KEN: Look at what we’re facing right now, economically, coming out of covid. All these different issues. And the Biden administration is saying, “Oh, we gotta get rid of these carbon emissions.” So, they are pressuring banks. 15 of them in fact, led by coal-heavy West Virginia. And the treasurer, Riley Moore said, in West Virginia, he’s prepared now to terminate contracts with banks that pull back the fossil fuel industry lending. ‘Cause what’s happening, that’s the other way you’re being discriminated against. Oh, you like using gasoline? We’ll teach you. Think about this. This sounds like Russia in the fifties. It sounds like China now. Let’s go back more than a decade. Rush nailed this. Listen to this.
RUSH: If you happen to live in Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Colorado, and even parts of Indiana, Barack Obama wants the coal industry in which you work to go bankrupt. He intends to bankrupt it. He also intends to cause skyrocketing energy prices. He made these comments earlier in the year with an editorial board meeting that was recorded, the San Francisco Chronicle.
OBAMA: What I’ve said is we would put a cap-and-trade system in place that is aggressive if not more aggressive as anybody else out there. So, if somebody wants to build a coal-fired plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re gonna be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.
RUSH: He’s gonna bankrupt ’em. He’s got a cap-and-trade program, Algore, this is to save the planet. He’s gonna bankrupt ’em. By definition they will be bankrupt. But that’s not by itself the single most damaging aspect of what he said. This is…
OBAMA: When I was asked earlier about the issue of coal, you know, under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, the electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.
RUSH: So, he wants folks, he wants to bankrupt the coal industry. Now, I’ve never seen a presidential candidate actually admit that he wants destroy elements of the U.S. economy. He did. He said it. And now he wants skyrocketing gas prices. You remember when gas, or energy prices. Do you remember when gasoline spiking up to four bucks? The only thing Obama said about it, “well, only thing that bothers me is how quickly we got it up there.” But he didn’t do one damn thing to lower gasoline prices. He didn’t care that they were that high. His only stated concern was that they got up there so quickly. Here he is, same interview with the San Francisco Chronicle editorial board January 2008.
OBAMA: Regardless of what I say about whether coal is good or bad, because I’m capping greenhouse gases, coal-powered plants know. Natural gas, you name it, whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money. They will pass that money on to consumers. If you can’t persuade the American people that, yes, there’s gonna be some increase in electricity rates on the front end.
But that over the long-term because of combinations of more efficient energy usage, and changing light bulbs, and more efficient appliances, but also technology, improving how we can produce clean energy that the economy will benefit. If we can’t make that argument persuasively enough… you can be Lyndon Johnson. You can be the master of Washington. You’re not gonna get that done.
RUSH: Well, it would have been nice if you’d tried to persuade us, sir. The thing is he didn’t try to persuade us about this. This has remained a stealth plan. I mean, we’ve known he’s had a carbon trade plan, a carbon trade-off. All the liberal Democrats are touting that. We didn’t know that by design, it’s to bankrupt the coal industry, and we didn’t know that by design it is to cause electricity rates to skyrocket. Biden, on the campaign trail, a rope line, September 17th. He gets a question, “wind and solar flourishing here in Ohio, so why are you supporting coal?”
BIDEN: We’re not supporting clean coal. Guess what? China’s building two every week. Two dirty coal plants and it’s polluting the United States, it’s causing people to die. The first guy to introduce a global warming bill was me, 22 years ago. The first the guy to support solar energy was me, 26 years ago. It came out of Delaware. But guess what? China’s gonna burn 300 years of bad coal unless we figure out how to clean their coal up because it’s gonna ruin your lungs. And there’s nothing we can do about it. No coal plants here in America. Build them if they’re gonna build them over there, make ’em clean, because they’re killing us.
RUSH: All right. So we’re gonna leave the coal industry to the ChiComs. And we’re gonna make noises, we’re gonna, like the ChiComs gonna listen to us. “Hey, hey, Hu Jintao, clean up your coal, hey buddy old pal, clean up your coal, stand up.” Who? What? Oh, you don’t tell a communist stand up. Communists tell you to sit down. For the past six years we have an hearing about how we’ve got to really harm Walmart. We’ve gotta push Big Drug. We have to punish Big Oil. We have to punish Big Energy. We have to punish Walmart. We have… now I know they didn’t say they wanted to bankrupt these industries, but they were on the enemies list.
The Democrat Party has made it plain who their enemies are, and their enemies are those things that compromise the engine and the fuel of capitalism. They do want to shut down, I take it back. They do want to shut down talk radio. That industry they do want to shut down. They’ve made no bones about it.