T

he Arctic holds about a tenth of the world’s known oil and natural gas reserves – and it’s not clear what nation owns which offshore reserves because ownership is based on where the edge of the continental shelf is, and we don’t have a clear picture of undersea topography there.

As a result, the US, Russia, Canada, Denmark, Norway, China and even South Korea, Singapore and Japanare all making forays into the region to establish drilling rights – rights that are becoming more valuable as ice-free navigation becomes possible in some parts of the Arctic.  So it would make good sense, wouldn’t it, for the US to establish operations wherever it can as quickly as it can, give a reasonable regulatory regimen?

And we would be doing just that, were it not for the Center for Biological Depravity Diversity.  The Washington Times reports today that the Center’s endless and aggressive litigation has brought much of the exploration by US companies to a halt:

Richard Ranger, senior policy adviser at the American Petroleum Institute, an industry lobbying group, said direct legal challenges are also slowing exploration and production off Alaska’s coast.

The Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit conservation group, is the principal party behind Arctic litigation, Mr. Ranger said. The group has filed lawsuits with the federal Minerals Management Service to halt the issuing of air quality permits to Royal Dutch Shell, asserting, according to the center’s Web site, that the oil giant has not adequately assessed how exploratory drilling would affect wildlife and native populations.

Shell announced earlier this week that it was withdrawing its 2007-2009 drilling plan in the Beaufort Sea and would submit a new plan for 2010. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in San Francisco blocked the company from oil drilling in July 2007.

The new lawsuits come on the heels of the Center’s central effort in getting the polar bear listed, a ridiculous, political contortion of the Endangered Species Act that should have been stopped in its tracks by the Bush Administration, but wasn’t, in one of Bush’s most signficiant domestic failures.  Building on that success, the Center is actively pursuing listings of numerous ice-dependent seals,  – the ribbon, bearded, spotted, and ringed seals – making similar arguments that worked well with its polar bear litigation strategy:

In addition to loss of its sea-ice habitat from global warming, the ribbon seal faces threats from oil and gas development in its habitat, and the growth of shipping in the increasingly ice-free Arctic. Last month, important summer feeding areas for the ribbon seal in the Chukchi Sea were leased for oil development, while seismic surveys are planned for the area this summer.

And what is the answer to these seals’ plight?  Hint: It’s not to just let them survive, as they have survived previous warming spells that melted the Arctic ice. No, we have to attack industry, the economy and the American way of life to save the seals:

“With rapid action to reduce carbon dioxide, methane, and black carbon emissions, combined with a moratorium on new oil-and-gas development and shipping routes in the Arctic, we can still save the ribbon seal, the polar bear, and the entire Arctic ecosystem,” said Brendan Cummings, oceans program director for the Center. “But the window of opportunity to act is closing rapidly. Endangered Species Act protection for the ribbon seal and other Arctic species will provide important tools to protect these species and their fragile habitat in the Arctic.”

Going after multiple seal listings at the same time is the same strategy that has worked so well for the Center in Central California, where its Delta smelt listing, which has slashed water deliveries and spiked unemployment in some areas to 40 percent, has been followed by similarly disruptive listings of the long-finned smelt and Delta-dependent salmon species.

The new litigation’s focus on air quality shows how opportunistically the Center bends environmental laws and regulations to their favor. Air quality is an area of easy pickings since the baseline arctic air is unusually clean. Regulations written for the Lower 50 are easy to exploit there, and exploit they have.

The Center takes no prisoners. It doesn’t believe in compromise. It certainly does not believe in an economically robust, expansive America. Its founder has made it clear he sees his purpose as the depopulaiton of the West. The Center’s mission obviously has grown, and its actions in the Arctic not only could lead to greater dependence on foreign oil, but also, tragically, could lead to foreign ownership of drilling sites that are rightfully ours.

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O

K, gang, let’s start prepping for the Senate showdown and, hopefully, the crashing and oh- so- carbon- emitting burning of the cap and tax lunacy.  Let’s start in a chilly place that by rights should be one of the leading proponents of global warming.  Lord knows, the weather certainly could stand to get a wee bit warmer in Scotland.

But for reasons unfathomable by rational minds, Scotland has decided its proper role as a nation is to lead the lemmings off the global warming cliff.  It hails itself, claiming it has the world’s most ambitious greenhouse gas emissions reductions goals – a 42 percent reduction by 2020 and a mind-numbingly stupid 80 percent slash by 2050. Just listen to Scotland’s Climate Minister (Climate Minister?! He should be filed on the spot! Have you seen Scotland’s climate? Disgusting!) says about it all:

Scotland can be proud of this bill, the most ambitious and comprehensive piece of climate change legislation anywhere in the world. As a country, we are leading global action and expect others to follow our lead as we look to the international summit in Copenhagen this December.

