ObamatookayoildrillingofftheAtlantic

Obama to okay oil drilling off the Atlantic coast?

posted at 2:01 pm on August 11, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

• Share on Facebook 1
• 1 SHARES

Will an administration that has dragged its feet for years on an oil pipeline suddenly transform the Atlantic coast into an active oil field? The Hill’s Laura Barron-Lopez reports that the Interior Department appears ready to approve drilling off the East Coast, a major change in policy for the Obama administration, and one likely to create a civil war within the Democratic Party.

Anyone want to take odds that this White House will do that? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

President Obama is moving toward opening the Atlantic Ocean to drilling, a major shift in U.S. policy that cuts against the administration’s efforts to reduce global warming. …

All signs point toward the administration giving the thumbs up to Atlantic drilling.

In June, the administration gave its strongest signal to date that the Atlantic will likely be included in Interior’s five-year lease plan for 2017-2022, by opening it up to new oil and gas exploration for the first time in 30 years.

That decision followed the Interior Department’s release of an environmental review in February, setting guidelines for seismic surveys to test Atlantic waters for potential energy sources.

“It does not look good because if he weren’t going to allow drilling then he wouldn’t have opened the Atlantic to seismic tests,” said Sara Young, a marine scientist for Oceana, a conservation group.

The politics of this push are complicated, to say the least. Interior isn’t touching the West Coast, where Democratic governors all oppose any drilling for oil despite the known reserves that exist there. The governors on the Atlantic seaboard have a mixed attitude toward it. Republican Chris Christie opposes oil exploration in offshore New Jersey, but Democrat Terry McAuliffe wants to encourage the oil industry in his state, as do both governors from the Carolinas, according to Barron-Lopez. The expansion would make sense for those governors, and would create a lot of jobs — good paying union jobs, actually, which means that the labor movement will want action on this just as it wants the Keystone XL pipeline.

However, that would pit two critical constituencies against one another, and just in time for the midterm elections. Environmental groups are working overtime to stop progress on exploration, and so are their allies in the Democratic Party:

Legislators from New Jersey and other Atlantic Coast states are pushing the Obama administration to reverse a decision to allow geologic exploration of the ocean floor from Florida to Delaware as a step toward seeking underwater oil and gas reserves.

In a letter to the head of the agency that oversees oil and gas drilling, 37 House members – all Democrats – cite the risk of an oil spill and the damage it could cause to those who make their living in commercial fishing or tourism along the coast as a reason not to drill for oil or gas.

“We are simply unwilling to accept the tremendous risks of an oil spill in the Atlantic, which would vastly outweigh any potential gains from drilling,” states the letter to Walter Cruickshank, acting director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.

“I strongly disagree with President Obama’s push to increase drilling off the East Coast,” said Rep. Rush Holt of Mercer County, one of those who signed the letter. Holt, the ranking Democrat on the House subcommittee that oversees domestic drilling, said an accident could endanger 320,000 jobs and $18.5 billion associated with New Jersey’s fishing and tourism industries.

Let’s put aside the relative value of the policy itself. Most people who hold opinions on it won’t be swayed with a couple of bon mots in a political analysis anyway, although it’s worth pointing out that support for offshore drilling has always been more bipartisan than its opposition. Instead, consider the idea that this administration will approve actual drilling when it has stalled the construction of a pipeline for the last several years. The Keystone XL pipeline is not only less environmentally risky than drilling, it would replace (at least in part) the much more dangerous transportation method currently in use for crude, by rail. Derailments create a big environmental impact and are much more lethal than an occasional leak from a pipeline, while a pipeline isn’t even in the same category of risk as an offshore rig.

Now, with that context, why would anyone expect the Obama administration to approve offshore drilling before the Keystone pipeline? Obama can mollify the same groups with an approval of Keystone without generating the outrage that offshore drilling would create among his base. That would also help repair some of the damage Obama has done to the US-Canada relationship as well as deny China easy access to Canadian crude. Keystone is a much easier political lift than Atlantic oil exploration, with much less chance for political blowback.

