John O'Sullivan
Industrialized nations emit far less carbon dioxide than the Third World, according to latest evidence from Japan's Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).
Global warming alarmism is turned on its head and the supposed role of carbon dioxide in climate change may be wrong, if the latest evidence from Japan's scientists is to be believed.
Japanese national broadcaster, NHK World, broke the astonishing story on their main Sunday evening news bulletin (October 30, 2011). Television viewers learned that the country's groundbreaking IBUKU satellite, launched in June 2009, appears to have scorched an indelible hole in conventional global warming theory.
Standing in front of a telling array of colorful graphs, sober-suited Yasuhiro Sasano, Director of Japan's National Institute for Environmental Studies told viewers, "The [IBUKU satellite] map is to help us discover how much each region needs to reduce CO2 [carbon dioxide] emissions."
Indeed, the map at which JAXA spokesman Sasano was pointing (see photo above) had been expected by most experts to show that western nations are to blame for substantial increases in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, causing global warming. But to an officious looking TV interviewer Sasano turned greenhouse gas theory on it's head.
According to UN science the greenhouse gas theory says more CO2 entering the atmosphere will warm the planet, while less CO2 is associated with cooling.
Gesturing to an indelible deep green hue streaked across the United States and Europe viewers were told, "in the high latitudes of the Northern hemisphere emissions were less than absorption levels."
Sasano proceeded to explain the color-coding system of the iconic maps showing where regions were either absorbing or emitting the trace atmospheric gas. Regions were alternately colored red (for high CO2 emission), white (low or neutral CO2 emissions) and green (no emissions: CO2 absorbers).
Bizarrely, the IBUKU maps prove exactly the opposite of all conventional expectations revealing that the least industrialized regions are the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases on the planet.
Yes, you read that correctly: the U.S. and western European nations are areas where CO2 levels are lowest. This new evidence defies the consensus view promoted by mainstream newspapers, such as the New York Times.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had long claimed that, "there is a consensus among scientists that manmade emissions of greenhouse gases, notably carbon dioxide (CO2), are harming global climate."
The Japanese satellite map shows regions colored the deepest leaf green (net absorbers of CO2) being predominantly those developed nations of Europe and North America; thus indicating built up environments absorbed more CO2 than they emitted into the atmosphere.
By contrast the bulk of the regions colored red (so-called 'carbon polluters') were in undeveloped, densely-forested equatorial regions of Africa and South America.
More HERE
Judith Curry blows the whistle
Scientist who said climate change sceptics had been proved wrong accused of hiding truth by colleague
It was hailed as the scientific study that ended the global warming debate once and for all – the research that, in the words of its director, ‘proved you should not be a sceptic, at least not any longer’.
Professor Richard Muller, of Berkeley University in California, and his colleagues from the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures project team (BEST) claimed to have shown that the planet has warmed by almost a degree centigrade since 1950 and is warming continually.
Published last week ahead of a major United Nations climate summit in Durban, South Africa, next month, their work was cited around the world as irrefutable evidence that only the most stringent measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions can save civilisation as we know it.
It was cited uncritically by, among others, reporters and commentators from the BBC, The Independent, The Guardian, The Economist and numerous media outlets in America.
The Washington Post said the BEST study had ‘settled the climate change debate’ and showed that anyone who remained a sceptic was committing a ‘cynical fraud’.
But today The Mail on Sunday can reveal that a leading member of Prof Muller’s team has accused him of trying to mislead the public by hiding the fact that BEST’s research shows global warming has stopped.
Prof Judith Curry, who chairs the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at America’s prestigious Georgia Institute of Technology, said that Prof Muller’s claim that he has proven global warming sceptics wrong was also a ‘huge mistake’, with no scientific basis.
Prof Curry is a distinguished climate researcher with more than 30 years experience and the second named co-author of the BEST project’s four research papers.
Her comments, in an exclusive interview with The Mail on Sunday, seem certain to ignite a furious academic row. She said this affair had to be compared to the notorious ‘Climategate’ scandal two years ago.
Like the scientists exposed then by leaked emails from East Anglia University’s Climatic Research Unit, her colleagues from the BEST project seem to be trying to ‘hide the decline’ in rates of global warming.
In fact, Prof Curry said, the project’s research data show there has been no increase in world temperatures since the end of the Nineties – a fact confirmed by a new analysis that The Mail on Sunday has obtained.
