Now that the initial flurry of reporting on the Clean Power Plan (CPP) has subsided, editorial writers are offering their opinions. While the overwhelming majority of newspapers have published their support for this life-saving and planet-protecting policy, there have been a number of detractors.
It's perhaps an encouraging sign of the times, however, that aside from the Wall Street Journal, nearly all the negative editorials have come from small or ideologically conservative papers. The only sizable papers running anti-CPP pieces have been the NY Post, which ran an editorial; the Star Ledger, home to the perennially misleading Paul Mulshine; and the Dallas Morning News, which featured an op-ed by Jay Ambrose.
Then there are the small outlets, like the Detroit News, Fitchburg Sentinel & Enterprise, Carteret County News-Times and Press Enterprise and the ideologically driven ones like the Washington Times. While each of these attacks is slightly different, they all share some common features. If they bother to cite any sources, they go to either debunked industry-sponsored reports or industry-friendly opinion pieces.
Give the pieces a read if you'd like a taste of their rhetoric. According to these writers, the plan "has the potential to devastate the American economy," but those who belong to the "Church of Global Warming" can't see that cheaper renewables in the future is "pie-in-the-sky speculation." You'll also find absurd predictions that the plan will make people choose "whether to eat or go hungry while freezing."
With hyperbolic scary stories, name-calling, and biased sources, these opinion pieces make it clear that if you want to fight clean power, you've got to fight dirty.
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