ESA REFORM: NEW MOVE COULD BE HOPEFUL BUT THE DEVIL WILL BE IN THE DETAILS

Congressmen who want to amend 1973's landmark Endangered Species Act said the effort they launched Monday may succeed where previous attempts have failed because they now have significant bipartisan backing. House Resources Committee Chairman Richard Pombo plans to move his bill to the full House this week. He scheduled a hearing Wednesday on a measure that environmental groups say would gut a law that has saved dozens of species. Democratic U.S. Rep. Dennis Cardoza joined his fellow Californian in arguing the current law does more good for lawyers engaged in endless litigation over species protection than it does for the species themselves.

It's time to return to the original goal of the act, Cardoza and Pombo said: increasing threatened or endangered species' populations to the point that they can be removed from the list. The pair was joined by Republican U.S. Reps. George Radanovich of California and Greg Walden of Oregon at a Sacramento news conference at the same time the bill was formally introduced in Washington, D.C.

Aside from being the primary co-authors' home state, the location far from the nation's Capitol was intended to show the proposed law would return more control to state and local governments. Six Democrats joined eight Republicans as original co-sponsors of the "Threatened and Endangered Species Recovery Act of 2005," from Arkansas, California, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, Oregon, South Carolina, Washington and Wyoming. Seven of the eight Republicans and two of the six Democrats are members of Pombo's committee. "We made the effort to actually sit down and get a bipartisan bill," Pombo said.

Pombo said some environmental groups - whom he would not name - joined with recreational users, property rights advocates, industry groups and Department of Interior officials in crafting the bill. His committee passed two bills last year to amend the law, but neither got a vote on the House floor. Earlier attempts to amend the law also went nowhere, including a 1997 effort that cleared a Senate committee. The latest effort would require the government to compensate property owners at fair market value for any loss that results from protecting endangered species, or else it could not enforce the act.

Environmental groups said that provision would be so expensive as to make the law useless, and would encourage developers to plan projects for environmentally sensitive areas to get compensation from the government.

The bill also would eliminate the act's requirement that critical habitat be designated for endangered species, substituting a provision that enough habitat be set aside to help each species recover. Pombo said that could be more or less land than under the current act, though environmental groups questioned the intent. Critics said the proposed legislation would politicize the act's enforcement with a provision requiring the Interior secretary to define what constitutes the "best available scientific information." They said other provisions would make it difficult to block damaging projects or add to the list of 1,370 plants and animals considered threatened or in danger of extinction.

Source




HURRICANES: ANOTHER "NO LINK TO WARMING" ARTICLE

"Amid the handwringing that has followed the devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, a persistent question whispered in the background has been whether hurricanes are getting worse. A paper in this week's Science, by Peter Webster of the Georgia Institute of Technology, in Atlanta, and his colleagues suggests that they are, but only in one, specific way.

Hurricanes can form only over oceans that have a surface temperature above 26øC. That is well known. What is debatable is what effect, if any, raising the temperature beyond that has. It might increase the number of storms, the length they last, their maximum strength or the proportion that are strong. Or it might have no effect. Since average ocean-surface temperatures have risen by about half a degree since 1970, this is not an idle question, and it has, indeed, been asked in the past. But it has been asked largely of the North Atlantic and North Pacific, because they are fringed by countries that can afford to do the asking. Dr Webster, by contrast, has looked at the whole planet-or, rather, the six ocean basins on its surface that act as hurricane nurseries.

He and his team used satellite data to obtain consistent observations from around the world. (This was the reason they were able to go back only as far as 1970; before that, there were not enough observations.) Analysing the sea-surface temperatures in the six basins (the North Atlantic, the West Pacific, the East Pacific, the Southwest Pacific, the North Indian Ocean and the South Indian Ocean), they found statistically significant temperature rises in all but the Southwest Pacific.

Looking at the hurricanes themselves, though, they found no long-term trends in the number of storms per ocean basin or the length a storm lasts, except in the North Atlantic, where both increased. That is unfortunate news for Caribbean countries and the United States, which bear the brunt of those storms. But it suggests that whatever is increasing hurricane incidence it is not-or, at least not solely-to do with ocean warming. If it were, such increases would have shown up in other places where the sea is getting warmer.

Nor was there any increase in the maximum windspeed that storms attained anywhere. What there was, however, was a doubling around the world of the proportion of storms in the most destructive categories (4 and 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale usually employed by meteorologists). And, although the exact rise in that proportion varied from basin to basin, all of them saw a significant increase.

What caused that increase is, of course, debatable-and since the second-largest percentage increase was in the Southwest Pacific, where no significant temperature rise was observed, leaping on changes in sea-surface temperature as the sole cause might be premature. But what Dr Webster and his colleagues have shown beyond much doubt is that something rather nasty has been happening. Time, perhaps, to batten down the hatches".

