From my newsletter today:

During the Great Depression, Pres. Roosevelt started the Rural Electrification Administration to bring electricity to the rural areas in the country. Though the REA was a stimulus plan that also served as a model for Obama’s green-energy policy, its goal was decidedly different, as far removed as light from dark. At the time, only one out of ten farms had electricity. FDR sought to “rais[e] the standard of living in rural America,” to bring to rural homes the “benefits” and “comforts and economic advantages of electricity,” and to “promote the economic health and strength of the country.”

FDR understood that access to electricity was key to helping the poor and disadvantaged, raising their standard of living, and thereby improving the economic health of the country as a whole. What would he say of policies that deliberately make electricity unaffordable?

As a presidential candidate, then-Sen. Barack Obama was quite open about his plans for energy: a vision of electricity rates that “would necessarily skyrocket,” of coal plants so expensive that it would “bankrupt” the company that tried to build one, of deliberately seeking “to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe,” and of other ways to “skin the cat” to solve the “problem” of affordable energy, especially through aggressive hyperregulation by the EPA.

Read on here.