Barack Obama’s Amnesia Tour

Former President Barack Obama is back on the campaign trail with one request for American voters: forget.

Rallying in Cleveland this weekend, the former President told the crowd his 2015 nuclear deal kept Iran from getting the bomb without firing a single missile. Just diplomacy, he said, until Donald Trump walked away and started a war.

It’s a great story, if you have the memory of a goldfish.

In January 2016, days before the Obama deal took effect, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard seized two U.S. Navy boats and 10 American sailors in the Persian Gulf. Tehran put them on camera, on their knees, so the world could watch. Following their swift releases, the Obama administration expressed gratitude, and the deal went forward on schedule.

Then there’s the part Obama leaves out entirely. On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas, a terrorist group Iran has armed, trained and bankrolled for years, murdered roughly 1,200 people in Israel. It was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.

If Obama’s diplomacy truly tamed Iran, someone forgot to tell its proxies.

An effective policy doesn’t leave behind captured sailors and slaughtered civilians. Obama isn’t asking voters to judge his record. He’s asking them to misplace it.

Nowhere is that request bolder than on the bill every family opens regularly.

He Said The Quiet Part Out Loud

In January 2008, candidate Obama told the San Francisco Chronicle that under his cap-and-trade plan, electricity rates “would necessarily skyrocket.” Congress never passed it, so Obama got there through his regulators.

His EPA’s mercury rule forced a wave of coal plant retirements, with more than a quarter of them landing the very month its first compliance deadline hit. Then came the Clean Power Plan, so far outside the law that the Supreme Court took the unprecedented step of freezing it in 2016, before a single appeals court had even ruled on it.

For those keeping score:

• In just 16 months, from January 2015 to April 2016, nearly 20 gigawatts of coal capacity retired, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA).

• Coal’s share of America’s electricity fell from 39 percent to 28 percent over that same stretch.

• More than 100 gigawatts of coal has retired since 2010, according to ElectricChoice. That’s capacity that could power about 40 million homes, close to a third of American households. 

That’s not a market adjusting. That’s President Obama’s war on coal.

The Sequel

Joe Biden spent eight years in Obama’s shadow and four years finishing his work. In April 2024, Biden’s EPA finalized a rule telling coal plants to capture 90 percent of their carbon emissions by 2032, using technology that’s barely been deployed, or shut down. And working families paid for it. 

Under Biden, the national average residential electricity rate jumped from 13.15 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2020 to 16.48 cents in 2024, a 25 percent increase in just four years. The worst came in 2022, when rates climbed 10.1 percent in a single year.

The Bill Comes Due

A power plant isn’t a light switch. A coal plant torn down in 2015 doesn’t come back online when the country needs it, and the country needs it now. 

The shortage shows up in the numbers. Capacity prices in PJM, the grid serving 13 states, climbed 9 fold in 2024 from $28.92 per megawatt-day to $269.92, the maximum allowed. More than 100 gigawatts of coal have retired since 2010, and those plants are coming offline faster than new generation is being built to replace them.

The bill landing in your mailbox today was written in the Obama years. 

Remember Before You Vote

Obama is the most popular closer Democrats have, which says plenty about the party’s bench. After losing to President Trump twice, Democrats still haven’t found a new idea, so they’ve dusted off the old messenger.

He’s counting on charm to cover the record. On Iran, it means skipping past the sailors and Oct. 7. On energy, it means pretending families’ power bills fell from the sky instead of a decade plus worth of his failed policies.

In a race for energy dominance with China, America can’t afford a rerun of the policies that shut down its most reliable power plants.

Obama wants you to forget. Your electric bill remembers.

Larry Behrens is an energy expert and the Communications Director for Power The Future. He’s been featured on Fox News, the Washington Times, and Townhall. You can follow him on X/Twitter @larrybehrens.

Editor's Note: Do you enjoy Townhall's conservative reporting exposing the radical left and woke media? Support our work so we can keep bringing you the truth.

Join Townhall VIP and use promo code FIGHT to receive 60% off your membership.