U.S. Buries Coal, Fracking Positives in Report to U.N.

Buried deep in a State Department report that discloses the U.S. has spent billions to combat climate change in developing countries are surprisingly honest assessments of coal and fracking, both high on the Obama administration’s hit list.

Once Americans get through the shock of their government blowing $7.5 billion to fight global warming in foreign nations, it’s worth taking a look at another important bit of information clearly intended to get lost in the 310-page document titled 2014 Climate Action Report. The U.S. government prepared it for our United Nations overlords to list all the good work it’s done to protect mother earth from the ills of global warming.

“Climate change is one of the most urgent and profoundly complex challenges we face,” says Secretary of State John Kerry in an introduction letter attached to the report. He mentions all the great things the U.S. has done to reduce greenhouse emissions and reiterates the administration’s “commitment to leading the fight to confront climate change head-on for our children and generations to come.”

It’s been widely reported that the president has declared a war on coal to appease environmentalists, which is probably why this lengthy report to the U.N. buries the administration’s surprisingly positive coal assessment on page 19. “The United States uses about 890 million short tons of coal per year. Current estimated recoverable coal reserves would supply the U.S. demand for energy, assuming constant 2011 rates of consumption, for approximately 258 years.”

Yet the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is creating stringent new regulations on coal that are expected to negatively impact the economy, raise electricity prices for consumers and drastically slash jobs in coal-mining states like Kentucky and West Virginia. A group of federal lawmakers from coal-mining states have joined forces to counter Obama’s war on coal, asserting that the president is violating the law with his “overzealous anti-coal agenda.” Obama and his EPA have moved forward with an “extreme regulation” in an attempt to “bankrupt the coal industry and fulfill a campaign promise to radical environmentalists,” the lawmakers say.

The Obama administration is also sour on a natural gas drilling technique, known as hydraulic fracturing or fracking, that’s mentioned positively on page 13 of the report to the U.N. “A major contributor to the decline in U.S. GHG emissions has been the displacement of coal with natural gas that is extracted from shale rock formations through hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. The production of ‘shale gas’ has grown rapidly in recent years.”

Yet the Obama EPA is also on a mission to crackdown on fracking and has promised to “provide oversight, guidance and, where appropriate, rulemaking” related to the drilling technique. The agency is investing in improving its “scientific understanding” of the process so that it can use its authority to “enhance health and environmental safeguards.” The goal is to ensure that natural gas extraction doesn’t come at the expense of public health and the environment,” according to the EPA.