The only good news here is that Michael Bloomberg is out $30 million. I guess that's money he can't give to gun control groups. But the rest of the news is all bad. By giving another $30 million to a Sierra Club effort to kill coal plants (he gave $20 million previously), Bloomberg is continuing to support a destructive effort that's getting results.
Their goal is utterly insane. They want to eliminate coal plants from the American energy landscape. Coal now accounts for 40 percent of all the electrical power Americans use. Bloomberg and friends think renewable energy sources like wind and solar can make up the difference, which would be quite a trick considering that all these sources combined only account for 5 percent of our energy use today, and because they are still immature technologies, they are nowhere near the capacity that would allow them to provide 40 percent of the nation's energy needs.
You'd think a campaign like this would be dead in the water given these realities, but you'd be wrong. Over the past decade, more than 100 U.S. coal plants have shut down - and every time that has happened, jobs have been eliminated and the cost of electricity has risen. There's this thing called supply and demand that you'd think a billionaire like Bloomberg would understand. When you make something harder to get, the price goes up. And when you kill a coal plant, you reduce the supply of electricity.
By the way, don't think for a minute that this is entirely unrelated to President Obama's constant yelping about global warming. Liberal politicians know where their campaign cash comes from. Environmentalists want to kill coal plants and stop projects like the Keystone XL pipeline out of nothing more than an ideological hatred of fossil fuels. They don't care about the nation's energy needs. They don't even understand the nation's energy needs. To them, it's entirely plausible that you can take unproven sources like wind and solar and simply rely on them at a rate eight times greater than we ever have before. Just because they like them better.
It's Bloomberg's money and he can do what he wants with it. But policy makers don't have to listen to him, and they shouldn't. Coal is a crucial part of the U.S. economy and one very rich man's irrational hatred of it is no reason to make a whole lot of other people poorer - both from paying higher electrical rates and, in the case of coal workers, losing their jobs.
Tell me again why blue-collar people vote for Democrats? It makes no sense to me.
