President Obama is surreptitiously colluding with radical anti-growth environmentalists to force ideologically driven carbon-emission controls on the energy industry that will devastate the U.S. economy, congressional investigators have discovered.

As the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) drew up rules aimed at limiting carbon emissions from power-generation plants, “key stakeholders — including the American public — had little to no influence over the debate while powerful environmental activist groups were given unprecedented access to and influence over administration officials,” the Washington Times reported yesterday.

Collusion between the EPA and the green’s isn’t exactly breaking news. They’ve been doing it for years, but the study “makes clear that the EPA and top environmental groups see themselves as deeply intertwined in the push to cut carbon pollution and pursue other pieces of President Obama’s broad, controversial climate-change agenda.” 

This and basically everything Obama has done in office are part of a metaphorical war on Americans that hits those at the middle and bottom rungs of the socioeconomic ladder the hardest. These radicals want to work a fundamental transformation of America by making people suffer.

Obama’s stated goal is to crush those companies that generate power and to effectively dynamite the nation’s coal mines on the theory that burning coal to generate electricity produces atmospheric pollution that goes beyond arbitrarily determined acceptable levels. This delights the powerful green groups pulling the strings in what used to be the tobacco smoke-filled backrooms of the United States Capitol.

Signaling he would be a tool of the environmentalist movement that for so long has had a death-grip on the policymaking process, early in the 2008 presidential campaign Obama told reporters straight-out that his plans would cause energy prices to “necessarily skyrocket.”

“Because I’m capping greenhouse gases, coal power plants, you know, natural gas, you name it — whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, uh, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle. 

“They will pass that money [sic] on to consumers,” the economically illiterate Community Organizer-in-Chief said confusing the concept of money with added production costs.

The report by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is titled “Obama’s Carbon Mandate:  an account of collusion, cutting corners, and costing Americans billions.”

The committee got its hands on documents from the EPA and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) that demonstrate the federal agency’s unseemly efforts to avoid accountability in its effort to slap aggressive restrictions on industries that emit carbon dioxide, the same benign gas you exhale from your lungs and that supports photosynthesis, the process by which plants grow. The greens disingenuously contend it is a nasty pollutant that is causing the earth’s atmosphere to warm. 

The report states:

Predictably, the perennially dishonest EPA and NRDC say they did nothing wrong and claim that all of this is part of the regular regulatory process. Move along; nothing to see here. Of course, they’re lying. That’s what Saul Alinsky disciples do.

The documents also showed that “EPA policy makers and environmental activists involved had cozy relationships with each other on not only a personal level but through like-minded activism from years of working together.” Though the agency and NRDC may not have always agreed on tactics, “they worked incessantly over the years to develop a unified public message in support of these rules.”

Among such efforts were coordination on media responses and discussions with the Obama White House on messaging. The parties involved tried “to shift the public debate away from using cap-and-trade to fight climate change to touting these rules as needed to limit carbon emissions from power plants to ostensibly improve public health.”

In 2013 Obama initiated “an all-hands-on-deck climate strategy” in the form of the president’s Climate Action Plan “to quiet threats of additional litigation from environmental activists and to set in motion executive action for what he could not achieve through legislation” in order to carry out his campaign promise to tackle climate change.

This is what is called “lawfare,” a portmanteau of “lawsuit” and “warfare,” a process in which administration allies sue the government in order to achieve a policy objective. In this case the legal proceedings were not unwelcome. Lawfare typically involves what amounts to “hard sell” or high pressure sales tactics. On a contrived, expedited timeline based on a false claim that action is urgently needed, the administration connived with green groups in a “sue-and-settle” arrangement that advanced the groups’ objectives. In the process, the EPA excluded “other interested parties and the public and short-circuit[ed] a more deliberate rulemaking process,” the report stated.

Critics have assailed Obama’s economically suicidal plan that seeks to reduce U.S. power plants’ carbon dioxide emissions by 30 percent by the year 2030. 

The director of the Cato Institute’s Center of Study of Science, Patrick Michaels, tweeted that “Using EPA’s own policy analysis model, Obama’s Clean Power Plan proposal will prevent a grand total of 0.03 [degrees Celsius] warming by the year 2100.”

Another Cato scholar, Paul Knappenberger, decried the plan, noting that the bulk of carbon emissions originate from the developing world and that no matter what the U.S. government does it won’t put a dent in emissions overall.

Knappenberger asserted that the plan calls for the deliberate retardation of human development and “the plan’s actual impact on climate turns out to be largely undetectable and the public health benefits tenuous, at best.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) released a statement describing the policy as “another blow to the economy and to the Middle-Class.” These “regressive regulations … are set to harm struggling workers and families,” are are projected to cost billions of dollars.

They threaten to ship good Middle-Class jobs overseas. They’ll likely make it harder to maintain reliable sources of energy to meet demand. They’ll also likely to result in higher energy bills for those who can least afford them, potentially raising electricity rates by double digits for the people I represent. All this, for what? Not only will these massive regulations fail to meaningfully affect the global climate, but they could actually end up harming the environment by outsourcing energy production to countries with poor environmental records like India and China. They may also be illegal.

The reason for Obama’s hard sell is obvious: despite years of warmist propaganda, Americans aren’t buying the hype. They remain unconvinced despite the media’s nonstop, years-long, global warming propaganda assault and the presence of a radical, lawless left-winger in the White House. The voters can’t be bothered to care about this silly, bogus global warming issue.