Radical New York City billionaire Michael Bloomberg announced June 7 he is pouring a half-billion dollars into a plan to finish off what’s left of the American coal industry, and then shut down all domestic oil and natural gas production.
It would be a massive expansion of his successful “Beyond Coal” campaign, which has shut down more than half of all U.S. coal plants in just nine years.
The Washington Examiner reports:
Former New York City mayor and climate change crusader Michael Bloomberg announced Friday he is giving $500 million to a campaign to finish killing coal and start killing oil and gas.
“The largest coordinated campaign to tackle climate change” ever to occur in the U.S., Bloomberg says, aims to close all of the nation’s coal plants by 2030, and put the country on track discontinue fossil fuel use altogether.
“We’re in a race against time with climate change, and yet there is virtually no hope of bold federal action on this issue for at least another two years. Mother Nature is not waiting on our political calendar, and neither can we,” Bloomberg said in a press release before giving a commencement address at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Beyond Carbon will respond to this crisis with the urgency and ambition that it requires, by taking the fight to the states and turbo-charging current on-the-ground efforts.”
The campaign, called “Beyond Carbon,” is an expansion of the the “Beyond Coal” campaign that Bloomberg has partnered on with the Sierra Club and other environmental groups that has helped retire more than half the nation’s coal plants, 289 out of 530, since it began in 2010.
Bloomberg’s plan could succeed because it uses an all-out assault approach, attacking oil, coal and natural gas at the federal, state and local levels, as well as through lawsuits
The plan would also target government regulators.
“Beyond Carbon will employ a similar strategy to Beyond Coal, funding lobbying efforts by environmental groups that send members and lawyers to meetings of state utility commissions, which regulate utilities and approve or reject where they generate electricity from based on cost,” the Examiner reports.
“There is no substitute for federal policy, but in the absence of that, every day decisions are made in utility commissions on whether we should put scrubbers [pollution controls] on a coal plant, or retire it. Or whether we should continue running a coal plant indefinitely, or make this transition to wind or solar with storage,” Sierra Club’s Mary Anne Hitt, the director of the Beyond Coal campaign, previously told the Washington Examiner.
Shutting down all coal, oil and natural gas production is part of an overall plan to “de-develop the United States” and downsize the American economy, which many liberals feel is too prosperous and unfair to poorer nations.
“A massive campaign must be launched to restore a high-quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States,” writes environmentalist Paul Holdren in his book “Human Ecology.” “De-development means bringing our economic system (especially patterns of consumption) into line with the realities of ecology and the global resource situation.”
“Redistribution of wealth both within and among nations is absolutely essential, if a decent life is to be provided for every human being,” Holdren writes in calling for an end to traditional energy use.
Holdren isn’t some random activist. He was President Barack Obama’s “White House Science Czar.”
The plan is supported by most Democrat presidential candidates, who publicly call for massive cutbacks in the use of carbon fuels, or want them eliminated entirely.
AAN Staff
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