However, Prof Muller denied warming was at a standstill. ‘We see no evidence of it [global warming] having slowed down,’ he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. There was, he added, ‘no levelling off’.
A graph issued by the BEST project also suggests a continuing steep increase.
The graph that fooled the world
But a report to be published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation includes a graph of world average temperatures over the past ten years, drawn from the BEST project’s data and revealed on its website.
This graph shows that the trend of the last decade is absolutely flat, with no increase at all – though the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have carried on rising relentlessly.
‘This is nowhere near what the climate models were predicting,’ Prof Curry said. ‘Whatever it is that’s going on here, it doesn’t look like it’s being dominated by CO2.’
Prof Muller also wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal. It was here, under the headline ‘The case against global warming scepticism’, that he proclaimed ‘there were good reasons for doubt until now’.
This, too, went around the world, with The Economist, among many others, stating there was now ‘little room for doubt’.
Such claims left Prof Curry horrified. ‘Of course this isn’t the end of scepticism,’ she said. ‘To say that is the biggest mistake he [Prof Muller] has made. When I saw he was saying that I just thought, “Oh my God”.’
In fact, she added, in the wake of the unexpected global warming standstill, many climate scientists who had previously rejected sceptics’ arguments were now taking them much more seriously.
They were finally addressing questions such as the influence of clouds, natural temperature cycles and solar radiation – as they should have done, she said, a long time ago.
Yesterday Prof Muller insisted that neither his claims that there has not been a standstill, nor the graph, were misleading because the project had made its raw data available on its website, enabling others to draw their own graphs.
However, he admitted it was true that the BEST data suggested that world temperatures have not risen for about 13 years. But in his view, this might not be ‘statistically significant’, although, he added, it was equally possible that it was – a statement which left other scientists mystified. ‘I am baffled as to what he’s trying to do,’ Prof Curry said.
Prof Ross McKittrick, a climate statistics expert from Guelph University in Ontario, added: ‘You don’t look for statistically significant evidence of a standstill. ‘You look for statistically significant evidence of change.’
The BEST project, which has been lavishly funded, brings together experts from different fields from top American universities.
It was set up 18 months ago in an effort to devise a new and more accurate way of computing changes in world temperatures by using readings from some 39,000 weather stations on land, instead of adding sea temperatures as well.
Some scientists, Prof Muller included, believe that this should provide a more accurate indication of how the world is responding to carbon dioxide. The oceans, they argue, warm more slowly and this is why earlier global measurements which also cover the sea – such as those from the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University – have found no evidence of warming since the Nineties.
The usual way a high-profile project such as BEST would publish its results would be in a scientific journal, following a rigorous ‘peer review’ by other experts in the field.
The more eminent journals that publish climate research, such as Nature And Science, insist there must be no leaks to the media until this review is complete and if such leaks occur, they will automatically reject the research.
Earlier this year, the project completed four research papers.
As well as trends in world temperatures, they looked at the extent to which temperature readings can be distorted by urban ‘heat islands’ and the influence of long-term temperature cycles in the oceans. The papers were submitted to the Journal of Geophysical Research.
But although Prof Curry is the second named author of all four papers, Prof Muller failed to consult her before deciding to put them on the internet earlier this month, when the peer review process had barely started, and to issue a detailed press release at the same time.
He also briefed selected journalists individually. ‘It is not how I would have played it,’ Prof Curry said. ‘I was informed only when I got a group email. I think they have made errors and I distance myself from what they did.
‘It would have been smart to consult me.’ She said it was unfortunate that although the Journal of Geophysical Research had allowed Prof Muller to issue the papers, the reviewers were, under the journal’s policy, forbidden from public comment.
Prof McKittrick added: ‘The fact is that many of the people who are in a position to provide informed criticism of this work are currently bound by confidentiality agreements.
‘For the Berkeley team to have chosen this particular moment to launch a major international publicity blitz is a highly unethical sabotage of the peer review process.’
In Prof Curry’s view, two of the papers were not ready to be published, in part because they did not properly address the arguments of climate sceptics.
As for the graph disseminated to the media, she said: ‘This is “hide the decline” stuff. Our data show the pause, just as the other sets of data do. Muller is hiding the decline. ‘To say this is the end of scepticism is misleading, as is the statement that warming hasn’t paused. It is also misleading to say, as he has, that the issue of heat islands has been settled.’
Prof Muller defended his behaviour yesterday, saying that all he was doing was ‘returning to traditional peer review’, issuing draft papers to give the whole ‘climate community’ a chance to comment.