(From The Economist)





"DUMB GROWTH" POLICIES IN AUSTRALIA TOO

We are the first inhabitants of Sydney who will leave this city worse than we found it. In pursuit of the policy called "consolidation", we are turning one of the most liveable cities in the world into a congested rats' nest. Artificial restrictions on growth have increased housing prices so much that many of our children cannot afford to live here. It's a mighty political and social failure. Things are about to get worse. About 70 per cent of all new housing in the next quarter-century will be built within the existing city boundaries. That will be half a million new homes, most of them as part of an estimated 7000 blocks of flats, to be built in streets like yours and mine. More and more people will be forced to live in concrete boxes or to spend their lives paying off some of the largest mortgages in the world. More suburbs will be blighted, deprived of oxygen, grass and space by denser housing, as remnant bushland disappears and roads and rivers become clogged like arteries running through fat.

The policy of consolidation, sometimes also known as "smart growth", is international and enshrined in the State Government's Metropolitan Strategy. It is based on a number of false assertions that fly in the face of common sense or have been exposed as false by academic research. Yet they persist, for reasons we will consider later. But first let's look at those assertions. The biggest is the claim, popular with all ideologues, that there is no alternative. We are constantly told that Sydney has reached its natural limits. In fact there are enormous areas of empty land on the city fringes, as anyone who drives along the Northern Road from Penrith to Camden can see. As the Australian Institute of Urban Studies demonstrated years ago, there is huge potential for extending the city into the Southern Highlands, half an hour by fast train from Central station. So there are alternatives.

The next big argument is environmental. Many people assume Sydney can only expand by eating into national parks, but as the two examples above show, this is not true. It is also claimed that the environmental cost of more freestanding houses on traditional blocks of land (700 square metres or more) is no longer acceptable, mainly because they use too much water. The first issue here involves equity: why should those who already own suburban houses on decent blocks be able to deny them to the young, the poor, and newcomers? In any case this is a furphy. Sydney's water crisis is as artificial as its land shortage. It could be solved in a few years by changes to the pricing system and the introduction of large-scale recycling. We could even build a new dam. (Many environmentalists are opposed to this but they shouldn't be. Dams involve the green ideal: large areas of bush - the catchment areas - from which humans are excluded.)

A variant of the environmental argument involves public transport. It's often claimed that we need to get people to stop driving their cars and use public transport, and that consolidation will achieve this. Unfortunately, evidence from around the world shows this to be wrong. Denser housing increases public transport in the affected area by a little and road use by a lot, so creating traffic congestion. Tony Recsei, the president of anti-consolidation group Save Our Suburbs, notes that "in cities all over the world, traffic congestion increases with density, even in cities with public transport systems Sydney can't hope to match". The reason for this is obvious: public transport, no matter how much is spent on it, just doesn't go to most of the places most of us want to go to when we leave our houses. To ignore this, as many planners and their supporters so persistently do, is to indulge in nostalgic left-wing fantasy.....

I suspect it's driven by something more prosaic, a desperate effort by government to minimise the increasing expense to itself of providing new housing. For Sydney's first 200 years, new suburbs were usually opened up with very basic facilities, and gradually improved over a long period. But today we have greatly increased expectations and a media ready to pounce on shortcomings. The old approach is no longer acceptable. So, believing it is cheaper, government crams most new housing into established areas to take advantage of existing infrastructure, from water pipes to schools. When it does provide building sites on the fringes, it now charges developers (that is, homebuyers) for infrastructure costs that would once have been borne by the general budget. So the housing crisis is a corner of the bigger problem, of government trying to cope with budgetary problems that persist despite the growing prosperity of society.

The result of all this is the destruction of the traditional suburban way of life that has suited the vast majority of Sydneysiders. Governments have been assisted in this by certain planners and environmentalists antipathetic to that tradition, indeed contemptuous of the suburbs. They desire to change our cities into a green fantasy of Paris, in which cafes and bicycle paths play a big role. They speak of bringing the vibrancy of Manhattan to Sydney, and contrast this dream with the tedium of ordinary life in a freestanding house with a garden - a life that millions of immigrants have crossed the world to achieve.

They denigrate this bourgeois utopia by calling it "urban sprawl", despite the fact that space and sprawl are part of Australians' cultural heritage. They call their dreams for the city "smart growth", to imply that any alternative is dumb. Government has turned to these intellectuals to provide the arguments to justify its budget-driven assault on suburbia......

Ian Macfarlane, the governor of the Reserve Bank, has suggested young people should leave Sydney because house prices are so high. It's sad this hasn't created a greater sense of shame among those who have created this situation. But then, it's not the children of the elite who are being driven out of their city.

In Cox's view: "The government advocates prefer to think Sydney's growth is the root of the housing affordability problem. Nothing could be further from the truth. Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston and Atlanta are the fastest growing large urban areas in the English-speaking New World. Each is already larger than Sydney and growing faster. They also have the most affordable housing markets. This is because [they] have been careful not to apply Soviet breadline policies to their housing markets."...

More here

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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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