Even holding the question open, and perhaps floating a trial balloon about approval, doesn’t make a lot of sense politically. Maybe the White House is worried about Kay Hagan’s chances in North Carolina and the challenge to Mark Warner by Ed Gillespie in Virginia in attempting to show that it’s giving serious thought to offshore drilling off the coasts of those states, but it’s more likely to discourage their environmental activists if they proceed or their labor activists if they don’t. Either way, it’s a popcorn-ordering opportunity for Republicans as Obama puts more stress on a Democratic fault line just a couple of months ahead of the midterms. Just don’t expect anything else but more can-kicking from Interior, especially before the midterms, and probably for the rest of Obama’s term.

• Share on Facebook 1
• 1 SHARES

Tags: Barack Obama, Big Labor, Chris Christie, Democrats, environmentalism, Keystone XL Pipeline, midterms, offshore drilling, Terry McAuliffe, Virginia

Related Posts:

Source from: hotair

IsMoscow“secretlyworkingwithenvironmentaliststooppose

Is Moscow “secretly working with environmentalists to oppose fracking” in Europe?

posted at 1:21 pm on June 23, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

• Share on Facebook 1
• 1 SHARES

That’s what the chief of NATO suggested at a conference last week, and frankly, I wouldn’t put it past the Kremlin. Via the Guardian:

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, secretary-general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato), and former premier of Denmark, told the Chatham House thinktank in London on Thursday that Vladimir Putin’s government was behind attempts to discredit fracking, according to reports.

Rasmussen said: “I have met allies who can report that Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organisations – environmental organisations working against shale gas – to maintain European dependence on imported Russian gas.”

He declined to give details of those operations, saying: “That is my interpretation.” …

A Nato official told the Guardian that Russia’s influence on energy supplies was causing problems for Europe. The official said: “We don’t go into the details of discussions among allied leaders, but Russia has been using a mix of hard and soft power in its attempt to recreate a sphere of influence, including through a campaign of disinformation on many issues, including energy. …”

I doubt many of these groups of usefully idiotic eco-crusaders really need any outside prodding to fuel their campaign to thwart Europe’s exploration and fracking of its own potential shale deposits (and, incidentally, Europe’s best practical hope for cleaner-burning emissions at the moment as well as economic growth, good grief), but Russia most definitely does not want that fracking to happen. Russia’s revenue and economy are largely dependent on energy exports, and because Putin’s government wants to keep the Europeans dependent on their gas shipments, Russian officials have been publicly critical of fracking — even as they themselves try to entice Western companies to share their fracking know-how to further unlock more of Russia’s reserves. As Keith Johnson at Foreign Policy notes, you expect the usual environmentalist opposition in places like Britain and Germany, but in other areas in Europe, the sudden rise of outright opposition is  a little more oddly conspicuous:

“It’s very concrete; it relates to both opposition to shale and also trying to block any alternative pipelines with environmental challenges,” said Brenda Shaffer, an energy expert at Georgetown University.

“There is a lot of evidence here; countries like Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine being at the vanguard of the environmental movement is enough for it to be conspicuous,” she said.

Bulgaria’s anti-shale movement is particularly telling. The country initially embraced fracking as a way to develop its own energy resources and reduce reliance on Russia, even signing an exploration deal with Chevron in 2011. But then came an eruption of seemingly grassroots environmental protests and a televised blitz against fracking. In early 2012, the government reversed course and banned the practice.

Researchers who’ve worked on the ground in Central and Eastern Europe say there is plenty of anecdotal evidence, if no smoking guns, of Russian financial support for some environmental groups that have recently mobilized opposition to shale gas development.

• Share on Facebook 1
• 1 SHARES

Tags: environmentalism, Europe, fracking, NATO, natural gas, Russia

Related Posts:

Source from: hotair

Canada just approved its own domestic version of the Keystone XL pipeline

Canadajustapproveditsowndomesticversionof

TomSteyergroup’slatestKeystoneXLattack:The

Tom Steyer group’s latest Keystone XL attack: The pipeline would be too vulnerable to terrorist attacks, or something

posted at 3:31 pm on June 10, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

• Share on Facebook 1
• 1 SHARES

Hedge fund billionaire and rapturous eco-crusader Tom Steyer has fronted a lot of ridiculous attempts to not only thwart the construction of the already-existing Keystone pipeline’s northern extension, which would merely give Canada’s oil sands an efficient connection to our refineries in the Gulf, but to smear everything about the fossil fuel industry, the technology it employs, and the global free market in which it operates. The absurdly worded poll that his NextGen Climate Action group commissioned earlier this year, claiming that the “majority of U.S. voters want to know where the crude oil transported through the Keystone XL pipeline will end up” — as if that’s somehow an indictment of the Keystone XL pipeline, and as if the U.S. doesn’t sell and ship its own petroleum products to Africa, Asia, and the Middle East (which, by the way, it does) — springs immediately to mind. This, however… this, I did not see this coming.