As for the press release, he claimed he was ‘not seeking publicity’, adding: ‘This is simply a way of getting the media to report this more accurately.’ He said his decision to publish was completely unrelated to the forthcoming United Nations climate conference. This, he said, was ‘irrelevant’, insisting that nothing could have been further from his mind than trying to influence it.
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Lying, cheating climate scientists caught lying, cheating again
By James Delingpole
Oh dear. I really didn't want my first blog post in a week to be yet another one about global bloody warming. Problem is, if those lying, cheating climate scientists will insist on going on lying and cheating what else can I do other than expose their lying and cheating?
The story so far: ten days ago a self-proclaimed "sceptical" climate scientist named Professor Richard Muller of Berkeley University, California, managed to grab himself some space in the Wall Street Journal (of all places) claiming that the case for global warming scepticism was over. Thanks to research from his Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures (BEST) project, Professor Muller stated confidently, we now know that the planet has warmed by almost one degree centigrade since 1950. What's more, he told the BBC's Today programme, there is no sign that this global warming has slowed down.
Cue mass jubilation from a number of media outlets which, perhaps, ought to have known better – among them, the Independent, the Guardian, The Economist and Forbes magazine. To give you an idea of their self-righteous indignation at the supposed ignorance of climate change deniers, here is the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson in full spate:
We know that the rise in temperatures over the past five decades is abrupt and very large. We know it is consistent with models developed by other climate researchers that posit greenhouse gas emissions — the burning of fossil fuels by humans — as the cause. And now we know, thanks to Muller, that those other scientists have been both careful and honorable in their work.
Nobody’s fudging the numbers. Nobody’s manipulating data to win research grants, as Perry claims, or making an undue fuss over a “naturally occurring” warm-up, as Bachmann alleges. Contrary to what Cain says, the science is real.
Problem is, Eugene, almost every word of those two paragraphs is plain wrong, and your smugness embarrassingly misplaced.
As you know, I had my doubts about Muller's findings from the start. I thought it was at best disingenuous of him to pose as a "sceptic" when there is little evidence of him ever having been one. As for his argument that the BEST project confounds sceptics by proving global warming exists – this was never more than a straw man.
Now, though, it seems that BEST is even worse than I thought. Here is what Muller claimed on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme:
In our data, which is only on the land we see no evidence of [global warming] having slowed down.
But this simply isn't true. Heaven forfend that a distinguished professor from Berkeley University should actually have been caught out telling a lie direct. No, clearly what has happened here is that Professor Muller has made the kind of mistake any self-respecting climate scientist could make: gone to press with some extravagant claims without having a smidgen of evidence to support them.
Here, to help the good professor out, is a chart produced by the Global Warming Policy Foundation's David Whitehouse. It was plotted from BEST's own figures. Note how the 10 year trend from 2001 to 2010 – in flat contradiction of Muller's claims – shows no warming whatsoever.
What's odd that BEST appears to have gone to great trouble – shades of "hide the decline", anyone? – to disguise this inconvenient truth. Here is a graph released by BEST:
The GWPF's David Whitehouse is not impressed:
Indeed Best seems to have worked hard to obscure it. They present data covering more almost 200 years is presented with a short x-axis and a stretched y-axis to accentuate the increase. The data is then smoothed using a ten year average which is ideally suited to removing the past five years of the past decade and mix the earlier standstill years with years when there was an increase. This is an ideal formula for suppressing the past decade’s data.
Muller's colleague Professor Judith Curry – who besides being a BEST co-author chairs the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at America’s prestigious Georgia Institute of Technology – is even less impressed.
There is no scientific basis for saying that warming hasn’t stopped,’ she said. ‘To say that there is detracts from the credibility of the data, which is very unfortunate.’
SOURCE
Brrr…the Troposphere Is Ignoring Your SUV
For those tracking the daily global temperature updates at the Discover website, you might have noticed the continuing drop this month in global temperatures. The mid-tropospheric AMSU channels are showing even cooler temperatures than we had at this date with the last (2008) La Nina. The following screen shot is for AMSU channel 6.
A check of the lower stratospheric channels (9, 10) suggests this is not a stratospheric effect bleeding over into the tropospheric channels.
