We've said it before. This country was built on coal. We have the cleanest coal. Coal is an irreplaceable part of the energy mix. And America has 500 years' worth of coal - more than any other nation. We are, or should be, the Saudi Arabia of coal.
So we are pleased that made-in-America coal was the big winner in the rightly decided West Virginia Supre Court decision announced this morning on a 6-3 decision. Here is a summary written by the Chief Justice:
The decision echoes the late Justice Scalia, who famously wrote in American Trucking:
"Congress, we have held, does not alter the fundamental details of a regulatory scheme in vague terms or ancillary provisions — it does not, one might say, hide elephants in mouseholes."
Since the spectacular failure of Obama's cap-and-trade scheme to even come to the Senate floor in 2010, Democrats and the environmental left have been relying on the EPA to do their bidding in destroying the fossil fuel industry – and putting our energy reliability and security at risk.
The elected representatives of Congress make the laws – not unelected regulatory bureaucrats.
On a more purely practical level: The Obama/Biden war on coal (via the EPA) isn’t reducing world consumption or global CO2 emissions, it is shifting production away from America - with clean coal - to China with dirty coal. We reprint here a chart from earlier this week that shows the quadrupling of coal production in China. Beijing doesn’t have an EPA.
Michigan’s Dana Nessel is the nation's most radical state attorney general. During COVID she abetted Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s arbitrary and cruel lockdowns, even castigating a 77-year-old barber who opened his shop by questioning his love for the United States.
A social justice warrior, she made headlines this month by telling a conference she wanted “a drag queen for every school….drag queens make everything better!”
Let’s just say Dana is a little unhinged from reality.
Now a unanimous Michigan Supreme Court has slapped her down by ruling her indictments against former GOP Governor Rick Snyder and others in the Flint lead pipe water crisis case must be dismissed. The Associated Press calls it “an astonishing defeat” for Nessel, who fired a special prosecutor on the case when she took office in 2019. She then authorized a single judge to hear secret evidence and then take on the role of a one-judge grand jury to indict the former governor for willful neglect of duty and his former health director for involuntary manslaughter.
Chief Justice Bridget McCormack, a Democrat, said in her opinion that the highly unusual use of a single judge was a "Star Chamber comeback,” a reference to secret courts in the Middle Ages.
Justice McCormack wrote: “To this day, the defendants do not know what evidence the prosecution presented to convince the grand jury to charge them."
5) Germany Wakes Up To Its Green Energy Frankenstein
We reported earlier this week that Germany has decided to restart coal-fired power plants and likely delay the closure of its remaining nuclear power plants as it realizes it put far too many chips on renewable energy.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February, it was dependent on Russia for 50 percent of its natural gas and 41 percent of its oil. As it tries to wiggle free of the yoke of the Russian bear, there is not only talk of possible rationing and brownouts but even shutdowns in key industry.
Instead, talk of rationing natural gas has already started, and the event horizon now includes the possibility of mass industrial shutdowns and recession.
“We are in a gas crisis,” German Economy Minister and Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck warn his fellow citizens.
“Companies would have to stop production, lay off their workers, supply chains would collapse, people would go into debt to pay their heating bills, and people would become poorer.”
What makes Habeck’s doom scenario all the more remarkable is that he is a member of the GREEN Party, which has for decades called for an end to fossil fuel use. His realpolitik response to an energy crisis created by environmental wackos is commendable, but wouldn’t true leadership have been to not follow the Green Pied Piper in the first place?
We despair that America is now to the left of Europe on Green Energy madness