I bet it’s going to be bone-chillingly cold in Copenhagen this December – big global warming confab or not.

I bring all this up because in Scotland’s goals we see what’s ahead for a cap and tax America.

Get ready for hefty fines if your household doesn’t do its part. And heftier fines if your business doesn’t. That’s now the rule in Scotland.

Prepare yourself for the Greenshirts busting into your house in search of plastic bags, or forcing your corporation to drop its theft-resistant packaging for something more easy to steal. OK, they’re not yet breaking down doors in Scotland, but they are attacking plastic bags as heinous, anti-social tools of destruction, only slightly more acceptable than the dreaded product packaging.

To incentivize thrifty Scots to part with some of their cash to reduce their carbon footprints, the Scotish Parliament has approved a 50 pound reduction in a local tax.  That sounds exactly like Obama thinking.  Everyone who pitches in to save the planet gets a tax cut.  Never mind that you’ll spend a 500, or 1,000 or 10,000 pounds to insulate your quaint cottage or install solar – that 50-pound tax cut is exactly the sort of great incentive a big government control freak would come up with. And we have more than a few of those in DC.

Not all the Scots are buying it, of course.  Here’s university prof Dr. James Buckee attempting too late to interject some rationality into all this:

“As far as reducing emissions by 80 per cent, banning the internal combustion engine, and coal-fired power stations from Scotland would not get close to doing it. This is clearly unobtainable.

“More energy has been expended on finding ways to infringe on human activity than has gone into understanding the science.”

Heh.  Loved that.  And speaking of understanding the science, there was one heck of an article in Forbes the other day, Waxman-Markey Flunks the Math.  Math is the base of all science, so that’s bad news for the Warmies. Here we go with the basics:

In the U.S., electricity is produced from these sources. If you are reading this on a handheld and can’t read Wikipedia’s wonderful pie chart, here is the breakdown:

48.9% — Coal
20% — Natural Gas
19.3% — Nuclear
1.6% — Petroleum

Got that? A tick over 88% of U.S. electricity comes from three sources: coal, gas and nuclear. Petroleum brings the contribution of so-called “evil” energy–that is, energy that is carbon- or uranium-based–to almost 90%.

The remaining sources of U.S. electricity, the renewables, are, by comparison, tiny players:

7.1% — Hydroelectric
2.4% — Other Renewables
0.7% — Other

Hydroelectric accounts for 70% of renewable energy in America. But, of course, hydro is mostly tapped out. Almost every dam that could be built has been built. Ironically enough, political opposition to building more dams comes from the same crowd of tree huggers who oppose coal, gas and uranium.

Waxman-Markey is all about punitively taxing the energy sources that make up 90 percent of our electrical generation, in order to subsidize the 10 percent that’s renewable.  Well, really 3 percent if you don’t count hydroelectric generation, which isn’t targeted for big Waxman-Markey subsidies. The author then reveals what the bill is all about; not stopping global warming, but good ol’ politics as usual:

In other words, Waxman-Markey is betting the future of U.S. electricity production on sources that now contribute 3% or supply 10 million Americans with electricity. That’s enough juice for the people in Waxman’s Los Angeles County. Or, if you prefer, for Nancy Pelosi’s metro San Francisco plus Markey’s metro Boston.

Well, what about electricity for the other 295 million? You can’t get there from here with Waxman-Markey. At very best, solar, wind and cellulosic ethanol will make 20% contributions by 2025. The smart money would bet on 10%.

Besides, those nasty ol’ Devil fuels are doing very well on the technology front, advancing at a clip that rivals or surpasses gains made in alternative energy.  Engines are cleaner and more efficient, fuels burn hotter and cleaner, and extraction and processing technologies are greener than ever.

There simply is no reason for Waxman-Markey … except for power-grabbing and money-sucking.  But there is a great alternative, an absolutely brilliant alternative, promoted today by Doug Ross:

We start with the most useless government agencies we can find. The Department of Education, the Department of Agriculture, The Department of Health and Human Services, The Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Labor, the Environmental Protection Agency, the FCC and Amtrak. For the sake of argument, let’s say that together, they consume $250 billion a year.

Congress’ job? They would be required to cut spending for these ridiculous bureaucracies according to the following schedule (which I had a lot of fun creating — all numbers in billions).

2012 – $250
2013 – $210
2014 – $190
2015 – $160
2016  – $140
2017 – $120
2018 – $110
2019 – $100
2020 – $90
2021 – $75
2022 – $60
2023 – $50

Pay-cuts? Layoffs? Closing unnecessary facilities? Who gives a crap? That’s for them to figure out.

How do you like Cap-and-trade now, Democrats?

