There’s one thing Barack Obama told the truth about in his 2008 run, one thing he’s never really wavered from: he’s going to smash the power industry and drive up our energy costs. In a time of falling poll numbers and swirling scandals, with his party facing a grim midterm election, he’s decided to be pugnacious about it, sending forth his minions to brag that no one can stop his War on Energy, and signaling that Democrat support for his efforts is mandatory. Fox News reports:

White House counselor John Podesta said Monday that attempts by congressional lawmakers to block the Obama administration’s climate action plan will fail. Podesta told reporters during a briefing at the White House that President Obama is committed to moving forward with controversial Clean Air Act regulations to cut carbon dioxide emissions for all new coal and gas-fired power plants. “So they may try, but I think that there are no takers at this end of Pennsylvania Avenue. And I think — with respect to the commitment of Democrats to support a cleaner energy future, I think there�??s a strong sentiment there,” Podesta said. Republicans have branded the president’s climate plan as a “war on coal” and have sponsored legislation to roll back planned Environmental Protection Agency greenhouse gas standards they argue will harm the nation’s economy. “They�??ll find various ways, particularly in the House, to try to stop us from using the authority we have under the Clean Air Act. All I would say is that those have zero percent chance of working. We�??re committed to moving forward with those rules,” Podesta said.

Except Podesta went on to lay out one way Republicans can beat back this Democrat war on the middle class: push for the Keystone XL pipeline.

He cited an energy efficiency bill sponsored by Sens. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, and Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., as an example of bipartisan support for clean energy. Some Republicans want to add an amendment to the bill approving the Keystone XL pipeline, leaving Obama with a more complicated choice, since large numbers of lawmakers in both parties are likely to favor the broader measure. “We hope that it passes,” Podesta said of the legislation. “But if it passes with unacceptable riders, then it will be headed to the watery depths, I guess.”

To support this effort and frighten Americans into accepting the new levels of poverty ordained by their rulers, the Administrations’ witch doctors are back to blaming the weather on global warming, shaking their medicine sticks and warning that the Angry Sky Gods will strike us down with tornadoes and hurricanes if we don’t pay tribute to their bureaucratic clergy:

Meanwhile, the Obama administration will argue in a report to be released Tuesday that global warming is changing Americans’ daily lives and will worsen, according to study co-author Donald Wuebbles, a climate scientist at the University of Illinois. “We’re already seeing extreme weather and it’s happening now,” Wuebbles told The Associated Press on Monday. “We’re seeing more heat waves, particularly in the West and in the South.” This final report is a rewritten and shortened version of a draft that was released in January 2013, with more scientific references, reviews by experts and the public, and a thorough review by the National Academy of Sciences, said Wuebbles and report lead author Gary Yohe of Wesleyan University in Connecticut. There is even stronger evidence than in 2013, Yohe said. The draft came out just as meteorologists calculated that 2012 was the hottest year on record for the United States, but last year was slightly cooler than the 20th century average. And in the time since the draft report was released, the United States has seen lots of extremes.

See? 2013 was cooler than 2012, so that proves climate change. Just like 2013 being hotter than 2012 would have proved climate change. Or if 2013 had been exactly the same as 2012, that would have proved climate change. It’s all so obvious, you benighted peasants!

For the benefit of anyone tempted to fall for this voodoo routine, extreme weather events are growing less common worldwide. The Keystone XL pipeline, blocked on the orders of billionaire Democrat puppetmaster Tom Steyer, would increase American carbon emissions by less than 0.3 percent – far less than what cows release through their farts, although in fairness the climate-change fanatics want to regulate that, too. U.S. carbon emissions, in turn, are but a fraction of what is produced by a world that has scant interest in joining us on the path to pre-industrial poverty. Biofuels, implemented at fantastic expense under previous edicts from the Church of Global Warming, turns out to produce more greenhouse gas than plain old gas. Diesel fuel, pushed by an even older load of “settled science,” worked out to be more toxic than gasoline, too.

The connection between man-made greenhouse effects and the California drought is tenuous and speculative at best; despite the Administration’s alarmist rhetoric, the climate-change movement is using its computer models (which have been wrong about just about everything thus far) to argue that human activity intensified the drought conditions somehow, rather than being a primary cause. And the Church of Global Warming is still struggling to explain why there hasn’t been much in the way of global “climate change” for nearly 20 years.

Obama’s green energy “investments” have been spectacular failures. Another one, Smith Electric Vehicles, just went belly-up after sucking down $32 million in taxpayer “stimulus” money, creating a quarter of the jobs that were promised, and leaving its creditors holding unpaid invoices. The last thing the American people want is another truckload of their money handed out to the Democrat Party’s big contributors for another wave of crony-capitalism disasters. They don’t care about Obama’s “climate change” agenda much at all, judging from the polls. What they want is more jobs and a stronger economy. What they’ll get is further stagnation and higher energy bills, slamming into private sector that already teeters on the verge of a new recession.

This should all be a fairly easy political layup for Republicans, especially given the number of already-endangered Democrats hailing from coal and energy states. Obama’s environmentalist agenda is an exercise in big-bucks cronyism, a last-gasp effort to milk political power out of the dying global-warming movement, and a final stage in what his ideology portrays as the irreversible transformation of Americans into a poorer, slower, simpler, more compliant people. We’ll have less energy to pour into entrepreneurial ventures, less money to invest in markets we have made to feel increasingly estranged from, less mobility to thwart the designs of central planners, and greater dependence upon government subsidies to cover the basic necessities of life.

Conversely, increased energy costs are easily absorbed by wealthy and politically-connected aristocrats – you won’t see Al Gore’s titanic carbon footprint getting any smaller, because he can easily afford the increased fuel and electricity costs that will crush you. After all these months of bleating about “income inequality,” Democrats are ready to push ahead with a war on energy that will do more than almost anything else to make such inequality worse.