HOORAY! MORE OIL DRILLING

Using one tenth of one percent of the land is still too much for the never-happy Greenies

The Bush administration has approved oil and natural gas drilling on federal lands in the Otero Mesa in Mew Mexico, despite pleas from the state's governor and environmentalists to protect the desert grassland from energy exploration. The decision mirrors the White House's national energy plan to open more federal lands to drilling to boost domestic oil and gas supplies.

However, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, who is a Democrat and served as U.S. energy secretary under President Bill Clinton, opposes vast drilling in the area and will fight the government's ruling. "I am very disappointed by the Bush administration's failure to respect New Mexico's position on oil and gas leasing in this precious, sensitive and world-renowned area," Richardson said.

The Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management (BLM) said energy companies will be closely monitored and only 1,589 acres will be disturbed from well pads, roads and pipelines, which is less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the area's total 2 million acres located in the south-central portion of New Mexico on the Texas border. Energy companies would have to replant disturbed areas with native desert plants before other tracts could be developed. "We have the science, the tools, and the will to ensure that the very limited amount of exploration and development allowed under this plan is accomplished under today's strict environmental and social standards," said Linda Rundell, State Director of the BLM in Santa Fe.

There will be only 141 exploratory wells drilled, resulting in up to 84 producing wells, at most, the BLM said. The agency will permanently protect almost 36,000 acres of grassland having the highest potential as habitat for the endangered Aplomado falcon, and drilling will not be allowed on a total of 124,000 acres.

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CLIMATE FRAUD

I recently saw a newspaper ad that urged Canadians to take the "one-tonne challenge". Placed by the Government of Canada, the ad featured a picture of none other than Rick Mercer of the CBC's metric hour (22 minutes) fame, holding up a booklet published by the government entitled The One-Tonne Challenge. The ad and the booklet exhorts Canadians to reduce personal emissions of so-called greenhouse gasses by 20 percent per year or one-tonne per person and to "take action on climate change".

I find it interesting that it's no longer about "global warming" and that the newest bug-aboo is "climate change". I remember in the late 70s everyone was concerned about the coming ice age. Clearly no one has a real clue about what is happening to the earth's climate, although the liberal left wants to turn whatever it is into a morality play. It gives me cause to be suspicious of the agenda of those who would impose restrictive compacts, such as the Kyoto Accord on the world. No matter how I look at the treaty and no matter what the treaty purports to achieve, it still looks like a wealth redistribution scheme disguised as a plan to save us from ourselves.

There is so much confusing and contradictory information about climate change circulating today, that it is difficult to make sense of it. Quite frankly, the issue has become too politicized to be meaningful, with complex data being reduced to slogans such as the one currently being touted by the Government of Canada. Both sides of the argument are claiming the other side is lying. Recently John Kerry chided the "non-scientific, pseudo-scientific, anti-scientific nonsense emanating from the right wing". When couched in terms such as these by people like John Kerry, I am given to wonder what the real agenda might be.....

In the 1980s the United Nations formed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to act as a clearinghouse for climate research on a worldwide basis. The trouble with that is that the same wonderful group of bureaucrats that brought us the "Iraqi oil for food" scandal runs the IPCC. Except in this case, instead of money and oil disappearing, we're finding that scientific research that contradicts the accepted orthodoxy about climate change somehow doesn't find its way into the public eye, or if it does, it's in a highly edited form to ensure it conforms.

The IPCC's 1990 report, which was its first, acknowledged that there was a great deal of concern that human influence might be responsible for climate change; there was no concrete evidence that this was indeed the case. The 1995 report issued by the IPCC did announce that there was now evidence that there was "a discernible human difference" on the world's climate. One problem: the scientists who worked on this report did not actually say that. What they did say was that they could not tell whether or not there was a discernible human influence on climate. The claim was added after the research was completed and the conclusions were changed by the bureaucrats at the IPCC to conform to their agenda.

All the accepted dogma regarding climate change appears to be flawed in some manner. In his excellent new book State of Fear, Michael Crichton explodes a lot of myths, which many of us tend to accept as gospel. For instance, the idea that ocean levels are rising at an unprecedented level is total hogwash. According to research quoted by Crichton sea levels are rising, but at no faster rate than they have been for the past six thousand years. The rise is miniscule, no more than six to eight inches every century. Additionally, recent trends indicate that sea levels are increasing at a much slower level than they have in the past.