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R

emember the BTU Tax?  I didn’t, which caused me to make a mistake in my post yesterday, when I made this comment in response to this, from Obama’s Rose Garden shill for the Waxman-Markey energy tax, “We have been talking about this issue for decades, now is the time to finally act.”  I said:

“We’ve been talking about carbon taxes for decades?!”  Where does he get this stuff? How dumb does he think we are?  If you stretch the timeline rather aggressively, pressure to tax carbon began within the last ten years, and even then it was promoted only by a small group of whackos.

I forgot one particular whacko, Al Gore, who in 1993 – decades ago – tried to move a tax on energy – British Thermal Units, or BTUs,  through Congress.  Mea culpa.

Matt Dempsey, a GOP staffer at the Senate Energy & Public Works Committee brought me back into the light:

As the House prepares to vote on the largest tax increase in American history, otherwise known as the Waxman-Markey bill, and as President Obama tries to persuade his House allies to vote for same, EPW Policy Beat took another trip down memory lane.  We landed in 1993 as the House was voting on the Al-Gore-backed BTU tax.  As we and others have stated before, the historical and political parallels between the BTU tax and Waxman-Markey are striking: members fearful that voting for an energy tax would have political repercussions at the ballot box; members fearful of voting for a bill that would then die in the Senate; members fearful that an energy tax would be regressive, harm consumers, destroy jobs and slow economic growth; members fearful of a man named Gore pushing an energy rationing scheme that harms the heartland; and Democratic congressional leaders and Administration officials (read: Gore) desperately searching for exemptions and last-minute deals to shore up support.  As the proverb goes, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”

As you know, because “we have been talking about this issue for decades,” the BTU tax did fail, as Clinton dropped the bill in the Senate, when it became clear it didn’t have enough Democratic support there. Many of the Dems who voted for it in the House found themselves scrambling to defend their votes, and many could not, losing their seats. And America was spared having to commit forced economic suicide at the hand of a radical environmentalist politician.

We don’t have to go back to 1993 for lessons on how bad Waxman-Markey is; we need only visit Spain today. As George Will pointed out in his column yesterday:

[Gabriel] Calzada, 36, an economics professor at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, has produced a report that, if true, is inconvenient for the Obama administration’s green agenda, and for some budget assumptions that are dependent upon it.

Calzada says Spain’s torrential spending — no other nation has so aggressively supported production of electricity from renewable sources — on wind farms and other forms of alternative energy has indeed created jobs. But Calzada’s report concludes that they often are temporary and have received $752,000 to $800,000 each in subsidies — wind industry jobs cost even more, $1.4 million each. And each new job entails the loss of 2.2 other jobs that are either lost or not created in other industries because of the political allocation — sub-optimum in terms of economic efficiency — of capital. (European media regularly report “eco-corruption” leaving a “footprint of sleaze” — gaming the subsidy systems, profiteering from land sales for wind farms, etc.) Calzada says the creation of jobs in alternative energy has subtracted about 110,000 jobs elsewhere in Spain’s economy.

A GOP study found the same thing here in the U.S. – green jobs aren’t particularly high-paying, but require an average government subsidy of $100,000.

I attempted to engage some green-tinted lefties in a meaningful conversation on the topic yesterday on a  New Mexico political blog (I got there via a Twitter link, if you’re curious). I response to a guest column plea for a yes vote on Waxman-Markey, I wrote:

Ask yourself, which is melting faster, the ice caps or the economy? Hint: It’s the latter by far, and spiking all energy costs in at least the short- to mid-term will only deepen and lengthen the recession.

As for all those new clean energy jobs, you cannot count the jobs Waxman-Markey supposedly will open up unless you also count the jobs it will destroy in oil, gas and related sectors of the economy, where several million are employed.

Out of work New Mexicans will suffer through higher costs long before they get the benefit of any new green jobs, I’m afraid. Call your representatives and ask them to vote NO on Waxman-Markey.

That spawned a raft of responses, mostly negative, including one saying I sounded like an oil industry propagandist. I challenged them to find anything wrong with anything I said, but they didn’t even try.  Instead, they waxed on about all the jobs Waxman-Markey, or ACES as they refer to it lovingly, will create.  As I understand their argument it goes like this:

We would feel really good if we could get jobs in the green industry because the world is like dying, you know, and we’re so excited about it, we’d like everyone to pay more money for everything in order for us to get those jobs.

That’s what we’re up against folks: Ignorant self-interest.  And ignorant self-interest is what they’re really talking about when they say “money,” as in “money makes the world go ’round.”

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M

ichael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus met while trying to save redwoods. Their Breakthrough Institute is funded by the leftist Nathan Cummings Foundation – but they understand who wrong Waxman-Markey is, and they’ve got a pretty good idea about how to encourage new energy technologies without destroying the good old economy.

