GREENS ARE THE ENERGY PROBLEM

It goes without saying that the global economy depends on the availability of affordable energy. Many place their hopes for abundant energy supplies in yet-to-be-imagined technologies. But while researchers tinker with far-off possibilities, there’s something we should do right now to keep the energy flowing: break the radical environmentalists’ chokehold on national energy policy. Regardless of form — whether oil, gas, coal or nuclear — the Green movement is blocking efforts to harness our accustomed energy sources while leading us down the primrose path of so-called “renewable energy.”

First, we’re not running out of oil. “Notwithstanding the recent paucity of discoveries of new major oil fields, innovation has proved adequate to meet ever-rising demands for oil,“ wrote Alan Greenspan last October in "Middle East Economic Survey." “Gross additions to reserves have significantly exceeded the extraction of oil the reserves replaced,” added Greenspan. These new reserves don’t include unconventional oil sources, including the vast Canadian tar sands and Venezuelan heavy oil.


Nevertheless environmentalists are hindering efforts to obtain that oil — witness, for example, their fight against drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Environmentalists currently are whipping up Floridians against the offshore drilling provisions in the current energy bill in Congress, forcing Republican Sen. Mel Martinez to defy Senate leadership and kowtow to the activists. “Any weakening of protections currently in place off Florida's coasts is unacceptable,” says Martinez, echoing the anti-drilling position of environmental groups.

Green opposition to increased oil production is international in scope. Acting through such diverse groups as Amnesty International and Christian Brothers Investment Services, activists are harassing oil company BP about its $3.2 billion Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline from the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean Sea.

There’s also plenty of natural gas to be had — if the Greens would let us have it. As spotlighted recently by the Wall Street Journal editorial page, environmentalists “have successfully pushed moratoriums for most new offshore drilling of the fuel, have fought to keep the most gas-rich federal lands off-limits to exploration, and have used lawsuits to tie up those pieces that are accessible.” The Greens are also obstructing the importation of liquefied natural gas by blocking the construction of new port facilities based on fears that they would be terrorist targets.....

The energy crisis has arisen not because there’s a lack of sufficiently clean and affordable energy supplies — our problem is that we’ve allowed the Greens to have too much power.

More here





The Nonsense That is Ozone-Depletion

"Cancer threat as deadly UV rays build up" reported the NZ Herald on September 10th. Referring to a "disturbing new study" the writer reported a finding that "increases in UV radiation over summer have occurred because of ozone depletion caused by pollution". The article contained three assumptions:

1) UV has increased long term,
2) Ozone protects us from UV (and less now means less protection),
3) That ozone depletion is caused by humans polluting our natural environment.

Unfortunately, these claims are false on all counts. In order to simply understand the relationship between UV(sunlight), ozone and oxygen (air), think about what you see when you go to the beach. The order of things is Water - Surf - Beach. The boundary where the water hits the beach is called surf, and in the upper atmosphere, the boundary where the sunlight hits the air is termed the ozone layer, because in that region ozone is produced as a result of the UV acting on the oxygen, in other words where the sunlight hits the air.

Sunlight - Ozone - Air

Just as the surf cannot in any way protect the land from the sea, ozone cannot 'protect' the air and our environment that is below it from UV. A result cannot be defined as a protector. To lament that ozone depletion is taking away "our protection" is the same as crying that surfers are wearing down the surf, and as the surf is all there is holding back the ocean, when the surf goes (due to human behavior) the water will flood over the land and destroy mankind.

As with so many theories, threads are tied together to build a case. The case is then launched to the media to attract attention. The attention is then added to by 'further findings', 'disturbing new studies' and 'concerns' The end result is the willing granting of research funds to research "the problem". If the Cancer word can be attached, so much the better for the case. The public will donate any amount of money for cancer research. It only wants to see the case for it spelled out in a conclusive-sounding way.

The Case

We do know that ozone exists. We know that there are two ozone depletion zones: over each of the Earth's poles. We know the depletion zone over Antarctic is bigger than that over the Arctic. We have found that CFCs which are man-made substances commonly used in refrigeration and aerosol cans, contain chlorine. And we know that chlorine can destroy ozone.

At this point let's revisit school science. We breathe in oxygen and expell it as carbon dioxide. 02 is two oxygen atoms stuck together. Given sufficient energy applied, now and then three oxygen atoms will stick together, making an 03 molecule, which is called ozone. The energy required for this can come from electrical discharge through the air, such as lightning, or from the sun in the form of UV sunlight. You can smell ozone if you sniff around an electric motor that has arcing around the brushes - the pungent smell is the 03.

When in space the Sun's energy races down here to meet Earth's rising air, a certain amount of 03 is produced. But like the surf, it is merely the result of the photo-chemical process between oxygen and UV light. But it is the photo-chemical process itself which protects us; the ozone is a mere by-product. The air itself absorbs most of the UV radiation and disperses it. As the air contains ozone, so the ozone also combines with the UV. In the same way, if you dropped a cup of ink into the sea it would spread out and disperse. And if either the air or sunlight pack up, we will have long since suffocated or frozen to death before we start developing cancer.

