It's funny Mark I never heard you ***** when Obama f-ed up our healthcare system or tried to stop us from producing any petroleum products trying to make us dependent on foreign oil.
My wife and I have spent time in many of our National Parks and love them. I will see what I can find on how much encroachment there is.
Obama never f-ed up our healthcare system. In fact the ACA had many good points. The issue is that bi-partisan politics kept Congress from fixing the issues with the ACA to make it work better and instead wasted all their energy making lame attempts to repeal it. If they had actually worked on improving it, the country would be a lot better off today.
However the GOP only wanted talking points to complain about. They NEVER introduced a better alternative and when they finally had the ability to repeal it, they didn't because they had spent all their time bitching about the ACA rather than actually trying to find a better way to do things. What they did do was sabotage it, by making it much riskier for insurance companies to support.
They knew that they couldn't actually repeal the ACA because it would have cost many their lives and once it had been repealed, they would be blamed for the aftermath. Once again because they had nothing to replace it with and they would rather have this to ***** about during the election process.
Oil is where the GOP is completely out to lunch.
All that drill baby drill BS doesn't matter because offshore drilling is no longer even remotely profitable.
What we have done is found much better ways to process the oil in the Dakotas much more efficiently, but with oil prices way down even the oil production up there is down from its peak in 2015. We have plenty of reserves on tap whenever we need them and lots of oil rigs that are currently turned off because the price of oil is so low.
Obama did actually chip away at restrictions on Fracking while he was president and we are about to become the largest exporter of NG in the world.
Trump's whole coal policy is pure propaganda and makes no sense. The coal industry doesn't employ many people due to automation, AND the power utilities have been switching over the NG because it makes too much sense.
Natural Gas
1. Cheap
2. We've got plenty of it.
3. Once a pipeline is in place essentially zero transportation costs.
4. It's modular. You can drop in a new combustion turbine in a matter of months vs. multi-year coal boiler construction.
5. The biggest deal is that a combustion turbine can be spun up and back down very quickly so they can efficiently match load demands. Coal fired plants have to run at near 100% output and stay there to maintain efficiency. It takes up to 3 days to get a coal fired plant all the way up so they have historically WASTED piles of energy boiling water that is never used to generate electricity during off peak hours.
6. I know you don't care about these things, but they also burn much cleaner than coal fired plants.
BTW I worked with the power utilities for a decade, and it just makes very poor business sense to ramp back up with coal. It is more expensive, leaves a mess of slag and ash that occasionally causes serious environmental damage and pollutes the air even with bag houses, SO2 scrubbers and Nox scrubbers.
And if you are curious what a environmental spill of ash looks like. We had this happen fairly close to me in TN in 2008. I had a friend in the affected area. TVA ended up buying his home and the homes of a good chunk of the local city because it was unsafe to live there afterwards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly_ash_slurry_spill
