Obama Adviser: 'A War On Coal Is Exactly What We Need'

People who understand coal’s role in powering America will find this alarming, as will people who work in the coal industry. Unfortunately, both amount to a pittance of Americans. So this probably won’t matter at all.

Daniel P. Schrag, a White House climate adviser and director of the Harvard University Center for the Environment, tells the New York Times “a war on coal is exactly what’s needed.” Later today, President Obama will give a major “climate change” address at Georgetown University.

“Everybody is waiting for action,” Schrag tells the paper. “The one thing the president really needs to do now is to begin the process of shutting down the conventional coal plants. Politically, the White House is hesitant to say they’re having a war on coal. On the other hand, a war on coal is exactly what’s needed.”

Previous Obama hacks have said similar things, leading to a resignation in the EPA. But that was during an election year. Safely re-elected, Obama won’t sack Schrag. He’ll promote him if he can. He may go out and re-hire Al “Crucify ‘Em!” Armendariz just to put a cherry on top of his policy.

To most Americans, the flip of the switch that turns on their lights and the push of the button that turns on the DVR might as well be magic. Obama has been waging war on coal from day one of his administration. He has paid no penalty for it. Mitt Romney even tried pinning that war on him, in coal states, last year. He campaigned with people whose jobs are directly threatened by Obama’s policies.

It made no difference at all. Too few Americans either work in the coal industry or understand that many of their TVs and smart phones are coal-powered devices to understand that the war on coal — which is coming in earnest, thanks to Obama unilateral seizure of even more power in the name of “climate change” today — is really a war on them, their wallets, their earnings, and ultimately their futures. It’s all an abstraction until those bills in the mail start to look scary, and then — they’ll blame it on the energy companies for “gouging.”

By the time he’s done, Obama will have ushered in extreme health coverage prices through ObamaCare, extreme energy prices in the name of “climate change,” a devalued dollar thanks to the massive debt he has piled up, and food and fuel prices that have inched up year after year as he has been in office. If he wins on the immigration bill, he will have watered down sovereignty and citizenship while banking millions of new votes to support his pet schemes. Internationally, he has already debased the American position to the point that both China and Russia thumb their nose at us, secure that Obama will do nothing about it. And at the end of it all, unless his scandals bury him, he will have ramped up dependency on government to such a point that he and his party will not only not pay a price for any of this, they will gain even more power by defending the welfare state upon which close to half the country now depends.