In an NPR interview, they lay it out:

“When was the last time human beings modernized our energy sources by making older power sources more expensive?” [Shellenberger] asks …. “And, of course, by now you probably know that the answer is never.”

Personal computers didn’t take off because there was a tax on typewriters, he says. And the Internet didn’t sprout up because the government made telegraphs more expensive.

“So is there a better way to do this? Well, we think that there is. It’s very simple: It’s that we need to make clean energy cheap worldwide.”

Shellenberger and Nordhaus support government investments in alternative energy – a new Manhattan or moon project, which is hardly a new idea, but they articulate their well-researched points well.

Shellenberger tells the [Institute's] interns that environmental groups — like the ones he used to work for — are going about it all wrong. By urging Congress to cast carbon dioxide as a pollutant that needs to be controlled, he says, they will constantly swim against the tide of public opinion.

“We’re stuck in this kind of poor paradigm for dealing with climate change, this pollution paradigm,” he says, “not because environmentalists are failures, but actually because they were so successful. The Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the cap and trade on acid rain — these things worked really well.”

How refreshing to hear an environmentalist actually acknowledge that things are getting better, not worse – that existing levels of regulation have accomplished their goals.  I’m a free market guy, but even so, I have to acknowledge that government investment in technology works – it’s government control of the market and stomping on competition that I don’t like.  They explain the benefits of public investment:

“There’s this idea that the government shouldn’t be involved in technology, the government shouldn’t be picking winners and losers,” Shellenberger says. “Which is sort of a funny thing to say. It’s kind of like, well, why not? And when hasn’t the United States government been involved in picking technology winners and losers?”

He points to the computer industry as just one example of something that came into being because of deliberate federal investments.

And railroads. And rockets.

Of course, the hotheads are screaming that there’s not enough time, we have to act now, the world is melting and carbon dioxide is a terrible poison. These are largely the same people who condemned Bush’s “rush to war.”  Unfortunately, Waxman and Markey are staunchly set in the camp of the hysterics.  Shellenberger and Nordhaus have been in DC this week, trying to get more reasonable electeds to behave more reasonably.

I hope they succeed.  You can help.  Sign the petition.

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J

ust in case you are casting about today for more evidence of the self-serving immorality and unethical behavior of the labor union movement, look no further than the usually union-loving NY Times, which reports from the middle of nowhere:

When a company called Ausra filed plans for a big solar power plant in California, it was deluged with demands from a union group that it study the effect on creatures like the short-nosed kangaroo rat and the ferruginous hawk.

By contrast, when a competitor, BrightSource Energy, filed plans for an even bigger solar plant that would affect the imperiled desert tortoise, the same union group, California Unions for Reliable Energy, raised no complaint. Instead, it urged regulators to approve the project as quickly as possible.

One big difference between the projects? Ausra had rejected demands that it use only union workers to build its solar farm, while BrightSource pledged to hire labor-friendly contractors.

As California moves to license dozens of huge solar power plants to meet the state’s renewable energy goals, some developers contend they are being pressured to sign agreements pledging to use union labor. If they refuse, they say, they can count on the union group to demand costly environmental studies and deliver hostile testimony at public hearings.

If they commit at the outset to use union labor, they say, the environmental objections never materialize.

Come to think of it, this is also a wonderful example of how environmental laws are exploited by special interest groups – unions, NIMBYs, environmentalists – for reasons that have nothing to do with the environment.

Always ready to tell real thigh-slappers for his client’s benefit, Marc Joseph, a lawyer for California Unions for Reliable Energy, told the NYT:

“We’ve been tarred and feathered more than once on this issue.  We don’t walk away from environmental issues.”

Uh huh.  The chairman of the union group was more frank:

“You only have so much land that can accept solar power plants.  So the question is, should that land be used for low-paid jobs or should that land be used for high-paid jobs?”

How about using it for jobs that will allow the project to be profitable, and that are gained fairly, not through regulatory extortion?  How about not burdening potential future employers with 144 data requests,  as the union group did recently with one company that refused to sign a union labor agreement. The requests asked questions like how many man-hours would be dedicated to tracking desert tortoise, and which role each individual on the tracking team played – all matters of great interest to any union.

For every charge of “astroturf” community relations campaigns by corporations, there are a dozen “greenmailing” schemes like these – but greenies, NIMBYs and union thugs usually get away with them. Kudos to the NYT for covering the story.

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I

f you’re not interested in buying that bridge in Brooklyn, perhaps I could interest you in some stark, middle-of-nowhere desert land that’s ideal for the energy of tomorrow – solar! Yes, friends, imagine this dreary wasteland glimmering with solar panels as far as the eye can see! And what else glitters, friends? Gold! Yes, there’s gold to be made buying up desert land for the inevitable solar revolution! Step right up!

