OIL DRILLING SAFE

A major oil spill from a tanker is the main danger to the Arctic environment if oil exploration increases in the region, not drilling which is increasingly clean, the author of an eight-nation survey said. "Shipping has always had risk associated with it, mariners have known that for centuries. There is no such thing as a safe ship -- the Titanic was one," said Dennis Thurston, one of two lead writers of the study, due to be published next year. "The fear is that an increased search for oil is going to impact the Arctic, but the experience we've had is that activity has already peaked," he told Reuters in an interview Friday.

The survey of potential impacts from oil and gas exploration in the Arctic is part of a wider Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program, sponsored by the United States, Russia, Canada and the five Nordic nations. Norway has lifted a ban on drilling in the little-explored Barents Sea as oilfields further south have begun to mature, and the U.S. government wants Congress to approve drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to boost oil supplies.

Thurston said the study will recommend that countries improve their plans for coordinating handling of a major oil spill in the Arctic seas. "Three things happen with a big spill: there's a lot of death of animals, there's the long-term effects with oil persisting in the environment and there's the psychological effect," he said. "Seeing a pristine area covered in oil changes policy, people's perceptions, and it's certainly bad for the oil business," he added. Scientists said last month effects still lingered in Alaska from the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill.

Experts gathered in Helsinki for a three-day working meeting have found that most environmental damage in the Arctic due to oil and gas exploration occurred in previous decades, with new technology now permitting less drilling and low pollution. "The way people act in the Arctic has changed a lot. (Exploration) is a lot cleaner, it's a lot smaller and it's more focused. The activity level is going down even if the search for oil is ramping up," Thurston said. He said he believed Norway's decision to lift the drilling ban in the Barents Sea, which prompted loud protests from environmental groups, was unlikely to cause damage. "The technology is really safe and there's been a tremendous amount of risk assessment done on the Arctic projects. Personally I think they are safe operations," he said. "The question is transportation of the product, especially with tankers, because there's so much more human error potential," he added.

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NUTTY NOTIONS IN NEW JERSEY

While the entire northeast of the United States was digging out from a huge blizzard-usually a sign of cold weather-a meeting on "the climate challenge" was occurring in London, England and "an independent report" by the Institute for Public Policy Research (Great Britain), The Australia Institute, and the Center for American Progress announced that "an ecological time bomb is ticking away" that will plunge the world into chaos due to the heat said to be generated by greenhouse gas emissions.

This kind of lunacy is intended to impose caps on the use of energy everywhere. It is the goal of the United Nations Kyoto Climate treaty that became international law as of Wednesday, February 16. There is no ecological time bomb. There is no need for urgent action.

To understand what "caps" really are, let me quote from my friend, John Brignell, a British professor emeritus, statistician, and editor of Numberwatch.com. Recalling Martin Luther's rebellion against the Roman Catholic Church over the issue of indulgences, he reminds us, "Chaucer's Pardoner earned one hundred marks a year by selling indulgences, worthless pieces of paper, relics and other valueless items to credulous believers in the religion of the day. Now we have carbon trading, in which new worthless pieces of paper are sold for millions of pounds." That is the essence of the Kyoto protocol, a system by which meaningless trading of forbidden emissions are sold for the right to continue contributing to the dreaded and totally bogus global warming.

While an army of snowplows was at work on the roads of the Garden State, the little Green gnomes in the Department of Environmental Protection were working to reclassify carbon dioxide (CO2) as a "contaminant." If this becomes law, the DEP might as well arrest everyone living in the Garden State because humans generate CO2 every time they exhale. Or perhaps we will just pay for the right to exhale?

To bring about the implementation of the United Nations' Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change, something the US Senate unanimously rejected and the President has correctly said is based on "flawed science", New Jersey in concert with other northeastern States has entered into the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative that would, if enacted, impose a "regional CO2 cap-and-trade program."

To achieve this, CO2 has to be reclassified as a "contaminant", i.e., a form of pollution! This is yet another example of the way environmentalists-Greens-are seeking to do an end-run around the rejection and opposition to their bogus "global warming" claims. Aside from the fact that they use junk science to advance their lies, this is yet one more example of their unrelenting efforts to harm the health and welfare of everyone worldwide who would suffer the consequences of this hoax. And, yes, enough nations have ratified the Kyoto Protocol to theoretically impose its demands to cut back on CO2 emissions, but among those exempt from its mandates are China and India, plus a host of Third World nations, thus rendering it meaningless.

In late January, Dr, Marlo Lewis, Jr., Ph.D., a Senior Fellow in Environmental Policy for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, wrote to the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, exposing the abject lies and idiotic justifications it is offering for its proposed reclassification of CO2 as "an air contaminant." The hearings and written comments on this proposal are under cover. What happens next is up to the DEP.

Dr. Lewis stated his objections more politely than I ever could and I will excerpt them here so you can make up your own mind. "The proposed rule is a conceptual muddle. Logically, DEP cannot classify CO2 as an `air contaminant' unless it is prepared to apply the same designation to water vapor-the atmosphere's main greenhouse gas." In other words, if DEP pulls off this deception, it would presumably also have to designate steam from the State's nuclear power plants or just plain old water evaporation from public green spaces.

DEP is lying through its teeth, citing some of the most dubious junk science available. "The proposed rule lacks a credible scientific rationale," is the nice way Dr. Lewis put it. "There is no solid evidence that CO2 emissions are causing, or are likely to cause, `dangerous interference' with the global climate system. On the contrary, the balance of evidence suggests that CO2 emissions are greening the planet, enhancing biodiversity and making global food available."

