Obama's climate policy wrecked coal, and his renewable subsidies hurt efforts to replace it.
On Earth Day, the United States will sign the Paris Climate agreement. In terms of the actual climate policy already implemented by the Obama administration, however, the events of the previous week were much more important. Peabody Energy, the world’s biggest privately owned coal producer, declared bankruptcy, and SunEdison Corporation, the world’s largest solar-energy developer, entered into prebankruptcy negotiations. These bankruptcies are direct consequences of Barack Obama’s climate-change policies.
The Obama administration has relentlessly levied environmental regulatory actions to massively increase the costs and speed the end of coal production and its use for electricity generation.