Some members of the scientific community have expressed concerns about glaciers melting. And while indeed there are a number of glaciers that appear to be melting, some are actually increasing in size. There are some 160,000 glaciers in the world today with about two-thirds of them inventoried (497 in California alone). The mass balance data from studies lasting more than 5 years available today only covers 79 glaciers. How can we infer from this small sample that all of them are melting and that man is responsible?

Much has been written about Mt. Kilimanjaro's glaciers melting, with blame going, where else, but to global warming. The facts are that the most recent studies of that mountain have ascertained that the glaciers' melting is actually due to the deforestation of the rainforest at Kilimanjaro's base, which has been responsible for warm, moist air currents feeding the glaciers. With the forests gone the air now rushing up the mountain is hot and dry, hence melting glaciers....

We can all put on hair shirts and suffer for our affluence by participating in the Kyoto accord. Not that it would do any good, as the same projections generated from computer simulations that we rely on to predict the inevitability of severe climate change, predict a decrease in global temperature of only .04 degree Fahrenheit over the next decade, providing the Kyoto accord is fully implemented.

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GLOBAL WARMING IS ABOUT POWER TO THE GREENIES, NOTHING ELSE

As cold weather sweeps across much of the U.S. and buries New England in several feet of snow, global warming hyperbole reached new heights today as an apocalyptic international report, "Meet the Climate Change," warned the world is reaching a "point of no return" that will bring unprecedented famine and drought catastrophes. The report was assembled by the Institute for Public Policy Research in Britain, the Centre for American Progress in the United States and the Australia Institute....

In addition to famine and drought of spectacular proportions, the report warns of increased disease, sea-level rise and the death of forests. "There is an ecological time bomb ticking away," said Stephen Byers, former British transport minister and a close ally of British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The report urges all G-8 countries to agree to generate a quarter of their electricity from renewable sources by 2025, and to double their research spending on low-carbon energy technologies by 2010.

The controversial Kyoto Protocol became binding on industrialized nations who have signed onto it after Russia reluctantly moved to ratify it.... Vladimir Putin's personal economic adviser, Andrei Illarionov, said last summer Russia's approval of Kyoto came under severe duress - an "all-out and total war on Russia" directed by Blair. He said the pressure included "bribes, blackmail and murder threats." Illarionov said global warming advocates refused to answer questions posed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change at a Moscow symposium. He claimed British science advisers tried to stop skeptics from being heard. "When this attempt to introduce censorship ... failed, other attempts were made to disrupt the seminar," said Illarionov.

Illarionov said "none of the assertions made in the Kyoto Protocol and the 'scientific' theory on which it is based have been borne out by actual data. ... There is no evidence confirming a positive linkage between the level of carbon dioxide and temperature change. If there is such a linkage, it is of a reverse nature. ... The statistical data ... are often considerably distorted if not falsified."

While some in the U.S. have offered sharp criticism of the ideology driving the global warming crusade, none of the rhetoric has been as penetrating as Illarionov's, who compared it "with man-hating totalitarian ideology with which we had the bad fortune to deal during the 20th century, such as National Socialism (and) Marxism.... All methods of distorting information existing in the world have been committed to prove the validity of these theories," he continued. "Misinformation, falsification, fabrication, mythology, propaganda. Because what is offered cannot be qualified in any other way than myth, nonsense and absurdity.

Illarionov's comments, made in a press conference, were quoted by the Moscow News but received little international attention. He described the protocol as "one of the biggest, if not the biggest, international adventures based on man-hating totalitarian ideology, which, incidentally, manifests itself in totalitarian actions and concrete events, particularly academic discussions, and which tries to defend itself using disinformation and falsified facts. It's hard to think of any other word but 'war' to describe this."

Yuri Izrael, one of the three vice chairmen of the panel, said: "The Kyoto Protocol aims to impoverish our country, and not only us but our children and grandchildren.... There have been examples in our fairly recent history of how a considerable portion of Europe was flooded with the brown Nazi ideology, the red Commie ideology that caused severe casualties and consequences for Europe and the entire world," said Illarionov. "Now there is a big likelihood that a considerable part of Europe has been flooded with another type, another color of ideology, but with very similar implications for European societies and human societies the world over. And now we in Russia are facing a historical opportunity: Are we going to let the genie out of the bottle as the previous generations let the Nazi and Communist genies out of the bottles or not?"

DeWeese concludes: "The fact is that one person now stands between the global warming jackals and economic sanity - George W. Bush. Will he stand firm in his opposition to the Kyoto Protocol? Or will he capitulate to massive international pressure and sell America's soul?"

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

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