With the current (and forecast to continue) stormy pattern over the U.S., I have to wonder whether the atmosphere is currently in a destabilized state. I doubt that surface temperatures anomalies are as anomalously low as the mid-troposphere temperatures are running, which in combination with anomalously cold mid- and upper-tropospheric temperatures means there is extra energy available for storms. (Since AMSR-E failed in early October, our sea surface temperature plot is no longer showing current data, so I have no easy way to check surface temperatures.)
Of course, this too shall pass. I just thought it was an interesting curiosity during a time when some pundits are claiming global warming is “accelerating”. Apparently, they are still stuck in the last millennium.
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Shale gas in Britain
Beneath swathes of the UK lie billions of pounds worth of shale gas. And now we can get to it. David Rose reports on how the recession (and wind turbines) may soon be just a bad memory
Locked within the fissures inside that rock is an immense quantity of natural gas
Locked within the fissures inside that rock is an immense quantity of natural gas - virtually pure, unadulterated methane, of a quality so high it could be pumped direct to domestic and industrial users
Here are two visions of the future.
The first one lies at the end of a muddy track in the village of Banks, a 20-minute drive from Preston, Lancashire. It consists of a derrick about 60ft high, a few temporary buildings, a generator and some specialist machinery in a fenced square compound.
Powering the derrick and the drill at its centre is an eerily quiet electric motor. Today, on the first Friday of October, the bit it turns at the end of the drill pipe lies about a mile beneath our feet, boring steadily downwards at a rate of up to 500ft a day, depending on the hardness of the strata. It’s heading for a thick deposit of carboniferous shale, a rock made from the compressed mud which lay on a prehistoric seabed more than 300 million years ago, its upper edge some 7,500ft below the dark green fields of ripening cauliflower that surround the compound.
Locked within the fissures inside that rock is an immense quantity of natural gas – virtually pure, unadulterated methane, of a quality so high it could be pumped direct to domestic and industrial users, and to electricity generating stations.
Once the drill reaches the shale, the gas is released by a process known as ‘fracking’ – hydraulic fracturing, the pumping of a mixture of water and sand to widen the fissures and keep them open. Normally, you only have to frack an area once: after that, the gas tap stays open.
‘The installation you see here is only temporary,’ says Eric Vaughan, a veteran of drilling for gas from shale in America and the chief operating officer at Cuadrilla, the firm that runs the site.
‘If we go into production, we’d have up to ten wells radiating horizontally for distances of up to six miles from the bottom of this hole – what we call a pad. The derrick would be gone. All that would be left would be a bunch of tanks and a small building at the wellhead. There’d be miles between each pad. If you were standing here, you’d be lucky to spot another one.’
Drilling through more than 8,000ft of rock at a test-drilling site in Lancashire
Drilling through more than 8,000ft of rock at a test-drilling site in Lancashire. It is no exaggeration to state that shale gas could transform the prospects for the entire British economy
Cuadrilla, an independent British company formed in 2007 whose backers include the former BP chairman Lord Browne, was awarded gas-exploration rights to a rectangular 750-square-mile licence area, running east from Fleetwood on Morecambe Bay to the Forest of Bowland, and down to a line near Southport.
According to Peter Turner, Cuadrilla’s geologist, this one shale ‘sub-basin’ contains about 200 trillion cubic feet of gas.
Even if only ten per cent turns out to be commercially recoverable this would still be enough to meet Britain’s gas supply needs for around 15 years. In time it may be enough to offset the rapid decline in gas from the North Sea, and to remove any need for imports.
Cuadrilla’s forecast, based on analysis at two test sites and results from earlier ‘dry’ holes made by firms which were looking for conventional oil and gas, is scientific and credible, says Nigel Smith of the British Geological Survey. But it is also only the beginning.
‘The Lancashire licence area is just one part of a shale formation of a similar type that stretches across the Pennines to Lincolnshire, north through to Yorkshire, then up to Teesside and Northumbria. It’s also found in the Scottish Midlands valley,’ says Smith.
Still more lies beneath South Wales, near Bristol, and in Somerset.
‘There’s a huge amount more, at least four times as much, offshore,’ he adds.
It is no exaggeration to state that shale gas could transform the prospects for the entire British economy – turning the country into a major energy exporter for many decades, reducing costs to consumers, and attracting new industry through abundant cheap power.
‘We don’t want any subsidies. This is a sustainable business’, says Vaughan.
Shale gas production could create thousands of jobs directly, and provide many billions in tax revenue – as it is already doing in Texas, Pennsylvania and several other states in America.
