President Obama celebrated his 53rd birthday on Monday – and in parts of America others demonstrated against him and his energy programs.
Thousands of coal miners gathered in Pittsburgh last Wednesday to kick off the festivities with a “Rally to Support American Energy.”
West Virginia Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin was there, along with his Pennsylvania counterpart and the lieutenant governor of Ohio. Our state attorney general, Patrick Morrisey, also attended, urging representatives of the three states to “form a united front against the Environmental Protection Agency’s burdensome and illegal proposed regulation on existing power plants.”
On Friday, a dozen states made Obama’s upcoming birthday even more memorable by filing suit to stop the EPA from escalating its war against coal.
On Sunday, the eve of the president’s birthday, Pennsylvania Congressman Mike Kelly published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal warning that “the White House-ordered regulatory scheme will badly damage the coal industry and cost Americans in higher electricity costs and lost jobs while doing little to fight climate change.
“Coal generates 40 percent of America’s electricity,” Kelly emphasized. “Its stable price and abundance insulate the U.S. economy from spikes in energy demand. Yet the EPA is proposing to destroy coal’s benefits by imposing onerous emissions standards on all existing power plants, under the threat of crippling fines, which is certain to lead to plant closures.”
As a special gift for the president, Kelly has introduced the Coal Country Protection Act in the House of Representatives to “halt new EPA regulation on power plants until there is a guarantee that there will be no loss of American jobs, no drop in gross domestic product, no higher electricity rates, and no interruption in energy delivery.”
On Monday, Obama’s actual birthday, the Washington Times chimed in with an editorial about the president “scheming to ‘bankrupt’ coal, a plentiful and affordable source of energy, to make way for the trendier alternatives.”
We hope the president had a happy birthday, knowing how some feel about him.