Last month, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) surfaced a damning video of a high-up EPA official revealing his professional philosophy on making an example out of pollution-law violators with tactics comparable to the ancient Romans employing “crucifixion” (geez, dude — tell us how you really feel, why don’t you?). Speaking of which, the House Energy and Commerce Committee is holding a hearing this Wednesday, “EPA Priorities and Practices, at which the aforementioned former EPA official will testify. That should be a fun one.

Sen. Inhofe is pushing for a Senate vote on repealing the EPA’s new mercury and toxics rule for power plants, which he argues is a part of the Obama administration’s agenda to forcibly bring about the extinction of coal-fired electricity — and he’s got some evidence to back up the claim. Monday, Inhofe’s office posted a video of yet another EPA regional administrator, leaving little room for doubt as to the EPA’s real goals for the industry.

What’s that? You can’t just come out and say what your honest intentions are, EPA? To shutdown the coal industry, you’ve had to go around the long policy way? You’ve been making tough decisions about how to make coal communities artificially obsolete before their time? Oh, those guileless environmentalist bureaucrats — the heart just bleeds for them.

President Obama hasn’t really made it too much of a secret that his “all of the above” energy policy, isn’t. They’ll sometimes talk about “clean coal,” but it’s all been downhill since those 2008 “necessarily skyrocketing energy prices” comments. His campaign had to scramble when they realized people were noticing that they’d left coal off of Obama’s official “all of the above” platform — nevermind that coal accounts for almost half of the United States’ electricity needs, no big deal or anything.

As much as the inefficiencies and oversights inherent in top-down bureaucracies so often degrade the very environment they’re ostensibly designed to protect, I think that there can be such a thing as effective environmental regulation — but the regulations rolling out of the Environmental Protection Agency these days most definitively ain’t it. This is an out-of-control, independent federal agency on an ideological tear, hellbent on remaking the world in their own gloriously green image, and they don’t care how much central planning they have to implement to do it. After all, what are jobs and economic growth and lifting people worldwide out of miserable conditions when there’s a brave new green world to be had? Or something.