The Most Equal Comrade's great leap forward in his agenda to destroy the West

Well, he's made good on his promise to strangle the coal industry.  Couldn't do it through Constutitional, Congressional avenues, so he's going for EPA edicts.

The controversial regulation is one of the most sweeping efforts to tackle global warming by this or any other administration. 

The 645-page rule, expected to be final next year, is a centerpiece of President Obama's climate change agenda, and a step that the administration hopes will get other countries to act when negotiations on a new international treaty resume next year. 

While the plan drew praise from environmental groups, the coal industry was immediately suspect. 

Bill Bissett, president of the Kentucky Coal Association, said he's "certain that it will be very bad news for states like Kentucky who mine and use coal to create electricity." 

The draft regulation sidesteps Congress, where Obama's Democratic allies have failed to pass a so-called "cap-and-trade" plan to limit such emissions. 

Under the plan, states could have until 2017 to submit a plan to cut power plant pollution, and 2018 if they join with other states to tackle the problem, according to the EPA's proposal. 

States are expected to be allowed to require power plants to make changes such as switching from coal to natural gas or enact other programs to reduce demand for electricity and produce more energy from renewable sources.

They also can set up pollution-trading markets as some states already have done to offer more flexibility in how plants cut emissions.

If a state refuses to create a plan, the EPA can make its own.

There will be ample opportunity to delve into the damage this will wreak.  But let's take a moment to examine the origins of the ideological impetus behind such a move.  The MEC's science czar had this to say in 1975:

he essay appeared in The Windsor Star of August 1975 under the title Too Much Energy, Too Soon, A Hazard and was an attack personally penned by Holdren against the idea of trying to provide plentiful, cheap energy for the future. This, he said, would be totally the wrong move, and begins his article by handing down the following warning:

The United States is threatened far more by the hazards of too much energy, too soon, than by the hazards of too little energy, too late.

The Windsor Star. Aug. 1975. Too Much Energy, Too Soon, A Hazard.

Of course – all those foolish people worrying about what they’d do if the aging power stations weren’t replaced should’ve been worrying about too much cheap, plentiful energy. We all know how dangerous that can be, right? Holdren lists some of these dangers as:

. . . diverting financial resources from compelling social needs, making hasty commitments to unproved technologies, and generating environmental and social costs that harm human welfare more than the extra energy improves it.

And it doesn’t get much clearer than that, I’m afraid, not least because there’s not really much of an argument here to start with. Holdren’s basic position, I think, is that rather than investing in silly things like power stations and infrastructure, the nation should be investing in social goods like modern dance workshops and radical art seminars that are a real investment for the future.

What, for example, can we make of the following warning?

Mounting evidence suggests that the United States is approaching (if not beyond) the level where further energy growth costs more than it is worth.

Planned decline, friends.  The Freedom-Haters have been preparing for this moment a very long time.