All Posts Tagged With: "Planet"
Nancy, Please Let Us Save the Planet, Let Someone Else Drill
Our ugly duck energy approach has a bag over its head as exhibited when Nancy (Queen Nancy) edicts to Politico that she “is trying to save the planet”. Repeat “trying to save the planet”.
How can she be so politically blinded to the consequences of our disregard for talking care and providing for our own energy needs rather than foisting it on others to meet our energy needs. Does she live in a cave with a bag over her head too? Please take time to read this article in it’s entirely, for we are on a path to destroy the earth by not drilling for oil and it is past time for the large percentage of thinking and concerned citizens to be heard loudly, firmly and respectfully.
Pelosi: Save the Planet, Let someone Else Drill
Friday, August 1, 2008; Page A17 Washington Post
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi opposes lifting the moratorium on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and on the Outer Continental Shelf. She won’t even allow it to come to a vote. With $4 gas having massively shifted public opinion in favor of domestic production, she wants to protect her Democratic members from having to cast an anti-drilling election-year vote. Moreover, given the public mood, she might even lose. This cannot be permitted. Why? Because, as she explained to Politico: “I’m trying to save the planet; I’m trying to save the planet.”
A lovely sentiment. But has Pelosi actually thought through the moratorium’s effects on the planet? Consider: 25 years ago, nearly 60 percent of U.S. petroleum was produced domestically. Today it’s 25 percent. From its peak in 1970, U.S. production has declined a staggering 47 percent. The world consumes 86 million barrels a day, the United States, roughly 20 million. We need the stuff to run our cars and planes and economy. Where does it come from?
Places such as Nigeria, where chronic corruption, environmental neglect and the resulting unrest and instability lead to pipeline explosions, oil spills and illegal siphoning by the poverty-stricken population — which leads to more spills and explosions. Just this week, two Royal Dutch Shell pipelines had to be shut down because bombings by local militants were causing leaks into the ground.
Compare the Niger Delta to the Gulf of Mexico, where deep-sea U.S. oilrigs withstood Hurricanes Katrina and Rita without a single undersea well suffering a significant spill.
The United States has the highest technology to ensure the safest drilling. Today, directional drilling — essentially drilling down, then sideways — allows access to oil that in 1970 would have required a surface footprint more than three times as large. Additionally, the United States has one of the most extensive and least corrupt regulatory systems on the planet.
Does Pelosi imagine that with so much of America declared off-limits, the planet is less injured as drilling shifts to Kazakhstan and Venezuela and Equatorial Guinea? That Russia will be more environmentally scrupulous than we in drilling in its Arctic?
The net environmental effect of Pelosi’s no-drilling willfulness is negative. Outsourcing U.S. oil production does nothing to lessen worldwide environmental despoliation. It simply exports it to more corrupt, less efficient, more unstable parts of the world — thereby increasing net planetary damage.
Democrats want no oil from the American OCS or ANWR. But of course they do want more oil. From OPEC. From where Americans don’t vote. From places Democratic legislators can’t see. On May 13 Sen. Chuck Schumer — deeply committed to saving just those pieces of the planet that might have huge reserves of American oil — demanded that the Saudis increase production by a million barrels a day. It doesn’t occur to him that by eschewing the slightest disturbance of the mating habits of the Arctic caribou, he is calling for the further exploitation of the pristine deserts of Arabia. In the name of the planet, mind you.
The other panacea, yesterday’s rage, is biofuels: We can’t drill our way out of the crisis, it seems, but we can greenly grow our way out. By now, however, it is blindingly obvious even to Democrats that biofuels are a devastating force for environmental degradation. It has led to the rape of “lungs of the world” rain forests in Indonesia and Brazil as huge tracts have been destroyed to make room for palm oil and sugar plantations.
Here in the United States, one out of every three ears of corn is stuffed into a gas tank (by way of ethanol), causing not just food shortages abroad and high prices at home but intensive increases in farming, with all of the attendant environmental problems (soil erosion, insecticide pollution, water consumption, etc.).
This to prevent drilling on an area in the Arctic one-sixth the size of Dulles Airport that leaves undisturbed a refuge one-third the size of Britain.