Er, before you whip out that checkbook, allow me to introduce you to Mr. Greenie, who loves alternative energy – unless, of course, someone proposes to actually build an alternative energy facility anywhere. As the amazingly appropriately named Sandy Bahr, director of the Sierra Club in Phoenix told the Phoenix Business Journal:

We are very supportive of a mix of renewable generation. But we’re not in favor of paving the desert with mirrors.

Here’s a story about environmentalists concerned about a desert solar plant’s impact on pupfish.  It’s all pretty frustrating, says the governor of CahLEEforNEEa in Capitalism Magazine:

As Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger put it, “But, I mean, if we cannot put solar power plants in the Mojave Desert, I don’t know where the hell we can put it.” The answer, Governor, is nowhere, according to many environmentalists. A group called the Alliance for Responsible Energy Policy, discussing the plans for arrays in the desert, argues that this portends the “permanent destruction of hundreds of thousands of acres of pristine public lands . . . [this is] wilderness killing.” Despite lip-service to human needs, protecting “pristine nature” is their goal, and “pristine nature” means nature undefiled by any human presence—even a footprint in the desert.

The NY Times succeeded in actually finding some desert residents who don’t like the idea of productive use of their woebegone climes:

But it is also home to the Mojave ground squirrel, the desert tortoise and the burrowing owl, and to human residents who describe themselves as desert survivors and who are unhappy about the proliferation of solar projects planned for their home turf.

“We’re tired of everyone looking at the desert like a wasteland,” said Donna Charpied, who lives with her husband, Larry, in Desert Center, Calif., where they have been farming jojoba, a native shrub cultivated for its oil, for 27 years. She is also the policy advocate for the Desert Communities Protection Campaign of the Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice.

Wait a minute! Some desert rat is also an environmental justice radical who just happens to have a hotline to the NYT?  What are the chances?!  You got to hand it to those NYT reporters – if there’s a radical leftist to quote, they’ find ‘em, even in the remotest of places.  Don’t be deceived by that highfalutin’ “Desert Center” name – the hardscrabble place has a population of 125.

Even if you succeed in overcoming environmentalist opposition and get your incredibly difficult permits from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, which will be watching out for every bush and bunny, you’ll still have to figure out how to get your power to anywhere, since Greenies are fighting the new power line corridors that would bring electricity to metropolitan areas from the desert.

But let’s say you get past that hurdle.  Now, let me introduce you to the rather formidable Diane Feinstein.

In a move that could pit usual allies — environmentalists and the solar and wind industries — against each other, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) is preparing legislation that would permanently put hundreds of thousands of acres of desert land off limits to energy projects. The territory would be designated California’s newest national monument. …

“It’s frustrating. We really do have competing national priorities here,” said Paul Whitworth, whose San Diego-based LightSource Renewables hopes to put in a solar project on about 6,000 acres near Amboy. “We spent a lot of time researching the desert, and consulting with the BLM to make sure we didn’t apply on top of an area of critical environmental concern, or area with other issues. . . . Now, there’s uncertainty on whether these projects will go ahead.” [LA Times]

My advice?  Buy oil.

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N

ew York liberals will have to look for a new place from which to launch their anti-conservative diatribes if the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters is right:

Sea levels off the coastline of the Northeastern United States and Nova Scotia could rise more than in other regions within the next century if the Greenland Ice Sheet melts at an accelerated rate, according to a paper in the May 29 edition of Geophysical Research Letters.

According to the paper, “Transient Response of the MOC and Climate to Potential Melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet in the 21st Century,” sea levels off the coast of New York, Boston, Halifax, and other Northeastern cities could rise 12 to 20 inches more than the average sea level rise by the year 2100 as ocean currents circulate water from the melting ice sheets in Greenland.

“If the Greenland melt continues to accelerate, we could see significant impacts this century on the northeast U.S. coast from the resulting sea level rise,” lead author of the paper Aixue Hu, a scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., said in a statement. “Major northeastern cities are directly in the path of the greatest rise.” (From Daily Environment Report, June ’09)

Fifteen to twenty inches more than average by 2100 … let’s see, that’s 90 years from now, so that’s about a quarter-inch rise per year.

A quarter-inch a year is four times the rate of average sea level rise since 1880, right, which has been humming along at 0.6 inches a year.  To put that in perspective, it’s even greater than the number of times Obama has increased the national debt in the five months he’s been in office – just a measly three times.

Accelerated melting of the Greenland ice shelf is dependent on a lot of ifs.  Ocean temperatures would have to rise.  The North Atlantic Current would have to respond to that rise by shifting to the north. And atmospheric temperatures would have to rise as well. And the computer models would have to be accurate.

