Congressman Francis Rooney (R-FL) says, “There’s no reason to burn coal.” Really? So apparently 100+ million Americans who currently rely on coal to heat and cool their homes, cook their food, power their appliances and turn on the lights should just be in the dark and out in the cold. Good to know.

Rooney is currently the only Republican member of Congress co-sponsoring the latest carbon tax bill, a bill that hikes a sizable and ever-growing tax on the introduction of fossil fuels into the economy, whether it be by extraction, refining, distribution or manufacturing. This would apply to coal, but also to oil and all the thousands of products it generates, raising the cost of consumer goods across the entire economy.

Rooney believes America can switch to cleaner burning natural gas, but such a move would take decades in terms of infrastructure investment and delivery. Just ask the people of New England who faced a blistering cold last Winter. After removing a significant portion of fossil fuel power from their energy mix, the liberal New England states had to import gas from Russia. Russian gas, that’s what you get when simple-minded solutions get shoved on us by clueless politicians.

If Rooney believes that coal and traditional energy is such a serious threat to the planet, as he surely does if we judge him by his comments, then why not just ban fossil fuels outright? The typical line we get from carbon tax acolytes is an outright ban is just not practical currently, but the Rooney carbon tax will solve that problem by forcing us off coal over time. One wonders if Rooney has been living in a cave, or maybe a yacht off Marco Island.

America is using less coal year after year without a tax, as the energy renaissance in shale and fracking has now put us on the brink of being a net energy exporter – a far cry from the days when critics charged that America was too dependent on foreign oil. What Rooney wants to commandeer from Washington is happening naturally in the free-market, with more energy options like natural gas in the mix. So with Rooney’s plan we’ll still have coal and the traditional fossil fuels he says there is “no reason” to burn, now we just get to have them with a gusher of a new tax to pay.

It is further disturbing that by signing on to this plan, Rooney, who considers himself a free-market conservative, is handing massive new powers to federal agencies like the EPA and IRS, who will have immense oversight and coercive powers over U.S. energy policy under a carbon tax. It also creates a massive slush fund for liberal politicians to spread around to their political allies and like-minded advocacy groups, the same groups who are ideologically in bed with the radicals greens who think natural gas should also be corked. For a self-described free-market conservative, Rooney clearly doesn’t know what side of the issue he is on; the carbon tax lobby is not friendly to anything that is not government subsidized green energy like wind and solar.

Giving the government control over energy policy is a horrible idea, regardless of what side of the aisle you claim to be from. Rooney’s quixotic aspirations for a cleaner planet will not be furthered even if his plan is enacted, with even government data pointing to the carbon tax having an entirely negligible impact on the climate change figures Rooney says concern him so much. But in Rooney’s world it is seen as progress to tax average working-class families, the poor especially, with a tax on the energy and household products they require every day.

So let’s recount:

• Rooney says there is “no reason” to burn energy he doesn’t like
• But he has no viable alternative to replace it
• So let’s hit our economy with a giant new tax that will be paid for by working Americans and disproportionately hit the poor
• We’ll give the federal government massive new powers to regulate our economy, and hand politicians a sizable slush fund to coerce the economy
• And maybe, in the rosiest scenario, it will impact climate change tiny fractions of a degree

This all begs the question whether Rooney is just naive, or cynical – it’s hard to know which is worse, that he believes this is a good idea, or that he knows it isn’t. We’re sure that the more than 100 million Americans who currently rely on the energy that Rooney wants to tax may want to understand why they will have to pay the price for Rooney’s carbon tax.