I'm going to start blanket-ignoring these kind of articles. There's an unlimited supply of "bad person supports bad thing that are bad, how could they!" posts.

The problem is that while they certainly seem terrible, and they might well be absolutely true, the completely ineffectual method of policy making in western governments these days makes such statements useless. In this example Obama (or is more likely someone on his staff) might well have sided with the Energy companies to fist all of mankind for a quick extra buck while we still have fossil fuels, but I would suspect that the people making these decisions aren't total idiots and there was a sensible reason why it was made. The bill could contain any number of subtle ramifications, such as declaring measures that would balls up the economy even more, or force through some other undesirable factor.

The bill could contain virtually anything, and the article writer or journalist can cherry-pick one random phrase and produce an inordinate amount of hype about it. This is happening on all sides of modern politics and it's no more than brainwashing propaganda. Even if this was the vanilla proposal from the EPA with no extra “let's be nice to these birdies too while we're at it” legislation stuck in the back door then there must be a logical reason for the decision. Money or other contributions may well be a factor but I can't personally believe that the entire Obama administration (in this example, pick any other western government as a drop-in replacement) are two-faced evil bastards that are out to fist you over in favour of generating a Coal company a few extra billion. What's the over all incentive for the administration?

Ideally it would be nice if each bill was legally allowed to only contain a single proposal, and each bill was always freely viewable. After that it would be nice if journalists such as the article writer here (who from the style of the writing is no better than other pointless typically republican propaganda drivel) could directly link to the bill in question rather than (as is typically the case) copy-pasting a sentence or two from it, or even another blog, or someone's quote.

There are massive issues with most western governments which are clearly obvious such as insanely powerful lobbyists for corporate interests and disregards for human rights such as privacy. These articles, in my opinion, are no better than Fox News attempting to claim they are a fair and balanced news outlet. They follow a predictable pattern of an extreme statement that couldn't possibly be good (or 100% factual) followed by some brief details about how some lovable hippies did something good. Then follows a part about how “bad person did the bad things”. Right at the end are some meaningless statistics to present the statement as “official”.

The opaque nature of legislation currently being passed is so severe that apparently even the government ministers or senators can't tell what they're voting on half the time. It's no wonder they give up and listen to outside influences. This is compounded by it being impossible to tell if a fact is a fact or spun out of all recognisable form by biased interests or writers. The deliberate legislative bureaucracy needs to change before anything else can.

tl;dr fix the world's governments and I'll read your blog.