Yesterday, Time Magazine released a transcript of Mark Halperin’s interview with Mitt Romney about his tenure at Bain. After Romney claimed that his business experience gave him “a perspective on how jobs are created – that someone who’s never spent a day in the private sector, like President Obama, simply doesn’t understand,” Halperin pressed:
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Romney responded:
Today, the Environmental Protection Agency is holding two hearings, one in Washington one Chicago, on its Carbon Pollution Standard for New Power Plants. The EPA assures us that this new rule “does not apply to plants currently operating or new permitted plants that begin construction over the next 12 months.” So this rule will not close any existing coal power plants, only prevent new ones from being built.
But previous Obama EPA rules most certainly do apply to existing coal power plants and, by design, are shutting them down. The leftist Beyond Coal activist group even has a calculator on their website tracking how many coal plants are still in operation, and how many they have shutdown so far.
Shutting down coal plants, and preventing the creation of new ones, may make Obama’s environmental base happy, but as Romney might say, it also increases “the input cost of energy” for manufacturers. Fox News reports:
Why the massive price increases? Andy Ott from PJM stated the obvious: “Capacity prices were higher than last year’s because of retirements of existing coal-fired generation resulting largely from environmental regulations which go into effect in 2015.” Northern Ohio is suffering from more forced coal-plant retirements than the rest of the region, hence the even higher price.
These are not computer models or projections or estimates. These are the actual prices that electric distributors have agreed to pay for new capacity.
If you are an entrepreneur deciding where to locate your new manufacturing business, an eight-fold increase in energy costs is going to drive you away from creating jobs in the United States. That is what Mitt Romney, business man gets, and what President Obama, community organizer, still doesn’t understand.