It could also fill the looming black hole in Britain’s electricity generating capacity, the result of old coal and nuclear power stations being decommissioned: burnt in modern ‘combined cycle’ plants, shale gas plants would emit only 37 per cent of the carbon dioxide produced by their coal- or oil-fired predecessors.
The drill as seen from the surrounding cauliflower field
The drill as seen from the surrounding cauliflower field. Shale gas production could create thousands of jobs directly, and provide many billions in tax revenue
One such plant is currently being built at a cost of £500 million at Hoo St Werburgh in Kent. It will produce 1,000MW, enough to power a quarter of the homes in London.
The second vision is taking shape at the end of the Thames Estuary, where the foundations are being laid for the 217 turbines of the London Array, the world’s biggest offshore wind farm.
Covering 90 square miles, this too will have the capacity to generate 1GW (one billion watts). The turbines’ construction has been priced at £2 billion, four times as much as the Kentish gas plant, although this does not include the cost – perhaps a further £500 million – of connecting them to the National Grid, via 300 miles of undersea high-voltage cables.
Without the labyrinthine system of ‘green’ taxes and Government subsidies known as the Renewables Obligation, which is already adding an estimated £100 to the cost of every British household’s electricity bill, and an average 20 per cent to the charges paid by businesses, the wind farm could never be built, because it would be hopelessly uneconomic.
As well as being more expensive, the turbines will not last nearly as long: about 20 years, half the time of the gas-fired power station.
A gas plant, moreover, will produce electricity 24 hours day; the turbines won’t. British windmills can be expected to generate power only 27 per cent of the time. That figure falls to just ten per cent in the calm conditions of a bitter Arctic high, such as that which covered the entire UK, causing record low temperatures, for several weeks last December.
However, this is the vision supported by many environmentalists and the Liberal Democrat Energy and Climate Change Secretary Chris Huhne. And there is a large and vociferous body of opinion that wants Lancashire’s gas to stay in the ground – forever.
So who’s right?
For an answer we need to look at what has happened in the United States. In the past five years shale gas production there has risen from one per cent to 20 per cent, while prices have fallen dramatically. Shale gas fields, among them the booming Marcellus field under Pennsylvania and New York states have brought employment, tax income and wealth, as well as reducing the need for energy imports.
Overall, the effect of the discovery of an estimated 3,000 trillion cubic feet of gas from shale is transforming the U.S. energy economy, a development with important geopolitical consequences.
The Congressional Research Service recently estimated that America now has the biggest fossil fuel reserves in the world – more than Saudi Arabia, Iraq or China. The wholesale price of gas has roughly halved, to about $6 per thousand cubic feet – against $10.5 in Britain. As recently as 2003, America was building port facilities to cope with gas imports. They may now be used to send gas from shale abroad. And the same could happen here.
A few highly publicised incidents have caused concern among some environmental groups in the U.S., though.
‘Every method of producing energy carries risks,’ comments Dr Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF).
Coal mines trap and kill workers; oil rigs blow up; nuclear plants succumb to tsunamis.
In Norway, wind farm blades have wiped out whole colonies of Europe’s largest bird of prey, the white-tailed eagle, and the giant offshore farms now planned – some of which will be 600ft high – may be still more devastating to avian life. Set against this, how do the risks of shale fracking compare?
One of the most controversial issues has been the use of chemicals in the ‘fracking fluid’, the water used to open the fissures in the shale, about a third of which will eventually flow back up the well to the surface.
Some U.S. firms have been reluctant to disclose the substances used, inviting the charge that underground aquifers and rivers may become polluted. In one notorious incident in the town of Dimock, Pennsylvania, in the heart of the Marcellus field, fracking fluid leaked into several households’ private wells.
‘But that was because the company wasn’t using proper pipe lining,’ says Chris Carney, who has lived in Dimock for most of his life and until last year represented the town and surrounding district as a Democratic member of the U.S Congress.
‘There was a row of houses along one of the local roads which had their wells polluted, so I guess they’re having to get water from somewhere else. But if it’s done right, fracking has little impact.’
In contrast to the leaky well in Dimock, Cuadrilla’s holes in Lancashire come with a thick, multiple-layer cement lining.
‘In engineering terms, you could say that’s overkill,’ says Cuadrilla’s Eric Vaughan.
A recent study by Duke University shows that in wells built to a similar standard, no leaks of water or gas have taken place.
As for the additive to the fracking fluid, Vaughan says, ‘We use only one chemical – 0.4 gallons per 1,000 gallons of water of polyacrylamide, a substance which makes water less sticky’.