There is not a 'layer' of ozone at all, any more than there is single layer of air; and ozone doesn't protect us from anything. The Sun's rays hit us at exactly the same time as they hit the ozone. Therefore, protection is impossible. In the same way, 'hard' water molecules, H3O, doesn't prevent anyone from getting wet. If we could snap our fingers and make every single last molecule of ozone disappear, it would have absolutely no bearing on the amount of UV light reaching the Earth.

Now, back to the poles, where there are indeed observed ozone-depletion zones. How come? Well, there happens to be two places on Earth where UV light doesn't meet rising warm air molecules: where the Sun shines less and where it is cold - at the Poles! Because the Earth is tilted, there is a wide area of depletion around both poles, and NZ happens to be under the southern depletion zone for much of the winter. In fact the "hole" gets bigger towards spring, because the highs and lows of the effect are modified by Earth's wind systems and subsequently the flow of warm and cold air. That is why you see glaring headlines on sudden discoveries about ozone depletion around NZ around NZ's springtime. But by December the hole is much smaller, and that's when NZ has its summer, when the skin cancer risk from the sun is higher.

Bricks Don't Float Up

Despite all the information you may have read, there is not one shred of supportable evidence that CFCs have found their way 40 miles up above the Earth. No one has ever found any up there because they are roughly five times heavier than air. They are like a brick in a swimming pool. It is not often that you will see a brick floating to the surface of your pool. CFCs are so dense that even as a gas you could fill a bucket with it and pour the contents of one bucket into another. Secondly there is no evidence that they can destroy anything because they are very stable and unreactive substances. Most dictionaries and chemistry books describe them as inert gases.

Faced with this rather unfortunate logic, some researchers extend the plot, claiming that in the upper atmosphere the intense UV light is sufficient to break down the CFCs, releasing chlorine which then does the damage. If that actually could happen though, then the "ozone layer" would just get replaced by the CFC layer, which would then further "protect" us from UV radiation.

There is, too, another difficulty with the theory: the fact that all the CFCs in the world are insufficient to even dent the known amount of ozone. The factor is 1 in 100,000. So we get told of yet another scenario - that in some imagined chain reaction, chlorine would keep on getting released by the UV until all the ozone was destroyed. But even if we supposed that this could happen, then all of these reactions going on would only further absorb UV, protecting us even more. We would right now be dying from lack of UV light and vitamin D deficiency.

There is no evidence that such a chain reaction would occur. Also, it is a long jump and unscientific to say that if a reaction could occur, then it would. Furthermore, there are some 192 known chemical reactions and 48 photochemical reactions occurring in the stratosphere(the ozone area) all the time. How would it be that chlorine and ozone, which are only in minute quantities anyway, should be able to carry on this reaction to the exclusion of the other 241 known reactive processes?

And who says that the "holes" are getting bigger? In 1988 NASA's Nimbus satellite appeared to show that the southern hole was increasing. Here was supposed proof that man was aggravating the situation. The fact that the following year's results showed the hole smaller than ever previously recorded went totally unannounced, except in obscure journals. Neither was it reported that the variation in depletion-area size seemed to correspond with increases in sunspot activity, which throws out more UV radiation.

Where did all this nonsense start?

The "CFC Depletion Theory" was first published in 1974 by F. Sherwood Roland and Mario J. Molina, University of California. Their work was treated as a joke by the world's scientific community until the mid-80s, when suddenly there were plenty of funds available for the study of such things.

There are genuine experts concerned at the erosion of truth. In 1986 the prestigious science journal "Geophysical Research Letters" asked forty-six of the world's leading climatologists and meteorologists to submit individual papers on their research and findings on the subject of the "Antarctic Hole" The overview of those findings includes.."despite the number of public announcements, no clear link between manmade pollutants and ozone depletion over Antarctica has been established; indeed, a number of papers in this issue present serious alternatives to and constraints on the suggested chemical scenarios..The appearance of the South Polar total ozone minimum(the Hole) and higher values at mid-latitudes in the spring has been observed since the late 1950s, well before man-made pollutants could have had important impact on the stratosphere." The introduction went on to suggest that the hole was apparently a natural phenomenon, affected by climatic shift in the upper atmosphere.....

More -- much more -- here




California's bogus baby bottle scare : "The California State Assembly is about to consider legislation intended to frighten parents about the safety of baby bottles, teethers, pacifiers and other plastic toys. Assemblywoman Wilma Chan, D-Oakland, has introduced a bill (AB319) that would ban the manufacture and sale of any toy or child care article intended for use by a child under three years of age if that product contains the chemical bisphenol-A (BPA). AB319's provisions claim that BPA is an 'estrogen-mimicking endocrine disruptor chemical' that 'has been shown to have hormone disrupting effects.' The bill echoes unfounded allegations from a 1990s-era, environmental activist-generated scare about chemicals in the environment supposedly interfering with hormonal processes to cause everything from cancer to infertility to attention deficit disorder."

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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.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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