So You Think Closing Coal Fired Power Plants Is A Good Idea

 I'll bet the day after these reports were issued by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation ( NERC ) they woke up with a horse's head in bed with them and then an offer they couldn't refuse was tendered ....any takers. In any case you can't convince me that reducing generation is going to improve or increase electric power supply. Having never seen obama's energy farting unicorn I don't believe it exists and until I do see it I don't buy it and would just as soon keep using what I already I have.

Did the Obama administration try to silence whistleblower agency on energy policy?

Imagine, the Wall Street Journal implores, what the federal government would do if a whistleblower had tipped off JP Morgan chief Jamie Dimon about the risky maneuvers that ended up as a $2 billion loss earlier this month — and had gotten fired or discredited in an attempt to shut him up.  The Obama administration would have started an SEC probe, Congress would demand that witnesses appear, and the media would have spent weeks interviewing the brave soul who endured retaliation for speaking truth to power.  But what happens when a watchdog organization with decades of experience and involvement try to blow the whistle on bad policy in the Obama administration?

They get a proctological audit, that’s what:

The target is the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, or NERC, and its crime is scrutinizing the Obama Administration’s anticarbon agenda. This highly respected nonprofit has monitored the power system since the 1960s and establishes best practices to keep the lights on. In 2005, Congress gave NERC a formal role as adviser. But now it may be defrocked for questioning the “pace and aggressiveness” of the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulatory wave in a 2010 report.
NERC’s position is that the EPA goal of mothballing many or most coal-fired power plants could endanger the security of the electric-power grid, with possible blackouts and much higher energy costs. In a follow-up report last year it found that “Environmental regulations are shown to be the number one risk to reliability over the next one to five years.”
Apparently that was too honest for Washington. Earlier this month the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission disclosed that it has spent months conducting a highly unusual audit of NERC. The commission oversees NERC under the 2005 law, so it has every right to check its practices. But this probe exceeded normal auditing standards and was a free-floating investigation into NERC’s “economy and efficiency,” whatever that means. It didn’t find any rule-breaking.
Instead, the auditors question NERC’s focus and statutory responsibilities, concluding that it “may have exceeded the functions” Congress intended for a reliability organization. Never mind that NERC has been doing the same job for decades and its integrity hasn’t been questioned. The feds also complain about NERC’s “periodic reliability assessments,” otherwise considered the gold standard. They say this role “should be revisited.”

H/T Hot Air

http://hotair.com/archives/2012/05/21/did-the-obama-administration-try-to-silence-whistleblower-agency-on-energy-policy/

UPDATE

It gets better folks...it seems the EPA was out twisting arms to convince the coal industry to revise its job loss estimates downward ....I guess you can only kill so many horses before PETA comes to see ya.

Obama Administration Pressured Contractors to Change Coal Mining Job Loss Numbers

Posted by Jim Hoft on Monday, May 21, 2012, 11:52 AM

New Obama Administration EPA regulations will force 32 coal plants to close their doors putting hundreds of Americans out of work.
The latest move by the EPA will force aggressive new regulations on 26 states. The new rules will kill thousands of jobs, cost billions of dollars and increase electricity rates for every family.

New EPA rules will force Western coal-fired power plants to install haze-reducing pollution-control equipment at a cost of $1.6 billion a year. Pictured is the Dave Johnston Power Plant in Glenrock, Wyoming. (IBD)
Worse yet, the Obama Administration is now trying to hide this from the American public. Officials have pressured contractors to fudge their numbers on job losses — And it was caught on tape.
The Free Beacon reported:

Obama administration officials may have pressured government contractors to change job loss estimates associated with coal regulations, audio recordings reveal.
The tapes show that unnamed officials with the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSM) asked government contractors to change their calculations of job losses associated with the Stream Protection Rule.
A preliminary draft of an environmental impact statement estimated that up to 7,000 coalminers could lose their jobs under the administration’s “preferred” regulation. After a leaked copy of the report went public, officials asked the contractors to compare job estimates to a model in which another regulation was enforced, rather than the real world numbers.
“It’s not the real world, this is rulemaking,” an OSM official tells a skeptical contractor on the recording.

H/T Gateway Pundit

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2012/05/obama-administration-pressured-contractors-to-change-coal-mining-job-loss-numbers/