In the event no one taught you this fundamental fact about life on planet Earth, all the forests and every form of vegetation, including food crops, is utterly and completely dependent on the presence of CO2 in the atmosphere. More CO2 is good. Less CO2 is bad. More enhances plant growth. Less decreases it.

In brief, the agency's arguments are based on the extremely dubious reports of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This is the same UN that is responsible for the now infamous "Oil for Food" program imposed on Saddam Hussein that became a cesspool of corruption.

Suffice it to say, the IPCC has routinely revised its various projections of global warming, each time it was correctly attacked for (1) being based on flawed computer models and (2) its failure to demonstrate any verifiable justification for its claims. "Flawed" is a nice way of saying that, were the IPCC a casino, every slot machine would be rigged to never provide a payoff.

Right now, the NJDEP is claiming that, not only will New Jersey resemble Florida if they can't reclassify CO2, but that the State's beautiful shoreline will sink below a rapidly rising ocean. The only problem is that no observational data, including satellite altimetry, shows any evidence this is occurring. One leading scientist in this field called the IPCC data "untenable" and "impossible." As for air pollution, all the data points to major improvements since 1975 and, of course, there are plenty of laws already in place to insure the continuing reduction of pollution.

Finally, the DEP's regional cap-and-trade program will prove hugely expensive. The US Energy Information Administration estimates that the Kyoto Protocol, if implemented here, would cost the U.S. between $77 billion and $283 billion annually, depending on the extent of international emissions trading. Says Dr. Lewis, "Kyoto is all economic pain for no environmental gain. The same holds for any lesser CO2 regulation program."

A study by the Heartland Institute estimates that the DEP proposal would cost consumer and business losses that could reach $12.9 billion if implemented in New Jersey. Indeed, State revenue losses could reach $20.9 billion. Not only is New Jersey already deeply in debt, the NJDEP wants to plunge it even deeper in debt.

Greens, however, don't care about things like that. In fact, anything they can do to harm the economy is part of their statewide and worldwide agenda. Anything they can do to cause the needless deaths of people, denying them DDT or genetically improved seeds for crops, is just fine with them because they think there are too many people living on planet Earth.

Mr. Governor, if you are reading this. Junk the DEP proposal and then fire the Director. If possible, clean house in the DEP and hire some people who aren't certifiably nuts.

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KYOTO COMFORT

When you awoke this morning and looked out the window did you get an exhilarating rush of pride now that the Kyoto Treaty has taken effect? Didn't it make you feel so morally superior to those awful nations who refused to sign on? Did you notice a slight cooling of the ether as the amount of greenhouse gases has begun to shrink, making the world a better, safer place to live? Me neither!

What I did notice was absolutely nothing. Oh, yes, a lot of people were talking, particularly the talking heads in the media, about how exactly the Treaty would benefit mankind. No matter how I look at it, it does not make sense.

Someone please explain to me how we can control greenhouse gases by "purchasing" greenhouse emission credits from countries that have a surplus of these credits. As I understand this Ponzi scheme, if Canadians produced more greenhouse gases than they were allocated under Kyoto, then they could simply "purchase" greenhouse gas credits from another country that has a surplus. Two questions: who decided what a given country's greenhouse gases quota is and how will Canada paying $5 billion to a country like Russia to purchase surplus credit reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere? The country that we are purchasing from surely isn't going to spew them into the atmosphere if we don't purchase them. And us purchasing these credits will actually enable us to spew extra greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Any way I look at it, the Kyoto Treaty appears to be a wealth redistribution scheme dreamed up by Kofi Annan's crew to trim the sails of the West and lend some financial leverage to the Third World. As I see it, we morally superior Canadians are going to lay out billions of dollars to buy--nothing, the perfect Seinfeldian deal.

While climate change has been a bogeyman for the last 40 years, there is at best an array of conflicting claims by scientists that it is indeed happening and at worst, not a shred of evidence to support those claims. Compound this with the assertion that climate change is due to the activities of humans, namely humans living in the Western Hemisphere, and you have what looks to me like an "agenda".

Today every weather anomaly is used to support the claim that catastrophic climate change is in full force. These so-called no-falsifiable hypotheses are rearing their ugly head whenever there is a hurricane or a snowstorm or a flood resulting from a deluge. It's almost as if these phenomena had never occurred before. I recall last fall's Florida hurricanes and how many media commentators claimed that their unusual severity portended evidence of climate change. Obviously these pundits did not know that the 1940s saw the greatest quantity and severity of hurricanes in the past century, which was well before anyone even dreamed about the possibility of catastrophic climate change.

As evidence of global warming, certain scientists are citing today's temperatures being substantially higher than they were 30 years age. True as that may be, it is also true that today's temperature are substantially lower than they were in the 1930s. Does that mean we are now headed for an ice age?

The acronym GIGO, which stands for "garbage in-garbage out", applies equally to all computer-related activities, even those of UN climatologists. Two years ago, two researchers, Ian Castles and David Henderson, both with impeccable credentials in their respective fields, noticed some serious problems with the methodology used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to predict greenhouse gas emissions for the next century. Henderson, a respected economist and Castles a statistician, have challenged the IPCC's predictions as being unrealistic in their severity.

In signing on to the Kyoto accord, the government of Canada has betrayed its ineptitude both in matters of climatology as well as economics. The fact that there is no clear plan being floated by Ottawa, except some more conferences in the future is perfect evidence our political masters do not have a clue. But that isn't going to stop them from plunging headlong into a scheme that could well result in the most severe economic crisis this country has ever experienced.

Like same-sex marriage, the Kyoto Treaty is yet another ill-advised scheme to which the Liberals are committing this country, whether we like it or not, and consequences be damned

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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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