The Environmental Fifth Column

The Obama administration's Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) is controlled by left-wing ideologues who are using their positions to damage nearly every industry in America. That is their intention. That is their goal.

Consider the recent actions of the EPA and its related bureaucracies, who ostensibly act with the consent of the American people to protect the environment:

• Southern Co., parent of Alabama Power, critical of EPA emission rule: "Southern Co. would have to spend billions retrofitting, upgrading or closing its coal-fired power plants under tough new emissions standards proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency, and Alabama's utility regulator is backing the industry's complaints that the changes would increase power bills and threaten reliability... The Atlanta-based utility giant, in a strongly worded, 200-page submission to the EPA, says the long-term price tag of several new environmental proposals is at least $13 billion."

• Coal Regs Would Kill Jobs, Boost Energy Bills: "Two new EPA pollution regulations will slam the coal industry so hard that hundreds of thousands of jobs will be lost, and electric rates will skyrocket 11 percent to over 23 percent, according to a new study based on government data... Overall, the rules aimed at making the air cleaner could cost the coal-fired power plant industry $180 billion..."

• To EPA, milk is ' toxic sludge': "Imagine treating milk the same as the toxic sludge now washing up on Gulf Coast beaches... It may sound absurd, but some dairy producers are worried that it could happen under U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulations intended to prevent oil spills from polluting waterways."

• CEI Releases Global Warming Study Censored by EPA: "The Competitive Enterprise Institute is today making public an internal study on climate science which was suppressed by the Environmental Protection Agency. Internal EPA email messages, released by CEI earlier in the week, indicate that the report was kept under wraps and its author silenced because of pressure to support the Administration’s agenda of regulating carbon dioxide."

• Energy in America: EPA Rules Force Shell to Abandon Oil Drilling Plans: "Shell Oil Company has announced it must scrap efforts to drill for oil this summer in the Arctic Ocean off the northern coast of Alaska. The decision comes following a ruling by the EPA’s Environmental Appeals Board to withhold critical air permits... Shell has spent five years and nearly $4 billion dollars on plans to explore for oil in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas. The leases alone cost $2.2 billion."

• White House, EPA ignore Small Business Admin’s report that new coal regulations will kill jobs, economy: "President Barack Obama is ignoring heated concerns from within his own administration that new Environmental Protection Agency coal industry regulations will be economically devastating... The EPA is plowing forward with new Maximum Achievable Control Technology (MACT) mandates. The regulations would force coal energy plants to install giant scrubber-like materials inside smokestacks to capture and cleanse carbon particles before their atmospheric release."

• Administration blocks more Bush-era oil shale development leases: "The Interior Department on Wednesday blocked a Bush administration plan to open parts of the Mountain West for oil shale development, announcing that it would first study the water, power and land-use issues that complicate one of the nation's most abundant but controversial untapped sources of energy."

• Obama administration reverses Bush wilderness policy: "U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced on Thursday that the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) will again have the authority to set aside large areas of federally owned territory in the West that it deems deserving of wilderness protection."

• Plans for massive oil pipeline opposed by environmentalists: "More than 1,000 activists -- including NASA climatologist James Hansen, who has urged the scientific community to "get involved in this fray" -- are expected to descend on the White House starting Sunday for three weeks of civil disobedience and mass arrests. Six California activists are driving from Sacramento to Washington, D.C., as part of a "No Tar Sands Caravan" that leaves Sunday... The American Petroleum Institute and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, both of which are urging the State Department to approve the project, held a conference call with journalists Thursday in which they claimed the pipeline could generate 20,000 new jobs."

• Energy Secretary Chu Embraces High Gas Prices, Again: "This weekend, Energy Secretary Steven Chu appeared on Fox News Sunday and host Chris Wallace asked him about his desire in 2008 for Americans to punitively pay more at the pump in order to wean them off of gasoline. Shockingly, Chu did not walk back his comments as he has attempted to do in the past. In fact, he embraced the strategy noting that his focus is to ease the pain felt by his energy policies by forcing automakers to make more fuel-efficient automobiles."

• Obama's New Fuel Economy Standards Will Increase Cost of a Car More Than $11,000: "The Obama Administration’s new fuel economy standards will cause the retail price of average motor vehicles to increase over $11,000, according to a study conducted by the Center for Automotive Research."

Everything this administration does is intended to make Americans suffer. Every single thing.

If we don't crush the Democrats at the voting booth in 2012, I fear that the great American experiment will be finished.