That last one’s a bugger because intuitively, it’s pretty obvious that if the ocean gets warmer, cloud cover will increase from move evaporation, and increased cloud cover will flummox those persnickety computer models.

Besides, a brilliant friend tells me, the hysterical paper is based on a running average of sea levels, like most hysterical papers, which yield “outlandish and statistically unsupportable claims of sea levels a century hence, to tens of a foot.”  Actual sea level measurement, rather than running averages, yields the cool, calm and collected data. But what fun is that?

Further messing up this little global warming nightmare is the chart on the left, which tracks ocean levels since about 20,000 years ago.  As you can see, they began rising after the peak of the last ice age, really took off about 15,000 years ago, plateaued for two brief spells, and have run pretty darn flat for the last 8,000 years.

So what does all this mean?  Not that islands are sinking anywhere, at least not any time soon, but that bureaucrats are having a heyday.  Someone has to do something with this data, and boy are they!

My brilliant friend spells it out:  The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (not to be confused with a panel of climate scientists) says ocean levels will go up 17 inches a century – three times more than they have been. And they’re planning for our future accordingly.

The California Coastal Commission, however, has decided it’s going to base its planning on a 36-inch-per-century spike in ocean levels, and it’s making anyone who’s building in the Coastal Zone develop plans to protect homes from those levels.  Oh, but it doesn’t allow you to build sea walls, so go figger.

But wait!  When regulating itself and its fellow Earth-hugging agencies, the Coastal Commission uses an 11-inch-per-century sea level rise for its planning.  The thousands of homes adjacent to the new Bolsa Chica wetlands restoration project will soon have ocean tides immediately adjacent to their homes, protected by a little bitty levee that isn’t certified by FEMA and only anticipates an 11-inch ocean level rise over the next 100 years.

The area in red in this image will become a tidal wetland as soon as oil field clean-up in the area is completed.  The homeowners on the other side of that red line better hope the Coastal Commission is dead wrong with its 36-inch sea level rise prediction and spot-on or less with the 11-inch rise it applies when it’s doing its own touchy-feely projects.

Now, if you’re asking yourself why do private landowners have to plan for 36-inch rises while the agencies that write the rules can skate by with 11 inches, you just don’t understand how government works.

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L

ast Wednesday in Sacramento, I was approached on a street corner by an earnest, vaccuous young woman, Greenpeace clipboard in her hand.

“Hi, I’m Willow [or whatever low-carbon name she offered].  Can I talk to you about the danger of global warming?”

“I don’t think so,” I answered. “I’m your worst nightmare.”

Any feelings of guilt over my rudeness that have haunted me since were dismissed upon reading this, from the link-crazed folks at Consumer Freedom:

Greenpeace’s new report on so-called sustainable seafood has just been released and every single supermarket in Canada received a failing grade. Not because fish isn’t essential to a complete and healthy diet. (It is.) Greenpeace flunked every grocery retailer for selling “unsustainable” fish because the group, whose own co-founder has called it “a band of scientific illiterates,” wants to minimize the consumption of all seafood.

Nevermind that most of the seafood that Greenpeace wants off the shelves is in no danger of extinction whatsoever. Pollock, a white fish that is the main component in most supermarket fish sticks, is doing just fine, according to the National Marine Fisheries Service. But if Greenpeace’s wishes were granted, pollock — along with more than 50 percent of all seafood sold in United States supermarkets — would be “off limits.

In the Greenpeace view of things, anything man touches is threatened.  Cut down a tree to build a house, and all trees are threatened. Drive an SUV and the planet groans.  And if we eat any fish at all, then all fish are imperiled.  How depressing it must be to be so genus-loathing.

That loathing may be why Greenpeace is trying to deprive humans of the healthy benefits of fish, with its  high protein, low bad-fat and rich doses of Omega 3 fatty acids.  Or it may be that they’re profoundly ignorant of natural science.  Or it may be they believe that nature should provide us with nothing.  I wondered about this, about why a young Sacramento woman would sell out her genus to become a human-hating member of Greenpeace, so I looked up the kind of questions environmentalist philosophers ask.  And boy, was that illuminating:

Why care about nature “for itself” when only people “matter”? If you deny that “only people matter,” on what grounds can you defend that denial? (After all, if no people are around to regret it, what difference does it make if a species, a valley, or even a planet is destroyed? If people who are around prefer to destroy natural objects and landscapes, then so what? Why not?[)]

When species or landscapes or wilderness areas are destroyed, what, of value, is lost to mankind?

Will future generations “miss” what we have “taken from them”? (How could they if they never will know what they have “lost”?)

