Corporate Polluters Ate My Brain

[Dr Opinion]

Thinking of Earthday...

A search on google for "guilty of crimes against planet earth" will reveal a wealth of information about Bush's pro-pollution activities. The guy has nominated heavyweight psychos to habitat-caretaker posts - people who publicly recommend the selling of pristine American habitats to corporate polluters for gutting... Bush clearly does not subscribe to the notion of having opposing voices in key posts "to keep him honest". But perhaps, given Enron and possibly Taliban-Conoil this is a moot point...

[This message has been edited by Dr Opinion (edited 23-04-2002).]

[Bruno]

So, most governments ``appoint opposing voices'' to keep themselves honest?

[Dr Opinion]

Fair point... but the guys he's nominated are *really* bad....

[Bruno]

I agree. Gail Norton is particularly so. Fortunately, the Senate ditched his proposal for more oil exploration in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge this week.

[Dr Opinion]

Wow, I'd not read that... a nice piece of news. That, perhaps, is the strength of The Union, that even if the badguys make a grab for it, power is distributed such that common sense often prevails?  

Actually, there seems to be an undertone of Congressional suspicion about the role of the Energy Lobby in the current Administration. Eyeballs help keep people honest.  

[Dodgy]

He's got to get through Congress first though. They recently voted against Bush plan for oil exploration in Artic.

Good to know that someone, somwhere has some sense.

[maxthecat]

Just to add a little perspective, here are a few excerpts from an editorial in the Sacramento Bee:

Although there is drilling for oil and gas in 29 wildlife refuges, the most fiercely contested question about the energy bill was about drilling on one-hundredth of 1 percent of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which is described, by people more passionately devoted to preserving it than visiting it, as "pristine." Yes, and the moon's surface is pristine. Except ANWR is less so, because the moon does not have -- as ANWR's coastal plain, where the drilling would have occurred, does -- roads, military installations, an airstrip, a school, houses, stores.

ANWR could produce at least 1.3 million barrels a day for 25 years, almost what we import from Saudi Arabia. The House of Representatives voted for drilling, but it lost in the Senate, which is the habitat of Democratic presidential candidates who burnish their environmental credentials by jumping through the hoop of opposition to ANWR drilling.

Some senators said that drilling would interfere with the reproduction of caribou. However, the herds have tripled in the three decades since opponents of the Trans- Alaska Pipeline said it would interfere with the caribou's reproduction. Many caribou even cluster around the heated pipeline, perhaps just for warmth, perhaps to do things from which a gentleman would avert his gaze.

Many opponents of ANWR drilling favor mandating higher fuel-efficiency for cars and trucks, which means lighter and less-safe vehicles. The National Academy of Sciences says existing standards contribute to 1,300 to 2,600 deaths -- and 10 times that many serious injuries -- every year. Nevertheless, stricter standards are favored by many people who were scandalized when President Bush temporarily suspended implementation of new regulations requiring even more reduction of arsenic in water. The Environmental Protection Agency estimated the regulations might save 28 lives a year.

In the autumn of 2000 the price of gasoline went up a bit, an inconvenience for candidate Al Gore, so the Clinton administration, which felt the pain of a nation that has a low pain threshold when in the proximity of gasoline pumps, pumped oil out of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which exists to protect the nation against major interruptions of supply, not to knock a few nickels off the price of gasoline during a presidential election

[Dr Opinion]

Thats the funniest thing I've heard for ages! Maybe everyone should drive a tank, to reduce road injuries? How absurd. The problem is not that people are driving smaller more efficient cars that are somehow dangerous! It's that insecure people go out and buy huge off-roaders that with gigantic V8s - the engine block alone will crush a normal car on impact! If you really want to increase safety, make people who drive huge stupid off-road vehicles on the street take extra driving lessons, just like truck drivers have to.

The oil lobby is huge, powerful and distubing in the States. Actively opposed to alternative energy sources, they've shown repeatedly that they'll buy anyone, do anything, to keep the smog pumping out.

Thus, we have the Bush/Taliban/Oil fiasco. There is a powerful suggestion that 9/11 was a direct response to the ignorant meddling of Cheney and Bush in the region, entirely at the whim of their handlers, the Oil Lobby. Bush is so much a pawn of Oil interests that it's almost scandalous. There's some interesting stuff on the web if you care, salon especially has some interesting editorial. Try this for starters: http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/11/19/bush_oil/index.html
Or this: http://www.salon.com/politics/feature/2002/02/08/forbidden/

[Dr Opinion]

Phil: Wow... the EIA document is a fascinating summary of the chronology... holy cow...  

[maxthecat]

You guys missed my point,

It's that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is in no way a special case, so why the hysterical hypocrisy from environmental lobbyists?

Also, yes, the U.S.A. comprises only 5% of the world's population, and people often point out that it consumes well over 5% of the world's energy.  True.  But more pertinent to the energy equation is that it produces much, much, more than 5% of the world's wealth.  

And, one shouldn't confuse the sharing of political/economic philosophies with ulterior motives.

