Kevin D. Williamson‘s latest contribution to National Review offers an interesting comparison of the likely environmental impacts of policies favored by President Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney.
Among the specific regulatory initiatives that Romney proposes is revisiting the Clean Air Act, which was adopted to control the emission of pollutants but which the Obama administration intends to use to police carbon-dioxide emissions in the pursuit of its voguish and unproductive global-warming crusade. Romney intends to see that it is limited to its original purpose. One of the many ironies of this election is that Romney has a more aggressive global-warming proposal than Obama does, though he would never describe it as such: By modernizing and liberalizing the permitting process for new nuclear-power facilities, a Romney administration would take a very large step toward putting the U.S. electricity-generating infrastructure on a path that is more reliable, more economical, and, not incidentally, more environmentally friendly than the current system. Taken in the context of our generating infrastructure, those electric cars the president is so fond of are in fact coal-powered cars, the batteries of which simply store power from a coal-dependent power grid.
