President Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently unveiled a series of new regulations likely to devastate the American coal-power industry and turn out the lights by increasing costs, reducing the standard of living. Under the regulations, all coal-fired plants that are slated to remain operational in the long-term and all new baseload gas-fired plants will be required to effectively eliminate 90 percent of their carbon emissions, a wildly impractical target.

“The administration has chosen to press ahead with its unrealistic climate agenda,” Shelley Moore Capito, the Republican senator from coal-rich West Virginia and ranking member of the Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee, said in a statement. “With the latest iteration of the illegal Clean Power Plan 2.0 announced today, President Biden has inexplicably doubled down on his plans to shut down the backbone of America’s electric grid through unachievable regulatory mandates.”

The original Clean Power Plan (CPP) was proposed by former president Barack Obama in 2014. It was estimated to cost a staggering $41 billion annually, according to a study by industry groups. A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found green policies would increase the tax burden of the poorest households three times more than that of the richest households.

CPP would increase the cost of living for the poorest American families by an additional $19 billion per year, equivalent to increasing their taxes by 166 percent, according to a Manhattan Institute study. The tax increase would also raise taxes on other poor families by an extra $25 billion, equal to a 33 percent tax increase. Living costs for the richest households would only increase by 4 percent.

“Electricity demand is set to skyrocket thanks in part to the EPA’s own electric vehicles mandate, and unfortunately, Americans are already paying higher utility bills under President Biden,” Capito’s statement continued. “Despite all this, the administration has chosen to press ahead with its unrealistic climate agenda that threatens access to affordable, reliable energy for households and employers across the country.”

The new rules consist of a whopping 681 pages of unreasonable demands that will kill the American coal industry. One example: mandating that coal plants somehow install not yet commercially available carbon-capture technology to be allowed to continue operating. In otherwise-favorable coverage of the regulations, Politico makes note of their length and characterizes the move as largely political, and wonders whether the “aggressive” attack on coal “will appease progressive voters worried about climate change without losing centrist Democrats wary of the costs.”

The rules will effectively ban coal power in the United States, fail to decrease worldwide carbon-dioxide emissions at all, and lead to less reliable energy for Americans.

If it had been fully implemented, the CPP would only have prevented 0.019° Celsius of warming by the year 2100, an amount so small it can’t be detected, according to an analysis by the libertarian Cato Institute using models created by the EPA. The EPA actually omitted the amount of warming the Clean Power Plan was supposed to prevent from its own analysis because it did  “not have sufficient confidence in available data or methods.”

Republican senators and the state of West Virginia successfully challenged CPP in the Supreme Court after Republicans in the House and Senate failed to overcome President Obama’s veto of attempts to repeal the plan.

These flaws in the plan’s cost-benefit calculations prompted former president Donald Trump to order an EPA review of the CPP by his administration, which ultimately rolled it back and forcing the agency to reconsider. However, on the last full day of the Trump administration, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the Trump ruling, allowing the Biden administration the opportunity to “improve and clarify” the regulations.

“The Biden administration has specifically targeted coal power plants in these regulations and created unrealistic and unworkable emission reduction goals with the intention of driving coal-fired power plants off the nation’s electrical grid . . . . Existing coal generation assets would be required to install carbon capture equipment that is not yet commercially available or shutdown,” notes a press statement responding to the new EPA announcement from the office of Senator Kevin Cramer (R., N.D.).

“The regulation also sets arbitrary operating limits on new natural gas generation before imposing carbon capture requirements on those facilities too. President Biden learned nothing from the Supreme Court’s landmark West Virginia v. EPA decision and is again trying to circumvent the law by mandating unrealistic standards in the hopes of shutting down coal generation,” the statement continued.

West Virginia attorney general Patrick Morrisey, who spearheaded the legal charge that led to the Supreme Court’s ruling that the EPA had overreached with the original CPP, has already promised to challenge the new regulations in court.

The far-left crusade against coal didn’t begin with the CPP in 2014, though. Every time Democrats are in power, the EPA goes beyond its mission of protecting the environment to engage in actively targeting entire industries with virtually no justification. This process began in 2012. That’s when the agency attempted to roll out its Utility MACT Rule, which forces utilities to meet stricter air-quality standards or shut down, would raise electricity rates by approximately 20 percent, cost $10 billion, and shutter 81,000 megawatts of power generation.

The EPA contended this was necessary to prevent mercury emissions from harming a purely theoretical population of unborn children whose mothers annually consumed more than 225 pounds of local freshwater fish caught from the most polluted 10 percent of U.S. inland waterways. When prompted, the federal government was unable to find a single individual who met this criterion. Yet this massive governmental overreach is an attempt to prevent a predicted loss in IQ by an undetectable 0.00209 IQ points in this non-existent population.

The agency’s strategy is always the same: use speculative and likely imaginary benefits to artificially raise the price of electricity generation above its market value by increasing compliance costs via overregulation of politically disfavored industries such as coal and natural gas. Supported by its environmental-lobby allies, the Biden administration is attempting to shutter these industries to make unreliable wind and solar power more competitive by fiat. When that leads to rising electricity costs and erratic energy availability, households across the nation may be forced to ration electricity and switch off the lights. The future of Biden’s America looks dark, quite literally.

Weblink:

https://www.capito.senate.gov/news/in-the-news/opinion-biden-effectively-bans-coal-power_--again

Communist Defectors Warn About Four Stages Of Subversion — And America Is On The Last One

Xi Van Fleet and Yuri Bezmenov witnessed the evil of communism in China and the Soviet Union. The same evil is at work in the U.S.

