring up his base. But to many of the people I represent, the president’s proposals are a threat to their basic economic survival — not to mention their dignity.

One Kentuckian recently wrote to tell me that as a young man, he dreamed of growing up to be a coal miner just like his dad. He said he graduated from high school and got all the necessary training and certification — just in time for the start of the president’s war on coal. Now that young man is struggling to find any work at all to help support his family.

This young American and others like him have become collateral damage in an ideological crusade that is doing little to help the environment, even as it threatens to ship well-paying jobs overseas, splinter our manufacturing base and increase Kentucky’s traditionally low utility rates. Already, more than 7,000 coal-related jobs have been lost in Eastern Kentucky since this administration took power — a sad contrast to the Bush years when coal jobs increased.

As usual, the Obama administration is presenting us with a false choice. The question isn’t whether we should protect the environment or help the economy. It’s whether we should continue to cling to an ideologically driven energy strategy or switch to a smarter, balanced approach that includes coal and nuclear, natural gas and biofuels, better technology and more home-grown North American energy.

An all-of-the-above approach — rather than an all-but-coal approach — is the key to creating more jobs, keeping energy bills low, protecting our planet and promoting public health, all at once.

It’s also the kind of strategy the American people expect. And it’s one we can get to work on in a bipartisan way once the Obama administration drops its my-way-or-the-highway mindset and its ineffective, politically driven regulatory agenda that threatens to do so much harm for so little environmental benefit.

Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky is the Senate Republican leader.