There are a dizzying number of economic and national security arguments for drilling at home: a $700 billion oil balance-of-payments deficit, a gas tax (equivalent) levied on the paychecks of American workers and poured into the treasuries of enemy and terror-supporting regimes, growing dependence on unstable states of the Persian Gulf and Caspian basin. Pelosi and the Democrats stand athwart, shouting: We don’t care. We come to save the planet!
They seem blissfully unaware that the argument for their drill-there-not-here policy collapses on its own environmental terms.
There’s One Less Malodorous Person On The Planet
“I’ve been portrayed as a caveman by some. That’s not true. I’m a conservative progressive, and that means I think all men are equal, be they slants, beaners, or niggers.”
-Jesse Helms to the North Carolina Progressive, Feb. 6, 1985
Death is a funny thing. People tend to forget someone’s horrific behavior once they’ve kicked the bucket. By the time Tricky died, his Watergate transgressions were all but forgotten. I’ve been reading obituaries about Jesse Helms since his July 4th death. Some of them might make you think he was an admirable person. While my mother told me never to speak ill of the dead, I think she’d make an exception in this case. The fact is that Jesse Helms was one of the most malodorous people on the planet, a racist bigot and a virulent homophobe. I’m always mystified when people like Helms are spoken of as ‘religious’ or ‘God fearing.’ I’m not sure where Helms passed on to, but I have a difficult time believing he’s sitting at the right hand of God.
In a 52-year career, Helms was often portrayed as a champion of the poor and common man. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Helms didn’t mind big spending big government as long as the money was going to those who already had plenty. He had no problem bailing out savings and loan associations, or investing billions of dollars in bloated defense projects. Contrary to his image, he slashed assistance for school lunches for the poor, medical care for disabled people and prescription drugs for the elderly.
In spite of serving five terms (from 1973 to 2003), Helms was a polarizing figure in North Carolina and national politics. The largest percentage he took in any election was just 54.5%. He often neglected his home state. During Helms’ five terms, only four states received less per capita in federal funds than North Carolina. North Carolina ranked 42nd in release of cancer-causing toxins; 43rd in manufacturing wages; and 44th in infant mortality.
According to those who ran against him, he got those that did not like him to vote for him because he tapped into the fears of white, middle-class Americans afraid of their country being taken over by liberals. “Just think about it,” he’d say, “homosexuals, lesbians — disgusting people — marching in our streets, demanding all sorts of things including the right to marry each other and the right to adopt children. How do you like that?”
Here are some other interesting realities about Helms:
- He had a virulent hatred of Castro, but close ties to and was a sponsor of the right-wing Salvadoran Nationalist Republican Alliance and its leader, Roberto D’Aubuisson. When it was brought to Helms’ attention that D’Aubuisson ran death squads and murdered civilians, he responded, “All I know is that D’Aubuisson is a free enterprise man and deeply religious.
- Likewise, he was a supporter of Chilean dictator (and 30th president) Augusto Pinochet. As Commander-in-Chief of the Chilean army, Pinochet engineered the overthrow of President Salvador Allende. More than 3,200 were killed and 80,000 detained without trials and subjected to torture. When he died in December of 2006, there were still 300 criminal charges pending against him.
- Helms was opposed to federal financing of AIDS research and treatment. He opposed the Kennedy-Hatch AIDS bill of 1988 stating, “There is not one single case of AIDS in this country that cannot be traced in origin to sodomy.”
- After 12-year-old Ryan White died of AIDS in 1990, his mother went to Capitol Hill to speak to 23 legislators on behalf of people with AIDS and to gain support for the Ryan White Care Act. Helms refused to speak with her, even ignoring her completely while he rode in an elevator with her. In spite of his opposition, the legislation passed in 1990.
- When the Ryan White Care Act came up for refunding in 1995, Helms again tried to defeat it, stating that AIDS victims contracted the disease thorough “deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct.”
- Helms served as an aid in the 1950 North Carolina Republican candidate Willis Smith who was running against Frank Graham. In this capacity, he helped to create attack ads against Graham. One read, “White people wake up before it’s too late. Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races.”
To those he harmed, there was nothing admirable about Jesse Helms. His political positions and legislative maneuvers were steeped in discrimination, racism and homophobia. His passing represents one collective sigh of relief in the minds of all fair-minded Americans.