Classed officially as a ‘non-hazardous chemical’, this is also used in drinking-water treatment plants and soft contact lenses. But in Lancashire, he insists, the fluid will not leak. The local drinking water aquifers lie more than 7,000ft above the level where fracking would take place.
More HERE
Obama, Liberals, And Destructive Energy “Policies”
“Energy independence.” Doesn’t that sound like a great idea? Unfortunately, in the era of Barack Obama the goal of enabling the United States to meet its own energy needs has been subverted by some very destructive politics.
First, the term “energy independence” has been confused with the term “green energy.” While some people use the two expressions synonymously, the Obama Administration has gradually phased-out references to “energy independence” and moved towards “green energy” references exclusively.
This language shift from the Obama Administration raises some important questions: are we no longer seeking to become “energy independent?” And if we are still seeking “energy independence,” what is it, exactly, that we are trying to become independent from?
Since the days of the Nixon presidency most Americans have recognized the many problems associated with being dependent on foreign oil suppliers. And it was nearly six years ago when George W. Bush became the first U.S. President to proclaim that “America is addicted to oil.”
But now President Barack Obama seems to have determined that our problem isn’t so much “foreign oil,” but oil itself. His Administration has sought to force the nation away from consuming all types of oil – both foreign and domestic –and to move us in the direction of his environmentally preferred “green” energy sources.
Unfortunately, the President has approached energy policy just as he approaches most everything else – with the naïve assumption that as long as lots of government programs and mandates are established, the agenda will be accomplished and all will go well. Thus billions of our tax dollars have been handed-out in “loans” and “grants” to everything from solar panel manufacturers to electric car makers in Europe, while nearly all of the recipients have been “personal friends” of the President and people who are working for his re-election.
Further complicating things is the fact that since taking office in 2009, President Barack Obama has insisted on co-mingling our nation’s need for new energy resources, with our nation’s more immediate need to expand the employment sector of the economy. Thus we have become accustomed to President Obama’s concept of “green jobs” - which is a politically driven attempt to collapse two important and separate policy agendas in to one.
But just because Barack Obama says “let there be green energy jobs,” doesn’t mean that jobs will be created (and what exactly constitutes a “green job,” anyway?). Again the President’s undying confidence in the his power to create new realities has been obliterated by the fact that technological breakthroughs take time, involve “trial and error,” and require lots of “research and development” – none of which necessarily expedites job creation.
As if all this isn’t confounding enough, liberal activist groups across the U.S. have for the past year been taking direct aim at a private sector effort to reduce America’s dependence on oil from the Middle East, and other global regions. The Kearl Oil Sands project is a North American oil drilling effort in the Canadian Province of Alberta, and promises job creation for both Canada and the U.S. – but American liberals seem intent on destroying the project.
In the works since 1997, the project kicked-in to high gear twelve months ago with both the Conoco Phillips and Exxon-Mobil corporations delivering oil drilling equipment to Lewiston, a tiny inland port in northern Idaho that is accessible to small vessels from the Pacific Ocean. From there the drilling equipment gets trucked eastward into Montana, then north in to Alberta, where it is set up in preparation for what promises to be a robust new oil resource right here on our own continent.
The project has already created economic opportunity in the Mountain West states. Yet liberal activists have sought to hinder the plan at every turn.
For over a year, radical environmentalists have been filing law suits in both Montana and Idaho courts to try to prevent the big rig trucks from hauling the oil drilling equipment, and In some cases they have gathered on the highways to block the traffic - literally, physically, standing on the roads and at times laying-down on the roads - to prevent the trucks from rolling.
It does not matter that real "everyday" American men and women -moms and dads, sons and daughters, husband and wives - provide themselves and their dependents with food, healthcare, and housing by operating trucks and truck stops. The trucks are “aiding and abetting” the evil oil industry, so far as the liberal activists are concerned, so they have sought to do everything imaginable to deter the effort.
Fortunately the Kearl Oil Sands project has been moving forward, but not without costly delays, expensive legal fees, and near-constant opposition, as the companies are forced to fight in court just to keep the trucks rolling on Montana and Idaho interstates.
As the U.S. remains dependent and vulnerable to foreign oil barons, liberal Americans seem intent on holding us hostage to the status quo. Real “independence” will begin when we vote ourselves a “regime change” in 2012.
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Jim Hansen and his twin