“Should Trees Have [Legal] Standing?”  On what grounds, if not for mankind’s sake?

Does “land ownership” make moral sense, or is it a morally absurd and repugnant concept?

Do human beings have a need for nature that implies an obligation to preserve it? What is the evidence for this? 

What are the ultimate grounds of an affirmation to protect the environment? Are they rational? Irrational? Non- rational? Mystical?

What, basically, is wrong with the developer’s anthropocentric and utilitarian land ethic? Why not treat land as a “commodity” rather than a “community”?

Do future generations (who, after all, do not exist now) have a “right” now to a clean and natural environment when their time comes?

Can man “improve” upon nature? How? What constitutes “improvement”?

Do the facts of environmental science have moral implications?

Are human beings psychologically capable of caring for nature and for future generations?  If they have this capacity, are we morally obligated to nurture it?

Do you get the sense that the professor who teaches from this syllabus, one C D  Sebastian Ph D [no periods, please; they're so wasteful!], will answer every question logically answered “yes” with a “no” and visa versa?  Do you suspect that he will grant man little credit for getting things right, for searching out viable compromises instead of running endlessly to extremes? Do you suspect he would ever acknowledge that his questions are useless, since man has co-existed successfully with the planet and will continue to do so long after C D Sebastian’s existence is forgotten? Do you think C D would ever forgive me if he is a she, not a he?

But in college classrooms throughout the nation, these questions are being asked and man is endlessing coming out the loser in this game of 20 Questions.  And the kids who graduate from these classes then find “meaningful” jobs (rather than productful ones) teaching the next generation of kids the same hooey.

And they pass by those packages of protein-packed haddock, opting instead for tasteless tofu made from soybeans that screamed with pain when picked from the motherplant, and shrieked again when tossed without so much as a prayer for their departing souls into boiling water. You don’t believe me that soybeans are sentient?  Who cares? I feel that way so it must be true.  Can I talk to you about the danger of global warming?

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hat’s not a typo in the headline – it’s the greenhouse gag, not generic greenhouse gas, because the depravity of declaring the fourth most common element in the universer, carbon, a pollutant and carbon dioxide, the byproduct of human breathing, something needing regulating is coming home to roost.  Like an 800-pound chicken.

In her confirmation hearing, EPA Director of Air and Radiation nominee Regina McCarthy put an end to EPA Director Lisa Jackson’s curt dismissal of concerns by manufacturers and chambers of commerce that EPA was poised to impose greenhouse gas regs on small business.  “It is a myth … EPA will regulate cows, Dunkin Donuts, Pizza Huts, your lawnmower and baby bottles,” Jackson said, according the the WSJ, the primary source for this post.

McCarthy countered her boss, telling lawmakers that litigation could force her office to draft emission rules for small emitters like hospitals, schools and farms.  And, true to form, the Center for Biological Depravity Diversity promptly piped up with Kassie Siegel, its climate warmonger director of the CBD’s Climate Law Institute, saying she is poised to sue for regulation of smaller emitters if the EPA stops at simply large emitters.

The administration is now set to regulate only about 13,000 large emitters, including refiners, smelters and cement plants. The position seems radical next to Siegel’s stand, but when you consider that refiners, smelters and cement plants are all backbones to our industrialized, mobile society, you’ll understand that there’s nothing moderate about Obama’s position; it’s no less extreme, only more efficient, than the CBD approach.

Sen. John Barrasso (R., Wyo.) has put a hold on Ms. McCarthy’s nomination in part because of her responses on the greenhouse gas issue.  Barrasso wrote on the Heritage Foundation blog The Foundary (which could, I suppose, itself be regulated under the new regime),

Special interest groups around the country are scheming to sue the EPA to prosecute hospitals, farms, nursing homes, commercial buildings and any other small emitter of greenhouse gasses. These regulations are a dangerous loose cannon in the wrong hands.

When asked about potential lawsuits, Regina McCarthy, the Administration’s nominee as Assistant Administrator of the EPA Office of Air and Radiation said that she will “request that I be informed if any such notice is filed with regard to a small source, and I will follow-up with the potential litigants.”

The solution to this problem is not to have government officials go around asking litigants not to sue. That is not a solution and entirely unrealistic. I quite frankly expect more.

The only jobs this option will create are in law firms as the litigation bonanza begins.

In considering the economic impact of this lunacy, Barrasso cautions that the 1.2 million businesses that might fall under EPA regulation as a result of GHG emission controls would face something akin to the EPA’s current pre-construction permit process, which the agency itself says costs each applicant $125,000 and 866 hours to obtain - and that was in 2007; I’m sure it’s become more costly and less streamlined since then.

