Via The Washington Examiner:

“What a glorious mess is being created in America,” Murray plans to say at Thursday’s Texas Public Policy Foundation’s second annual At the Crossroads: Energy & Climate Policy Summit. “President Obama is the greatest destroyer and enemy of available, reliable, affordable electricity that the United States has ever seen,” added Murray, one of the industry’s chief critics of Obama’s war on coal.

The speech, provided in advance to Secrets, is one of several at the summit expected to hit Obama’s planned participation at a global climate change conference in Paris this week where he is expected to push his Clean Power Plan, rejected this week in a ceremonial Senate vote.

Murray assailed the plan and charged that the administration has provided little evidence that it would improve the environment. Instead, he said, the president and Democrats have their eye on taking over the nation’s power source.

“I call what is occurring ‘a political power grab of America’s power grid.’ If a political movement wants to achieve central government control concentrated in Washington, D.C., then get control of the availability, reliability, and cost of electricity and put the United States Environmental Protection Agency in charge of it. The administration is totally bypassing the states and their utility commissions in this process, and, of course, their political power grab has nothing to do with the environment,” he charged.

He cited studies showing that the Obama plan shift to wind and solar power will cost users up to 25 percent more. “The CPP will increase wholesale electricity prices by $214 billion between 2022 and 2030, and yield double digit price increases in 45 states, and over 25 percent increases in 16 states. It will cost an additional $64 billion to replace the lost power capacity to 24 million homes due to the elimination of another 41 gigawatts of coal-fired electricity,” he warned.

He also said that the president’s bid to please “elites” will cost thousands of jobs.

“Mr. Obama’s actions are a human issue to me, as I know the names of many of the Americans whose jobs and family livelihoods are being destroyed as he appeases his radical environmentalist, liberal elitist, Hollywood character, some unionist, and other constituents. These Americans, you see, are my employees,” said Murray.

His Ohio-based company is the nation’s largest coal mine operator.

Murray brushed aside Democratic claims that global warming is going kill, mocking an EPA claim that the ocean levels have raised 0.3 millimeters. That, he said, is “the thickness of three sheets of paper.”

And, he warned, if the administration doesn’t win on killing coal with the Clean Power Plan, it will do it through regulations, which he said are already at historic levels.

“Regulations from the Obama EPA alone now total over 25 million words, 38 times more than those in our Holy Bible,” he said.

Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at pbedard@washingtonexaminer.com.

See the article here.