Dr Stuart Jeanne Bramhall: Obama's Climate Initiative: The new Obamacare!

Who does he think he's fooling? By Dr Stuart Jeanne Bramhall. As with his sweeping health care legislation, the President's long awaited climate initiative has winners and losers. With Obamacare, the big winners were the insurance, finance sector and the drug companies, the losers are doctors, nurses, hospitals and average Americans left reeling under skyrocketing insurance premiums. From the President's June 25 climate change speech, it appears that once again insurance companies struggling with major losses from catastrophic weather events are big winners. So are the oil and gas industry, thanks to the big boost he gave the fracking industry and his duplicity around the controversial Keystone XL Pipeline. The losers under Obama's new climate initiative are Big Coal, United Mine Workers, that will teach them for not endorsing Obama in 2012, children who develop cancer and other health problems, because they live or attend school near fracking wells, and future generations who suffer the ravages of catastrophic climate events, because Obama's extremely timid initiative falls far short of achieving the emissions reductions that are required. For the most part, the executive order Obama proposes fully empowers the EPA to implement existing legislation already enacted by Congress under The Clean Air Act, to regulate carbon and other emissions. In other words, he will cease to obstruct the EPA as he did during his first term. The Obama administration is already bound by a 2007 Supreme Court decision that the EPA must regulate carbon dioxide (CO2) under the Clean Air Act. In compliance with the ruling, in 2009 the EPA issued an Endangerment Finding, that CO2 is a threat to public health, and drafted rules to regulate CO2 from new power plants in March 2012. According to Think Progress, the already delayed rules have been delayed since then. In fact bitter battles over emission limits on coal fired plants and the Keystone pipeline were the main reason behind EPA chief Lisa Jackson's resignation in December 2012. Opposition from the Right and the Left. AS with Obamacare, both the right and left have big problems with the President's climate initiative. Republicans fear it will expand Big Government and harm the economy. Anti fracking and anti-Keystone activists are even more vocal in their criticism. Anti fracking and anti Keystone activists are mainly concerned because of growing evidence that fracking poses serious hazards to human health. Many have already taken to calling Obama the Fracking President, owing to the ALEC Exxon legislation he signed recently.