Another Climate Alarmist buys Another Coal Company

From Breitbart's Big Government:

It’s a good thing I finally went public last week with my long-held view that Democrat investors were going to snap up coal companies driven to bankruptcy by Obama’s war on coal.

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.

One time is an anomaly, two times is a coincidence, three times is a pattern. This is a pattern.

Wow! Obama drives down coal company stocks, and Soros buys them on the cheap

From Thomas Lifson at The American Thinker Blog:

I have always believed that global warming is a gigantic scam, driven by greed and lust for power. Now comes the shocking news, via Steve Milloy writing on Breitbart, that following President Obama’s use of CO2 emissions as a weapon to drive major coal companies near bankruptcy, the ultimate politically connected speculator George Soros is buying up stock in major coal producers on the cheap.

I 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.

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 away from coal. The report referred to coal reserves as “stranded assets” that were losing value as they were no longer needed.

This just doesn't surprise me.

Obama’s Great Coal Train Robbery

From Breitbart's Big Government:

President Obama’s “war on coal” is not really that. The more accurate term is the “war for coal.”

Earlier this month, the Environmental Protection Agency issued rules under the guise of preventing global warming that supposedly will reduce coal-fired electricity in the U.S. by 32 percent. This action is on top of other Obama EPA rules that are already well on their way to shuttering another 20 percent of coal plants.

And those EPA rules have been complimented by a host of other regulatory pain designed to make U.S. coal mining more difficult, including rules to reduce dust levels in mines and rules to designed to limit coal mining under the guise of protecting surface and ground water.

Combined with the ongoing glut of cheap natural gas, all these Obama regulations are pushing electric utilities out of coal and, hence, driving the coal industry out of business.

Yes, right now coal is evil.

That coal has been arbitrarily smeared as “dirty” means that it can just as easily be declared “clean” under the right circumstances. What are those circumstances?

My prediction is that, barring a Republican president who stops and reverses Obama’s anti coal jihad, bankrupt coal companies and their assets will be snapped up in bankruptcy by politically-correct and politically-favored Wall Street takeover firms. Unlike current coal industry management, the new coal owners will be Democrat-friendly.

The rest is obvious in an Orwellian way. The new coal industry will flood the coffers of politicians and coal will be magically rehabilitated as a “clean” or at least as a “necessary evil.” The new coal industry will flourish as never before. The crime will have paid off handsomely.

I didn't even think of this as a possibility. But is not Orwellian, but Machiavellian.