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Obama EPA kills power plant, 3,900 jobs in Texas

Irrational hatred of the President seldom allows rational responses.

Does Obama have control over electricity generation in Australia? Power profits up by $100m despite users cutting back

How about in the UK? Electricity price-rise pain may be worse than expected - Business News - Business - The Independent

Oh maybe he does control India's costs? As costs rise, power companies to up tariffs 33 per cent - Economic Times


Then we have a bit more reasonable look at one reason electricity prices are rising? Less regulation of the free market, just what the capitalists claim they want, you know that whole "competition thing", well except for the small matter that less regulation almost always means the big boys wipe out their smaller competitors and then they get to control the market.
Proposal could hike electricity rates despite lower fuel costs - Houston Chronicle

Consumers are enjoying lower electricity prices because of the plunge in the price of natural gas often used to generate it.

State regulators, however, are contemplating new rules that could send consumer retail prices up again.

The Public Utility Commission of Texas is considering raising the cap on the price at which generators can offer to sell electricity on the wholesale market, as an incentive for them to build more plants.

By lifting the cap, regulators are helping increase potential revenues for generators.

"If the PUC's plan does not work and no new capacity is built, what do we do?" Biedrzycki (executive director of Texas Ratepayers' Organization to Save Energy) said.

"As far as I know, there is no provision in the law for the commission to order that new plants be built."

So tell us, why should new power plants be built when a company can increase their profit margins by simply charging more for a product even when their costs are stable or dropping. "Oh but that commie in the White House is going to stop the mining of coal and that will make natural gas prices go up - even though extraction costs of gas have gone down - and besides there are other countries that will pay us more than we can get in the US market. As a side note, why do you think a Canadian company wants to build a pipeline to Texas?

For quite a bit more discussion of costs for power generation, read James Conca at Forbes.com
 
Irrational hatred of the President seldom allows rational responses.

How about a rational contempt for his policies? Obama's major problem seems to be an inability to sell his irrational Chicken Little responses to miniscule problems which could be more effectively addressed without the police state he is pushing.
 
Now you know why this President is responsible for the slowest recovery from a recession in American history......

He could care LESS about jobs.

It's all about his agenda.
 
Now you know why this President is responsible for the slowest recovery from a recession in American history......

He could care LESS about jobs.

It's all about his agenda.


This thread hangs around like a hemmhroid. It's been proven that no New Obamy regs are involved and the 3,900 jobs lost never existed anywhere but on some paper proposal. End of story. The power plant proposal was killed by GWShiiteForBrains era regulations. Ain't that surprising?
 
This thread hangs around like a hemmhroid. It's been proven that no New Obamy regs are involved and the 3,900 jobs lost never existed anywhere but on some paper proposal. End of story. The power plant proposal was killed by GWShiiteForBrains era regulations. Ain't that surprising?

Where's Jindal when ya need him?
 
Now you know why this President is responsible for the slowest recovery from a recession in American history......

He could care LESS about jobs.

It's all about his agenda.

How about a rational contempt for his policies? Obama's major problem seems to be an inability to sell his irrational Chicken Little responses to miniscule problems which could be more effectively addressed without the police state he is pushing.



and the Republican minority in the Senate has nothing to do with the problem? :roll:

The history of the filibuster, in one graph

You don't have to like the source, just look at the numbers, you don't like the numbers - then you need to provide different ones.

We just witnessed a failure of leadership on the part of Harry Reid (D-NV) in his negotiations over changing the rules governing Senate filibusters and Mitch McConnell gloating over how he played Harry.

The result is no major change in Senate rules and the Republicans can continue to obstruct everything in the Senate, all the while - as shown here - they complain about the President's 'failures".

Funny that - they call him a dictator yet at the same time say he gets nothing done. Haven't they ever heard of cognitive dissonance or the Orwellian meme? - "We've always been at war with Eastasia"
 
Now I understand why Obama didn't mention jobs in his speech the other day.




Obama EPA kills power plant, 3,900 jobs in Texas | WashingtonExaminer.com

I don't know if this is normal to use the Washington Examiner as source for 'Breaking News', and I don't want to start off by just attacking the source, but in this case, I think we must consider the source and the obvious bias tone of the headline.

Background on Washington Examiner.

Politico described the paper as "a megaphone for [Anschutz's] right-wing views on taxes, national security and President Barack Obama."[4] The Examiner's parent company, Clarity Media Group, also owns the conservative opinion magazine The Weekly Standard.[5] The Examiner co-sponsored the Republican presidential debate in Ames, Iowa on August 11, 2011.

Then when you go the story linked in the "source", you find out:


The air quality issue culminated in July, when Travis County District Court Judge Stephen Yelenosky ordered the TCEQ to take a more in-depth look at the permit, particularly where it addressed the way the company planned to handle, store and transport petroleum coke onto the site, and the commission’s failure to review the plant according to the latest National Ambient Air Quality Standards.

So, an activists group filed a suit and a judge took another look at the permit.

I did some google searching and found a story that confirms that:

The plant was given an air permit in January 2011 by the TCEQ. A challenge to that permit was brought by a coalition of environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), the Corpus Christi Clean Economy Coalition, and several Texas cities. Now Judge Yelenosky has ruled in those groups’ favor, reversing the air permit.

