The coal industry is hitting back against attacks on Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who highlighted the Obama administration’s energy policies during a campaign stop in Colorado. Those policies, he said, are hostile toward coal.
A video released Friday by America’s Power, a coal industry-funded advocacy group, focused on the towns of Nucla and Naturita, Colo., where proposed regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency threaten to close a coal mine and a coal plant. The regulations cover mercury emissions and other pollutant standards.
If the EPA’s proposed rules were passed, the plants would be unable to afford the upgrades necessary to continue operation, leaving what one local business owner called “a ghost town.”
“If you wipe out those 150 jobs, when you’ve only got a town of 600 people, you’re going to have a ghost town and that’s going be all there is to it,” Apothecary Shoppe owner Don A. Colcord said in the video.
“You’ve got bureaucrats who run the EPA. They won’t let you burn coal, they won’t let you mine coal. We have coal to power this whole country. What are we going to do? Pretty soon this country is going to grind to a halt and we’re doing it to ourselves, and that’s what’s so frustrating.”
The sad truth is that the Mercury Standard is more an excuse to destroy the town than a needed public health measure.
Bringing the country grinding to a halt is the goal of the radical environmentalists at the EPA. They seek to impose a zero growth policy on the country. Once they restrain energy production they will get more aggressive with agriculture. We are seeing it now with attempts to stop GMO grains and vegetables, onerous land use regulations, pesticide and herbicide regulations that defy logic. What these myopic idealogues fail to look at is history. When standards of living drop, birth rates climb. The lowest birth rates globally are in the most affluent countries. The eco-nazis want to slow the growth of human population by creating artificial shortages of energy, food, health care, etc. but history tells us their efforts will have the opposite effect. Then of course there is that lunatic Erhlich of Stamford. He wants to “humanely” reduce the population of the earth by 4 billion or so. This election will tip the scale either towards responsible economic growth and prosperity, or forcing the American population to start devolving back to primitive standards and increasing government control of every aspect of our lives.