P.S.  Dr. Opinion,

We could take it to the opposite extreme and just go back to the horse and buggy with a speed limit of 5 mph.  We'd save hundreds of thousands of lives each year and zillions of barrels of oil.  Any takers?

[This message has been edited by maxthecat (edited 04-05-2002).]

[Dr Opinion]

> You guys missed my point

With all due respect, you didn't have a point. You posted excerpts from an apparently rambling article that drifted from an attempt to justify destroying a national wildlife park based on the fact that communities there already had some limitied infrastructure (?), on to a bizarre suggestion that people who opposed drilling in the reserve were jumping through a hoop, whereas grovelling for soft money at the feet of multinational polluters was in some way a heroic gesture. The article then indulged in a series of increasingly bizarre segues.

First we get some commentary about caribou - as if that species was in some way the predominant issue in the general ecological disaster proposed by Bush/Oil.

Next, we're treated to the unashamedly crude "Many opponents of ANWR drilling favor...", apparently attempting to characterize the entire population of people who oppose drilling in pristine wildlife parks as a group of dangerous drivers who favor small, deadly vehicles, getting in the way of good honest Americans in their 4x4s.

We jump madly into something unrelated concerning water controls, and finally come to a shuddering halt with an equally irrelevant discussion about the Liberals use of oil reserves prior to the election to get points.

Did I miss something?  

Now, if your point truely was intended to be "that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is in no way a special case", well, I'd simply say two wrongs don't make a right. Just because money-grabbers have destroyed other wilderness areas hardly suggests that we just write them all off and say to hell with it???

And horses and buggies are not so bad, really, max.   In all seriousness, big cars are fun, but unnecessary. It seems that some folks attempt to justify the ecological damage that big cars do on a national and global level simply because they personally like them and they are fun to drive...  

[maxthecat]

SirPhil, Dr. O,

Yes, I'd let my children swim in the Gulf of Mexico.  I've swum in the Gulf of Mexico.  Of course, that doesn't mean that evry single square inch of it is suitable for swimming.  I've spent a lot of my life at Santa Monica beach.  In the 50s they dumped DDT in the bay.  LA's urban runoff ends up in Santa Monica Bay.  (I don't swim near the storm drain outlets, especially after it has rained, just as the signs advise.)  Would I prefer it to be pristine?  Of course.  But that's life in the big city, and that third eye did eventually go away (cosmetically unappealing as it was, it did prove handy in various situations).

What was my point?  Cost/benefit ratios.  Would some degradation occur with drilling?  Yes, but not nearly enough to justify not drilling, and certainly nowhere near the point of "destroying" the ANWR.  As the editorial said, drilling is now taking place in 29 U.S. wildlife refuges, and you can be assuresd that if even one of them were anywhere in the vicinity of being remotely threatened with "destruction," you'd be hearing about it night and day.

Regardless, cleaner alternative energy sources are, and will continue to be developed (I think the new hybrid cars are exciting, and fuel cell technology is starting to get some big backers).

Dependence on oil will be a faint memory long before the demise of the earth.  It is a finite, non-renewable energy resource.  It will never be completely depleted, just to the point where it doesn't pay for the trouble anymore (The best analogy I've read is that of being in a room, waist-deep in pistachio nuts.  As you eat the nuts and discard the shells, it becomes increasingly more and more difficult to find shells with the nuts inside.  They're there, but not worth the effort.)

The reason I excerpted the paragraph on the 2000 election was to highlight Clinton/Gore's hypocrisy.  Bush has never made any bones about his pro-business philosophy.  You know what you're getting.  Gore, on the other hand, wrote the laughable, "Earth in the Balance."  A staunch environmentalist who, along with his partner, used the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to make the price of gasoline fall !!!  We all know about price and demand.

While I'm on Gore, it's an often-forgotten footnote, that his environmental mentor at Harvard, Roger Revelle, also known as "the father of global warming"  said shortly before his death that "the scientific base for greenhouse warming is too uncertain to justify drastic action.  There is little risk in delaying policy responses."

A remarkable quote from a man who'd been warning of impending doom since the 1950s.  Of course, maybe he had in mind the doomsday hysteria of the 1970s when scientists were warning of an imminent ice age.    Stephen Schneider, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, proposed blanketing the arctic ice with soot to increase the amount of solar radiation absorbed, to counteract the coming global cooling.  In his book (also laughable) he asked if we could really afford the risk of doing nothing, while he insisted that governments act.

Thank God we did nothing.

Anyways, I'll be too busy to post for the next couple of weeks, (and I catch hell everytime my wife catches me on this site), so I'll just agree to disagree, respectfully, of course.  In case anybody thinks me pro-pollution, well, I did get a master's in landscape architecture in the most "sustainability" conscious program in the country.  I'm not really completely in either camp -- I just call each case as I see it.  And I believe the ANWR case was one whre the benefits would have been high, and the costs minimal.

With affection,

Maxthecat.

P.S.  As far as I'm concerned, horses are only good for betting on.

[Dr Opinion]

> ... waist-deep in pistachio nuts ...

Now that's pretty funny.  

I'll have to remember that analogy.