In his May letter, the judge found several things wrong with how the TCEQ processed the permit, and said it failed to meet the requirements of the Clean Air Act, among other issues. Tuesday’s order lays out in detail what the TCEQ did wrong. The TCEQ would not agree to an interview about the ruling, and would only give StateImpact Texas a prepared statement.

In fairness, there are two sides to every story, but the claims about hostile EPA actions don't seem to hold water. The Clean Air Act has been on the books since 1970, amended in 1990.


I'm going to speculate now and guess that under Bush/Cheney energy policy, these permits were easier to come by.

The OP is really misleading because the plant was issued permits in 2011, but it was this state level group, and a district judge revoked the permit due to "significant legal errors".

IMO - the OP is twisting the story, leaving out information to attack the EPA and President Obama.

It seems like these days there's two types of stories regarding federal regulatory agencies, 1) when they fail to enforce federal law (Deep Water Horizon, tainted food) 2) When they enforce federal law and someone is not happy about it. In the case of this specific story, it was a state level court case that got the permit revoked, so blaming the EPA is just dishonest.
 
Well, Get ready and hold of to your wallet Cap....Obama, and Progressives have a surprise for you....

"Last week the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported a shocking drop in power sector coal consumption in the first quarter of 2012. Coal-fired power plants are now generating just 36 percent of U.S. electricity, versus 44.6 percent just one year ago.
It’s the result of an unprecedented regulatory assault on coal that will leave us all much poorer.
Last week PJM Interconnection, the company that operates the electric grid for 13 states (Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia and the District of Columbia) held its 2015 capacity auction. These are the first real, market prices that take Obama’s most recent anti-coal regulations into account, and they prove that he is keeping his 2008 campaign promise to make electricity prices “necessarily skyrocket.”
The market-clearing price for new 2015 capacity – almost all natural gas – was $136 per megawatt. That’s eight times higher than the price for 2012, which was just $16 per megawatt. In the mid-Atlantic area covering New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and DC the new price is $167 per megawatt. For the northern Ohio territory served by FirstEnergy, the price is a shocking $357 per megawatt.
Why the massive price increases? Andy Ott from PJM stated the obvious: “Capacity prices were higher than last year's because of retirements of existing coal-fired generation resulting largely from environmental regulations which go into effect in 2015.” Northern Ohio is suffering from more forced coal-plant retirements than the rest of the region, hence the even higher price.
These are not computer models or projections or estimates. These are the actual prices that electric distributors have agreed to pay for new capacity. The costs will be passed on to consumers at the retail level.


Read more: Obama

Hint: people moving to other sources of power because they are cheaper is not some government plot.
 
Well, Get ready and hold of to your wallet Cap....Obama, and Progressives have a surprise for you....

"Last week the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported a shocking drop in power sector coal consumption in the first quarter of 2012. Coal-fired power plants are now generating just 36 percent of U.S. electricity, versus 44.6 percent just one year ago.
It’s the result of an unprecedented regulatory assault on coal that will leave us all much poorer.

Well, get ready and hold of the top of your skull because here is some info that is going to blow your mind:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-r8vhaJAS9...1600/Screen+shot+2012-05-04+at+8.15.06+AM.png

Further NG plants generally run more efficient (more electricity per unit of energy in the feed stock). So it is even worse for coal than shown in the above graph, which is only in straight energy vs price.

So that Fox article is pure Obama-hating fantasy.
 
and the Republican minority in the Senate has nothing to do with the problem? :roll:

The Republican minority in the Senate is keeping the problem from getting worse, but we will need the White House and a majority in the Senate before we can begin to make any serious progress against the disaster that Obama-Reid-Pelosi hath wrought.
 
Hint: people moving to other sources of power because they are cheaper is not some government plot.

But people moving to more expensive sources of power because of a government mandate is a government plot.
 
That is not the problem.

Sure it is. Think mandates for ethanol (especially the non-existent cellosic ethanol), solar, wind, and other greenie fantasies.
 
I don't understand how they do it. They complain about the President's inability to pass even his "irrational Chicken Little responses to miniscule problems " while simultaneously holding to the belief that the man is a dictator along the lines of Mao and Hitler, which is just sort of incongruous but then when I point out that the GOP in the Senate is deliberately obstructing the Democrats and their efforts to do something about the nation's problems - "eh, so what"

Rather obviously when you are as wrong as the modern day GOP in all aspects of modern politics, the only solution is to deny absolutely everything they themselves say on any one day because they have time and again shown the world that rationality and reality don't count when they are the minority.

and the Republican minority in the Senate has nothing to do with the problem? :roll:

The history of the filibuster, in one graph

You don't have to like the source, just look at the numbers, you don't like the numbers - then you need to provide different ones.

<snip>

Funny that - they call him a dictator yet at the same time say he gets nothing done. Haven't they ever heard of cognitive dissonance or the Orwellian meme? - "We've always been at war with Eastasia"

and here one of the True Believers provides a fine illustration of what I am saying.
First - the President can't get anything done, he's incompetent
Second - the True Americans are doing their job by blocking everything the President is trying to do
therefore - Obama is a dictator

The Republican minority in the Senate is keeping the problem from getting worse, but we will need the White House and a majority in the Senate before we can begin to make any serious progress against the disaster that Obama-Reid-Pelosi hath wrought.
 
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