Pro-fossil fuel people will not like this multi- approach common sense plan to reduce pollution and increase energy efficiency etc.

Shale Gas extraction side effects will have to be better managed.

Nothing new here! Same old ineffective plan that will be ignored by everyone. I would be impressed if Obama could get China, India, Indonesia, and Brazil to name a few to stop building coal plants like hot cakes.

Oddest thing happens when you let people have electricity. Next thing they want is a double door fridge with an ice dispenser. The US just set a record for coal exports.

Coal Producers Associations will never allow it.

Alternatively, USA could use NG power plants (instead of coal fired power plants) + increased grid capacity and use SEER 26+ heat pumps for 75+ % of domestic heating and cooling.

Since HVAC can be reduced over night, the unused e-energy could charge many million electrified vehicles.

Is this is same stupid Obama plan that couldn't get the number of counties in Hawaii right and the one that thinks that a 0.00004% increase in asthma attacks is somehow significant?

Ya, thanks but no thanks. I think we need someone intelligent and capable of basic research (at least the ability to Google, for hell's sakes) making decisions. Not that chump.

POTUS has forgot about congress.

That is so funny.

No, it's funny because before President elect Obama even took office the Republicans had a plot to obstruct him reguardless of anything he offered. They put Party before Country. In secret meetings led by House GOP whip Eric Cantor and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell in which they laid out their daring (though cynical and political) no-honeymoon strategy of all-out resistance to the popular President-elect during an economic emergency. “If he was for it,” former Ohio Senator George Voinovich explained, “we had to be against it.” Obama even went so far as to give them what they asked, use their ideas, and they still said "no."

Coal and the Bush Administration

Coal industry executives placed their bets on George W. Bush during the 2000 presidential campaign. Among others, Peabody Energy contributed $250,000 to the Republican National Committee in July 2000; West Virginia coal executive James "Buck" Harless gave $200,000 directly to Bush's campaign, while Peabody Energy and The Southern Company gave hundreds of thousands more. Also, during the 2000 elections, Peabody Energy, Burlington Northern, and The Southern Company founded Americans for Balanced Energy Choices, which kicked off a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign designed to promote coal energy and counter the influence of environmental groups.[1]

The coal industry's wager on Bush proved highly successful. In his first few months as president, Bush abandoned his campaign promise to force coal plants to reduce carbon emissions, appointed Irl Engelhardt (chairman of Peabody Energy) as an energy advisor to his transition team, and named former coal industry lobbyist J. Steven Griles Deputy Secretary of the Interior.[1](Griles resigned from this position in December 2004; in 2007, he pled guilty to obstruction of justice in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, and was sentenced to ten months in prison.)

Bush also cut the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency from $8.1 billion in 2001 to $7.1 billion in 2008. These budget cuts dramatically limited the EPA's ability to enforce violations of the Clean Air Act: the number of civil suits by the EPA against polluters decreased by 70% between 2002 and 2006, and by late 2007 the EPA was employing only 172 criminal investigators, fewer than the legal minimum of 200 set by President George H.W. Bush. (Eric Schaeffer, the former head of the EPA's Office of Civil Enforcement, resigned in 2002 in protest of Bush's approach to environmental enforcement.)[15][16]

Perhaps most importantly, until 2007 President Bush refused - in the face of overwhelming scientific consensus[17] - to acknowledge that global climate change was caused by human activities. In June 2002, when the Bush Administration's Environmental Protection Agency stated that human activities were partly responsible for global climate change, Bush dismissed the report, calling it a product of "bureaucracy."[18] In October 2004, NASA scientist James Hansen strongly criticized the Bush Administration's approach to climate change policy, stating that "in my more than three decades in government, I have never seen anything approaching the degree to which information flow from scientists to the public has been screened and controlled as it is now."[19] In 2007, Bush began to acknowledge somewhat openly that global climate change was both a real phenomenon and was largely caused by human activities.[20] However, the Bush Administration continued to oppose mandatory limits on carbon emissions, and the U.S. delegation obstructed the adoption of any meaningful global climate change plans at the December 2007 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali, Indonesia.[21]

In late 2008, the Bush Administration began pressuring the Environmental Protection Agency to weaken pollution regulations for coal plants and allow them to increase emissions without adding controls. The new rules are tied to a plant's hourly emissions rate, and are intended to help extend the life span of older power plants without requiring them to install expensive pollution controls. Under the proposed regulations, even if a power plant's total yearly emissions increased, it would be considered to be running more cleanly if its hourly emissions were equal to or less than its historical maximum.[22]

A spokesman for the EPA said that the agency is committed to finalizing the rule by the time Bush leaves office in January 2009. Power companies have lobbied for weakened emissions regulations for many years, and the proposal was part of Vice President Dick Cheney's 2001 energy plan. The EPA is also considering another eleventh-hour rule that would permit more power plants to be built close to national parks and wilderness areas.[23]

The coal boom

This considerably more coal-friendly regulatory environment under the Bush Administration - combined with rising oil prices and volatile natural gas prices (the U.S. price of a barrel of crude oil rose from $21.77 in Jan. 2001 to $88.41 in Jan. 2008,[24] while the price of natural gas fluctuated wildly and unpredictably during that same period[25]) - resulted in a dramatic expansion in utility plans for new coal-fired power plants.

