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Power Grab: How Obama's Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America
No matter how President Obama spins his proposed government policies, they all amount to the same thing: a power grab. In his new book, Power Grab, bestselling author Christopher Horner shows how President Obama wants to take critical decisions about our energy and environment out of your hands and hand them over to politicians, extreme environmental groups, international organizations such as the United Nations, and even foreign governments. From depressing America's economy through onerous regulations to stripping you of your freedom through invasive "green" measures, Horner shows how Obama and the liberals in Congress don't just want to run the government, they want to run your life--and make you, your children, and grandchildren pay for it.
7 pages, Audio CD
First published January 1, 2010
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 25, 2014
This book is a little scattered, and reads a bit like a stinging editorial. But that's its strength really. It points out a lot of genuine incoherence, fanaticism, and downright disingenuousness in the Obama Administration's drive to "fundamentally transform America" in ways that would never fly if they actually explained what they are doing.
I think the problem of the modern environmental movement is that it has become almost completely detached from the problems of most everyday people and increasingly attached to an almost religious ideal of what the earth 'should' be like. It would be hard to find the last time a major environmental push, with the possible exception of the Gulf Coast cleanup (which, as horrific as it was, they managed to exaggerate and fear-monger. It wasn't the Exxon Valdez), in which they could explain their mission, and the cost/benefit behind it, in terms an average person could understand.
It would be nice, particularly after reading this book, for the greens to admit that either A. Their programs are going to cost a lot of money, and it won't come from some magic bucket supplied by "the rich" but out of jobs and paychecks of everyday Americans, which will affect the poorest amongst us most, or B. They don't care how much it costs because they are totally convinced we're doomed if we don't do this or that, or C. Admit it's really more a personal aesthetic they want based on a more spiritual sense of the way they think things should be. Radicals like Rudolf Bahro, admirably, admit this.
There's even a fourth option, really. They could admit that environmentalism requires a healthy economy, and that requires free markets. You'll be hard pressed to find a country in the world that simultaneously has a clean environment and poverty, or a socialist country where the environment is cleaner than it generally is in America. Poor people take what they can get, they aren't concerned about sustainability. As Keynes said, in the long run, we're all dead.
I see I've spent most of the time discussing here what I'd like to see in the debate, not the book its self. Perhaps that's fitting, since the book's major point is simply that the debate, as it currently stands, is dishonest. Whatever the case, I'm not sure there is a realistic way out in the near term. In the long term, we'll just have to see.
I think the problem of the modern environmental movement is that it has become almost completely detached from the problems of most everyday people and increasingly attached to an almost religious ideal of what the earth 'should' be like. It would be hard to find the last time a major environmental push, with the possible exception of the Gulf Coast cleanup (which, as horrific as it was, they managed to exaggerate and fear-monger. It wasn't the Exxon Valdez), in which they could explain their mission, and the cost/benefit behind it, in terms an average person could understand.
It would be nice, particularly after reading this book, for the greens to admit that either A. Their programs are going to cost a lot of money, and it won't come from some magic bucket supplied by "the rich" but out of jobs and paychecks of everyday Americans, which will affect the poorest amongst us most, or B. They don't care how much it costs because they are totally convinced we're doomed if we don't do this or that, or C. Admit it's really more a personal aesthetic they want based on a more spiritual sense of the way they think things should be. Radicals like Rudolf Bahro, admirably, admit this.
There's even a fourth option, really. They could admit that environmentalism requires a healthy economy, and that requires free markets. You'll be hard pressed to find a country in the world that simultaneously has a clean environment and poverty, or a socialist country where the environment is cleaner than it generally is in America. Poor people take what they can get, they aren't concerned about sustainability. As Keynes said, in the long run, we're all dead.
I see I've spent most of the time discussing here what I'd like to see in the debate, not the book its self. Perhaps that's fitting, since the book's major point is simply that the debate, as it currently stands, is dishonest. Whatever the case, I'm not sure there is a realistic way out in the near term. In the long term, we'll just have to see.
April 22, 2012
Absolutely wonderful, well-documented, and thoroughly researched response to Obama's socialist czar-driven energy "policy."
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