Forty years ago, a KGB defector, Yuri Bezmenov, revealed the systematic plan Soviet communists used to take down countries and establish a communist-type society and regime. More recently, a Chinese defector immigrant, Xi Van Fleet, has been on a crusade to warn Americans about the parallels between what is happening in America today and what Mao did in the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

The systematic plan Bezmenov revealed involves four fluid stages of communist subversion: 1) demoralization, 2) disorientation, 3) crisis, and 4) normalization. In Mao’s America, Xi Van Fleet explains how Mao’s destruction of the “Four Olds” (old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits) is being replicated by today’s leftist cancel culture, which will end what is left of freedom in America if not stopped.

Demoralization

The first stage in the Bezmenov analysis, demoralization, lasts a generation or more. One of its main thrusts is to undermine the Judeo-Christian beliefs, customs, habits, and traditions that have been foundational to America — these parallel the Four Olds that Mao destroyed in China.

Another target for demoralization is the family, which communists want to replace with the state. Xi Van Fleet points out that just as the Chinese Cultural Revolution turned children against their parents, American families are under increasing attack. Government schools, the medical establishment, and popular culture — which now support the transgender movement — are increasingly turning children against their parents.

A third demoralization strategy is breaking the people’s loyalty and love for their country by rewriting history, denigrating the founders and national heroes, and destroying historic monuments — again, the Four Olds. In summary, the goal of demoralization is to disconnect people from the virtue of the past and render them unable to assess what is true.

Disorientation

The second stage of the communist strategy, according to Bezmenov, builds on demoralization to advance society’s disorientation, a condition wherein the masses feel bewildered and helpless. While it’s impossible to prove intentionality at this time, the China-originated Covid-19 pandemic caused massive disorientation in the U.S. when the government mandated masks, social distancing, quarantines, lockdowns, and the abandonment of tried-and-true medical practices of preventive and therapeutic treatments.

Another important part of disorientation happened early in the Covid crisis after the death of George Floyd. Assertions of systemic racism in law enforcement triggered rioting, looting, and the destruction of several billion dollars’ worth of property, along with the tearing down of historic statues and memorials in many cities across the United States.

Americans became further disoriented when they realized government authorities were unable or unwilling to do anything about the destruction in big cities across America. There were few arrests while more than 2,000 police officers were injured. Disorientation may have reached its peak when cities with the most lawlessness, such as Minneapolis, Seattle, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, initiated efforts to defund local law enforcement.

Crisis

Following disorientation is the crisis stage. An unprecedented crisis stage for America came in November 2020 with election rigging. Democrat operatives exploited the fear factor of Covid-19 in the summer months of 2020. They visited almost every swing state to change voting rules to accommodate expanded mail-in ballots, drop boxes, and extended vote-tally deadlines — all of which facilitate vote fraud.

The crisis that ensued from election irregularity was deepened by the massive media and social media censorship and cancellation campaigns that began well before the Nov. 3, 2020, election. The Department of Homeland Security division called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, better known as CISA, collaborated with the Stanford University-based NGO Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) to suppress information that would help Trump.

EIP launched a campaign to prevent the public from challenging the anticipated voting irregularities by getting agreements from all the social media companies — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, and Pinterest — to modify their customer terms-of-service policies to incorporate language about “delegitimization.” Once that was accomplished, according to Mike Benz, a former U.S. State Department communications policymaker and an expert on propaganda, the door was opened to algorithmic mass censorship and cancellation.

EIP exerted pressure on all the social media companies to adhere to their customer service policies and censor, cancel, or deplatform any content that contained “delegitimized” narratives about new election protocols and “processes,” election “issues and outcomes,” “mail-in ballots,” “early voting,” “drop boxes,” “Dominion Voting Systems,” and “Antifa.”

The media treatment of the Hunter Biden laptop story that broke in mid-October 2020 in the New York Post illustrates just how quickly the channels of propaganda and media manipulation fall into place. The laptop story (which contained massive incriminating evidence revealing a compromised Joe Biden family), was immediately delegitimized and taken down from every social media site. At the same time, 51 former top intelligence officials signed a letter, published in The New York Times and The Washington Post, stating that the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

After the 2020 election, social media effectively thwarted discussion about election fraud. Again EIP insisted that social media companies uphold the terms-of-service contracts that required censoring social media content containing newly delegitimized terms, such as “Stop the Steal,” “dead voter rolls,” “Sharpiegate,” “stolen election,” “ballot harvesting,” and “Postal Service,” to name a few. Additionally, people questioning the integrity of the 2020 election were marginalized by the media and discredited as “election deniers.”

Bemenov’s four stages are fluid, so demoralization and disorientation continue in the crisis stage. We see this with lawfare against Donald Trump, his aides, and some 1,200 Jan. 6 participants arrested by the FBI.

The target is not just Trump and his supporters, but the American people, who are now seeing that large parts of the justice system in America resemble that of a banana republic. With equal justice under the law and respect for the Constitution being mocked, the subliminal message is, “This is not the America you know; it’s a new world that you have entered, so get used to it.”

Normalization

While America is still in the crisis stage, some subversion experts argue that the lawfare, censorship, and cancellation regimes that now exist are really part of the last stage of communist takeover known as normalization — Bezmenov’s fourth and final stage. If America’s borders remain open and the American people are denied access to information, become accustomed to rigged elections, accept limitations on free speech, and acquiesce to the rewriting of history, the constitutional republic that was the United States will be gone, and the new world of communist global elite control will be normalized.

John Adams, the second president, unequivocally warned, “Liberty once lost is lost forever.” It is no longer enough just to man the ramparts. It’s time for the people to turn the tables on the elite destroyers of our constitutional republic.