Obama: "It's just that it will bankrupt them" - Granite Grok

Obama: “It’s just that it will bankrupt them”

Laser Beam on Coal Jobsas he was talking about coal generated electrical plant.  Which means coal.  He never got his Cap N Trade program FORMALLY legislated so he used his EPA to effectively do the same thing.  Coal plants are shutting down because of punative GHG regulations.  And with no market, coal companies are going under – not because people voted for a different energy source via the marketplace but because a few unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats (and True Believers that the US economy must be sacrificed for the betterment of the world) said so.  Coal must be verboten!

Oh wait, WHO is buying up all the almost and now bankrupt coal companies?  Oh, the guy who has been financing all those environmental groups!  Mr.

George Soros, the billionaire whose overall holdings have grown from $9 to $27 billion – all during Obama’s Administration.  Tell me, to someone that is always looking to maximize investments, why would he have done this? Oh:

predicted in this column last week that the Left wasn’t going to kill off the coal industry so much as it was going to steal it. That prediction is already becoming true courtesy of billionaire George Soros.  U.S. Securities and Exchange Act filings indicate that Soros has purchased an initial 1 million shares of Peabody Energy and 553,200 shares of Arch Coal, the two largest publicly traded U.S. coal companies. As pointed out last week, both companies have been driven perilously close to bankruptcy by the combination of President Obama’s “war on coal” and inexpensive natural gas brought on by the hydrofracturing revolution.

And that war on coal was also due, in no small part, to all those environmental groups that have demanded that the only energy resources that the rest of us can use is wind and solar.  Period.  But tell me, what is the Sierra Club going to say, now that their “Beyond Coal” program has succeed, given all the Soros money that has been distributing to them and like minded folks??

Under the hypothesis that not even socialists would leave trillions of dollars worth of a perfectly safe and clean energy source in the ground for the sake of the imaginary “climate crisis,” I posited that once the existing coal industry ownership was wiped out by President Obama’s regulatory onslaught, a new politically correct ownership would rehabilitate the fuel by contributing to Democrats.

Enter George Soros, a hardball investor and philanthropist to myriad left-wing causes, including the activist and “clean energy” rent-seeking movements that have helped take down the coal industry. In 2009, for example, Soros announced he would spend $1 billion in “clean energy” technology and create a San Francisco-based advocacy organization called the Climate Policy Initiative.

Less than a year ago the Soros’ Climate Policy Initiative issued a major report concluding that the world could save $1.8 trillion over the next two decades by transitioning awayfrom coal. The report referred to coal reserves as “stranded assets” that were losing value as they were no longer needed.

He used his money to promote for his marketing – coal at pennies on the dollar.  Useful idiots, indeed.  He spent bazillions ingratiating himself to this “deindustrialize the US” crew – and now he’s screwing them over.  They believed his intentions – now his intentions have become clear.  It was never about coal, it was never about global warming, and it certainly wasn’t about him supporting them.

As Trump keeps saying that he’ll not take big money because he wants to be free of commitment to big donors’ interests, Soros paid big money to play their game.  Just as Trump is not playing by the regular political rules, Soros ended up not playing by the environmentalists rules.  He suckered them.

What will they say when they realize they’ve been played like a Stradivarius?  I doubt very much, once he decides that he needs his level of return on his new investment.  Will we hear about it, when Soros Coal starts wafting warm CO2 into the atmosphere?  And to end, he’s not the only one – one more example:

There’s billionaire hedge fund operator Tom Steyer who committed to spend $100 million in 2014 to elect anti-coal, climate alarmist-friendly politicians. Though he failed miserably, he has re-upped for the same program in 2016. Yet Steyer’s dirty secret is that, despite his protestations of concern about the climate, he’s made a fortune from coal production in Indonesia over the past 15 years. It’s easy to imagine some Steyer-steered investment vehicle rescuing sinking coal companies under the guise of turning coal into “clean energy” business. Though the current coal industry trial and failed miserably to do re-brand itself as “clean,” with the right politics and the right payoffs, Steyer no doubt could pull off that trick.

I’d say that the Environmentalists are the chumps except we are the ones that are paying the price.

Aw heck, if one, then many:

The day after I made my prediction, news came that leftist billionaire George Soros had purchased shares of the two largest U.S. coal companies, Peabody Energy and Arch Coal. Now comes news that bankrupt Patriot Coal is being purchased in a $400 million deal led by Tom Clarke, a prominent Virginia-based environmentalist. But Clarke’s purchase of Patriot brings a new — and likely fraudulent — twist to what I called “Obama’s Great Coal Train Robbery.”

My original article forecast that the new kings of coal would have try to rehabilitate coal so they could profit from it with a straight face after having for years bashed the essential commodity as a people- and planet-murderer.So Clarke plans to do this — no kidding — by planting trees. Clarke will sell his coal at a 10 percent premium. And why would any cash-strapped utility pay 10 percent more for Clarke’s coal? The coal will come with a carbon credit certificate (also called a “carbon offset”) worth 30 percent of the coal’s emissions.

They think us all rubes, that we’d buy this rewrapped and remarketed version of the Catholic Churches indulgences?  About the only thing that these environmental updates have done have made AlGore sufficiently rich to buy even MORE houses that consume even more energy.

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