Lump of coal

This is the kind of thing you don't mention until you already have the job. [Link]

Obama is placing himself on this continuum, saying he is not taking the most extreme pro-environmentalist position, which would be to ban new coal plants outright. But he is advocating an extreme pro-environmental and anti-industry position nonetheless. Rather than banning new coal plants de jure, he plans to drive them out of business de facto, because the environmental requirements of his policies would be so stringent that new plants would be unable to comply and the penalties for noncompliance would be catastrophic. In other words,, any new plants would have to pay penalties so Draconian that they would be bankrupted—and the listener is left to wonder whether even older plants might be required to retrofit in order to comply, and be forced out of business as well.

Obama’s plan is that market forces would dictate that, as new coal production would become impossible, people would be forced to quickly fill in for the lack of power by developing the wonderfully clean alternative sources of energy that he is so sure would be available if only the will were there. We have no way of knowing whether it would work out that way, of course. But in the meantime we could be sure that the economic costs would be very high, as Obama unapologetically states.

This is his position on nuclear power as well, which he makes clear in the next to last paragraph of the quoted interview. He would set safety and environmental standards so high for that industry as well that he would be appearing to be in favor of nuclear power while simultaneously guaranteeing its non-development.

In this way, Obama manages to position himself as nominally in favor of a certain type of power—the more popular mainstream position—and yet actually against it by setting environmental regulations at so high a level that current technology could not meet them in a timely fashion. Clever, isn’t it? He has found a way to appear to be in favor of something and yet to actually make it impossible to implement in the practical sense. This is exactly the opposite of the more gradualist approach of acts such as Clear Skies, which attempt to find a compromise position that serves the needs of both the environment and the industry by taking a middle way. By ratcheting up the time frame and making the reforms extremely strict, he is sacrificing industry to the claims of the environment.

And while the increase in prices would partially have the effect he's looking for, the people who would be hurt most by drastically increased prices would be the poor. Very progressive.