Do the math – that’s $150 billion in new regulatory burdens and a billion hours of productivity down the drain.  If you’re sill in school, go into environmental law – the guys who work on regs like these will be the only people making real money in Obamaland.  Meanwhile, our competitors presumably will have avoided this lunacy, making America even less competitive and more vulnerable to foreign business domination.

As all this insanity looms, Rasmussen reports that only about a third of Americans believe human activities are causing climate change, about 50 percent less than believe it is caused by global climatic cycles, so there is opportunity for the GOP to position itself as the party of sanity on climate issues – something McCain reused to do.

And for those who feel the system will have to be on the edge of collapse before we will be able to reign in runaway regulators should keep their eyes on the regulation of GHG emissions in all its ramifications.  This baby is setting up to be one spectactular, collossal train wreck.

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he Center for Biological Depravity Diversity was its hyperbolic self yesterday in an email sent to its supporters (and watchers, like me):

[Interior Sec. Ken] Salazar confirmed our worst fears for his tenure as Secretary of the Interior — he announced that he will adopt Bush’s polar bear extinction plan …

You have to hand it to the folks at the CBD; they know how to gin up the language, turning a simple rule that allows the careful, ongoing use of existing oil production facilities as “Bush’s polar bear extinction plan.” Of course, it’s easier to turn a phrase like that when you don’t need to worry about facts, ethics or honesty like the rest of us.

Leaving CBD’s hyperbole aside, here’s what Salazar did, from DOI’s news release:

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced today that he will retain a special rule [a "4(d) rule"] issued in December for protecting the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act, but will closely monitor the implementation of the rule to determine if additional measures are necessary to conserve and recover the polar bear and its habitat. …

Section 4(d) of the ESA allows the Fish and Wildlife Service to tailor regulatory prohibitions for threatened species as deemed necessary and advisable to provide for the conservation of the species. Hence, the special rule is referred to as a 4(d) rule. …

The rule also states that incidental take of polar bears resulting from activities outside the bear’s range, such as emission of greenhouse gases, will not be prohibited under the ESA.

“Incidental take” means harming, harrassing or killing, when done incidental to other legal activities; stated less bureaucratically, it means “not deliberate.” The polar bear is classified as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, so if you go out and just shoot one for sport, you’re in big trouble. But with Salazar’s action yesterday, it remains legal to go about the legal activities of maintaining oil production facilities and exploring for oil on oil lease land, even if by some unprovable nexus, your activities cause a chunk of ice to melt, a polar bear to tumble into the sea, somehow forget how to swim, and drown.

The greens pushed hard to get the polar bear listed as endangered, because the 4(d) rule can only be applied to threatened species, not endangered ones.  Bush was justified in not listing the polar bear at all – their populations are stable, even growing in some regions, and there’s no proof that polar icemelt is permanent; indeed, last winter’s ice build-up was record-breaking.  But in one of his weaker moves, Bush gave in and took the middle ground, listing it as threatened and writing the 4(d) to protect energy production and other activities.

I’ve lived through this myself.  In the early 1990s, Hugh Hewitt and I orchestrated the campaign to keep the California gnatcatcher from being listed under Cailfornia’s ESA, then eked out a “threatened” listing from the incoming Clinton administration, dodging the “endangered” bullet.  As a result, thousands of new homes and commercial/industrial facilities were built that otherwise would have been stopped dead by the less flexible endangered listing.

And the gnatcatcher, God bless it, is thriving.

The same will certainly be true of the polar bear, which has survived previous warming spells.  I’m not sure if the same can be said now of Obama’s cap and trade tax movement, which is already unpopular in Congress.  If you doubt the signficance of the hurdles Obama’s facing with this madcap scheme, just ask the free market: The price of CO2 credits has dropped dramatically.

Now Obama must defend the urgency of imposing cap and trade on a crippled, job-shedding economy even while admitting through Salazar’s action that things really aren’t all that urgent.  If global warming were the immediate threat the hysterics Obama campaigned to say it is, Salazar would have suspended the 4(d) rule at a minimum and could have even re-opened the process to go for an endangered listing.

That  he didn’t is solid evidence that the Obama administration is watching gas prices, which are beginning to creep up again.  They know that a repeat of last year’s run-up in gas costs will spell doom to cap and trade, and cost any politician who’s anti-drilling points in the polls.  So to keep his numbers up and the changes of cap and trade alive, Obama approved the continuation of the 4(d) in spite of howling opposition from the environmentalists.

That he could make so politic a trade at the expense of the polar bear (at least that’s how the Greenies put it) can only be read as proof that Obama doesn’t view global warming and cap and trade to be issues as important as his own popularity.  Smart opponents of cap and trade just got some powerful new ammunition, and I hope they’re loading their legislative and rhetorical weapons as I write.

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