Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America
by Christopher C. Horner
Regnery Publishers, Inc.
April 2010
396 pages (including 78 pages of source notes)
ISBN 978-1-59698-599-5
Hardcover: $27.95 or $18.45 at Amazon.com

Environmentalism seeks to use the state to create scarcity as a means to exert their will, while expanding the state’s authority over your life. Obama wants to use environmentalism for the same reason.

It’s almost certain that Chris Horner doesn’t get Christmas cards from the White House, one major reason being books like Power Grab.

Obama’s seizure of “green” issues to impose an unadvertised Statist agenda is by no means new; only the boldness and outrageousness of his radicalism are. Obama is orchestrating the largest-scale corporate-government alliance in our nation’s history. Some of America’s biggest companies are heavily invested in promoting Obama’s agenda. Some companies are clearly just in it for the short-term windfall. Yet some among these allies also don’t mind the sort of central planning Obama favors—so long as they are the beneficiaries, and their competitors aren’t.

Horner has been on a search-and-destroy mission against so-called “global warming” hoaxers for some time, as shown in works such as The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism and Red Hot Lies. Power Grab brings us up to date on the latest machinations of the wealthy and ideologically-deranged special interest groups who are feverishly pushing binding legislation on the rest of us that will not only ultimately result in us sitting in our darkened living rooms but also, worse still, the loss of basic American freedom.

The bottom line remains, however, that if we are unable to replace the [energy production] capacity the Greens are chasing off the board with litigation, the consequence is clear. Spout all the happy talk you like about windmills somehow replacing coal and pixie dust being just around the corner; the lights are still going to go out.

But how could this be? you may ask. As Horner details in his book, what we have here is a confluence of disparate and ordinarily antagonistic special interest groups who find common cause in so-called “global warming” (recently rebranded as “climate change”): the usual suspects from the Hard Left (socialists, communists, anarchists, Gaia worshippers), the large anti-capitalistic foundations and NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) that fund them, major capitalist corporations that really should know better but which often yield to the short-term allure of oodles of federal money coming their way (not to mention the prospect of being put out of business by federal favoritism—i.e., “If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu”), and an out-of-control government that insists we’ll all die unless its every whim is satisfied.

Europe is once again offering our homegrown statists a trial run, which we are to adopt regardless of how their schemes (fail to) perform. Real world experience notwithstanding, this is inescapably where Obama is headed with his obsessive drive to ration energy through state-imposed price and physical scarcity.

In short the government has become the ultimate dispenser of favors, the only game in town, picking winners and losers in the spurious “global warming” game and penetrating into every corner of the common American citizen’s existence. It’s the largest power grab since the Cold War, is likewise predicated on an equally bogus ideology, and shows no signs of abating anytime soon. That seismic disturbance you’re experiencing is the Founding Fathers spinning in their graves.

Worse, as taxes go, cap-and-trade is also a very expensive tax, actually four to five times as costly as a transparent tax. This makes it particularly hard on the middle class whose taxes Obama vowed he would not raise—of any kind—not to mention seniors and the poor. But of course, transparent taxes threaten those few jobs of which elected politicians are particularly solicitous: their own. So we get sneaky backdoor tricks instead.

With the “global warming” inmates running the asylum, sane people who reject their lunatic theories become an endangered species—but, unlike the snail darter,  they shouldn’t expect their government to offer them protection. Unreservedly supported by the Obama administration, incessantly codified by a pliant Congress, ratified by an overreaching judiciary, and sold to the public by a scare-mongering and biased media, the Greens’ agenda is being enacted at all levels.

The environmental issue generally, and particularly global warming, have exposed with disturbing clarity how big business and special interests scratch politicians’ backs so that together they can pick your pockets. It is difficult to image a more glaringly obvious or expensive push for state control of our freedoms than this campaign to limit the availability of energy in the name of saving the world. Yet our free press has proved worse than negligent in performing their watchdog role here. Blinded by their sympathy for a shared ideology, the establishment media are fully and actively complicit in the burgeoning corruption of our system.

As Chris Horner demonstrates, the power grab is well underway. The unanswered question is whether the largest usurpation of constituted authority in human history can be turned back or whether we’ve already passed the point of no return.

—–

1. How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America
2. Renewable Fools
3. Van Jones Was No Accident: The Obama Administration’s Radical “Green” Activists
4. Obama’s “Global Warming” Power Grab: Taxing and Stealing Your Liberties
5. Picking Your Pockets for Political Payola
6. Green Eggs and Scam: The Wholesale Fraud of “Green Jobs”
7. Obama’s “Baptists and Bootleggers”: Unions and Greens Selling Out America
8. Domestic Disturbance: Locking Up Our Resources and Shutting Down the Economy
9. Insecurity Complex
10. Lights Out: Our Dim Bulbs Guarantee Blackouts

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Other Regnery books by Christopher Horner:

Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud and Deception to Keep You Misinformed (2009).

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism (2007).

Christopher Horner’s presence at the Competitive Enterprise Institute is here.

—Mike Gray