Obama Quietly Issues Executive Order Targeting 50% Increase In “Green Energy” Use
As if Americans weren’t hurting enough from declining income levels, inflation and a stagnant economy, President Obama has issued an executive order pushing America toward a 50% increase in the use of expensive, unreliable green energy for heating and power.
The order, which aims to increase the number of cogeneration plants in the U.S. by 50 percent by 2020 and slash carbon emissions by 150 million tons per year, is the administration’s latest effort to “deploy cleaner and more efficient energy production in the country by working around political resistance to climate change and ‘green’ energy legislation on Capitol Hill,” Reuters reports.
“The Federal Government has limited but important authorities to overcome … barriers, and our efforts to support investment in industrial energy efficiency and CHP [Combined heat and power] should involve coordinated engagement with a broad set of stakeholders,” the order says. …
The order dictates that the Departments of Energy, Commerce, and Agriculture, and the Environmental Protection Agency coordinate their actions to provide “policy and technical assistance” to states in order to ensure energy efficiency targets are being met. …
The order also “establishes a new national goal of 40 gigawatts of new combined heat and power capacity by 2020, a 50% increase from today,” according to a statement from the White House.
The primary green alternatives on the market are wind power and solar power. Both are so expensive, and so unreliable, that the government must not only subsidize their production but also mandate their use.
And this effort to push us away from energy sources that are working to energy sources that don’t work is, we’re supposed to believe, good policy.
By the way, you know what has done more to reduce carbon emissions in the United States than all the solar panels and all the wind turbines built to date? The rise in the use of natural gas thanks to hydraulic fracturing.
In related news, the Department of Energy Tweeted this graph showing the rise in solar power production in the United States:
The folks at Energy Tomorrow respond with this chart correlating growth in solar energy to growth in natural gas energy:
The Obama administration needs to get their priorities straight.
Tags: Barack Obama, government mandates, green energy, solar power, subsidies, wind power