Between 1992 and 2006, the capacity of all new U.S. coal-fired power plants totaled approximately 8,500 megawatts, a fairly modest amount of construction.[26] However, soon after Bush's presidency began - and especially after large increases in natural gas prices - energy utilities began submitting an increasing number of [proposals for new coal-fired power plants]. In October 2007, a report by the U.S. Department of Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory found that 45 coal-fired plants, with a total capacity of 23,240 megawatts, were either under construction or had already been approved by regulators; a further 76 plants, with a total capacity of 48,440 megawatts, were in various stages of the development process.[27] This total potential capacity of 71,680 megawatts represented 743% increase over the total capacity of 8,500 megawatts of all plants built between 1992 and 2006. Financial advisors, reporters, and environmentalists alike began to speak of a new "coal boom."[28][29][30][31]

Growing environmental backlash

However, during Bush's second presidential term, a rapidly growing proportion of the U.S. population began to view global climate change with increasing concern. According to a 2007 Yale University study, 56% of Americans considered global warming to be a very serious problem, compared with 40% in 2004; the 2007 poll also found that 68% of Americans agreed that global warming can be controlled by human actions. Furthermore, the study reported that that 86% of Americans thought that it was a good idea to increase funding for renewable energy research - and that 76% of Americans said that they trusted scientists at major universities on environmental issues, compared with 38% who said that they trusted President Bush.[2]

Hurricane Katrina - which killed 1,836 people and caused roughly $81.2 billion in damage when it hit coastal Louisiana and Mississippi in August 2005 - was a major factor in causing this shift in public opinion. According to a 2006 Zogby poll, 74% of Americans said that they were more convinced that global warming was a reality then than they had been in 2004, and 68% thought that global climate change was partly responsible for causing the hurricane.[32] This shift in public opinion was further bolstered in October 2007, when former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his campaign in favor of governmental action to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

This shift in public opinion on climate change more generally has also translated into increasing support for the growing movement against coal-fired power plants in the U.S. An October 2007 poll by the Opinion Research Corporation found that 75% of Americans would support a five-year moratorium on new coal-fired power plants if it was accompanied by increased investment in renewable power research; when asked what type of energy they would prefer their utility to use to power their house, only 3% opted for coal-fired power.[33] (This increasing tendency to blame coal-fired power plants for contributing to global climate change is strongly scientifically supported: the 2.12 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emitted by U.S. coal-fired power plants in 2006 represented 36.1% of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions, and 7.8% of global carbon dioxide emissions.[34])

Along with this shift in public opinion, campaigns organized by a growing grassroots movement against the construction of new coal-fired power plants has forced many corporations and politicians to abandon new coal-fired power projects.[5] Numerous environmental groups - such as the Sierra Club, Rainforest Action Network, Rising Tide, Clean Energy Action, Mountain Justice Summer, and Earth First!, as well as smaller local groups - have organized high profile protests and direct actions against new and existing coal-fired power plants.[5] The result has been a slough of recent plant cancellations: during 2007, 59 coal-fired power projects, with a total planned capacity of at least 28,364 megawatts, were cancelled or put on hold indefinitely. The general public has often strongly supported these cancellations: for instance, after the recent high-profile cancellation of Sunflower Energy's Holcomb Power Plant expansion by state environmental regulators in October 2007 due to concerns about global warming, a poll of Kansans found that 62% agreed with the decision to cancel the expansion.[4] Also, a recent poll of Iowans found that 80% thought that state regulators should focus on energy conservation and fuel efficiency, rather than approving new coal-fired power plants.[3]

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/U.S._coal_politics#Coal_and_the_Bush_Administration

The Huffinton Post and sourcewatch are not credible sources of information. A Candian want to explian US policy based on reading junk.

"Show me your sources."

What fact that I presented did you not agree with?

That tactic of long unrelated cut and paste blaming someone other than the current POTUS is odd.

"Predictable."

I have asked before but ai vin refuses to answer. Where do you work?

You made a claim about working but won't tell what you do. Cashing your government welfare check is not work.

I predict that ai vin will continue to make unfounded snide remarks about productive people.

I refuse to answer insults. So instead I'll see if we can't get this back on topic: If anybody is still interested in why Obama has to work around Congress instead of with it;

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/06/26/2202141/the-anti-science-climate-denier-caucus-113th-congress-edition/

And here's a list of their statements showing their denial;

http://thinkprogress.org/climate-denier-caucus/

The original vision of nuclear power was to target steam coal... by under-pricing it.

It worked until the coal interests managed to hobble nuclear with many regulations with some effect on safety, but massive effects on cost.