A few weeks ago, responding to the furor caused by Mitt Romney’s remarks on global warming during a town hall meeting, conservative writer David French defended him by taking the position that it doesn’t matter that he said some unsettling things on the environment because what he did say, when it comes down to brass tacks, will be “functionally meaningless.”
Why? Because in essence, “no one on the Republican side is going to enact the left’s environmental agenda. Elect Mitt and that agenda dies.” Supporting his case he cites a left-wing environmentalist blogger who laments that Romney talks a good case on the environment — from the Left’s perspective — but does not back it up with any substantive policy proposals: “Romney has not, however, endorsed any policies that would actually achieve his supposed goal of reducing global warming pollution.”
Honestly, I wish I could share French’s confidence that we can effectively ignore Mitt’s troubling comments on the environment because he will not support them with any concrete actions. I cannot. Let me tell you why.
The president has a lot to do with the EPA’s agenda and how ardently it pursues it, with whether it is an ineffective paper tiger or a real tiger sinking its teeth into our personal freedoms while using its claws to rip away at the constitutional safeguards that underpin the liberties which allow a free market to thrive and prosper.
The EPA has recently released for comment several regulatory standards that will cost thousands of jobs in the coal and coal-fired electricity industries.
President Obama fully endorses these austere measures. He is famously on record as saying that someone may wish to build a new coal-fired power plant but he will put regulatory burdens on them so heavy they will make the building of it economically unfeasible. The EPA’s new emissions rules will not only make it hard to build a new coal generating plant but will threaten the existence of many plants already in operation, costing jobs.
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