Hedge fund billionaire Tom Steyer, a climate change activist and staunch opponent of the prospective 1,179-mile pipeline from Alberta, Canada, to Cushing, Okla., has hired retired Navy SEAL chief David “Dave” Cooper to assess how vulnerable the Keystone XL might be to deliberate sabotage. In a 14-page report made public today (but redacted to keep it from being a playbook for aspiring terrorists), Cooper concludes that a small group of evildoers could easily cause a catastrophic spill of millions of gallons of diluted bitumen, or tar sands crude, from the Keystone XL. They could do it with as little as four pounds of commercial-grade, improvised explosives. Cooper even did a dry run, using the completed Keystone I pipeline as a proxy; he hung out at a critical valve station long enough to content himself that he could have planted some explosives and left without a hitch.

In what Cooper deems “the most likely scenario,” a single attack could result in 1.2 million gallons of Alberta crude tarring Nebraska farms and waterways. He calculated this using published emergency shutdown response times and pipeline flow forecasts from the government and TransCanada (TRP:CN), the company that wants to build and operate the line. A coordinated attack at multiple locations, Cooper suggests, could trigger a 7.24 million gallon flood.

Oookay. It is certainly true that pipeline vandalism has plenty of precedent; as Businessweek points out, it’s been a problem in places like Nigeria, Mexico, and particularly Iraq, with militants trying to sabotage all-important energy grids, and I have zero doubts that a former Navy SEAL chief has had ample experience with those types of situations. My question, however, is why the Keystone XL pipeline is ostensibly different/more dangerous than the literally millions of miles of oil-and-gas pipeline already crisscrossing the country in a vast and interconnected network?

The risk to our energy infrastructure as well as our environment via pipeline blowout has always been there, but every option has its tradeoffs, and we have clearly determined that this particular risk is well worth the reward. As the State Department just aptly pointed out once again in their recent adjustment to their Keystone XL report from last January, terrestrial pipelines are in practice the safest and most ecologically friendly way to transport the oil that Canada is most definitely going to be drilling for anyway. Evidently, Tom Steyer really is willing to use his fossil-fuel-obtained billions to peddle whatever deliberately misleading information he feels he needs to in order to stymie what the eco-radical lobby has branded as one of the greatest environmental threat Of Our Time — and only they know why.

• Share on Facebook 1
• 1 SHARES

Tags: Democrats, environmentalism, Keystone XL Pipeline, terrorism, Tom Steyer

Related Posts:

Source from: hotair

Eco-warriorsfoundpayingpeopletoprotestChevron

Eco-warriors found paying people to protest Chevron

posted at 1:01 pm on May 31, 2014 by Jazz Shaw

• Share on Facebook 1
• 1 SHARES

Back in March, a group of self-professed eco-warriors got their butts handed to them on a platter in court when they were found to have fraudulently attempted to pick the deep pockets of Chevron to the tune of billions of dollars. You’d think that after a drubbing such as this that they’d learn their lesson, no? Well, it seems that some people just can’t take no for an answer.

Humberto Piaguaje, of bogus Ecuador lawsuit fame, organized and led a new protest against Chevron outside of their annual company meeting being held in Midland, Texas. He managed to get several dozen people to show up and wave signs complaining about how awful the energy giant is. (This is the same “awful” company that provides more than 30,000 jobs in the US alone.) So… several dozen protesters, eh? That’s some real grassroots activism for ya. But I’m sure they were all dedicated, fervent believers in the cause at least.

Well… not so much.

To fill out the ranks of the demonstration, a Los Angeles-based production company offered local residents $85 apiece to serve as what the firm described in a recruiting e-mail as “extras/background people.”…

Television station NewsWest 9 reported the faux protest on its website, noting that viewers “took to our Facebook page this morning saying they received e-mails bribing them with $85 to join this protest.” When I called [film producer Julieta] Gilbert in Los Angeles, she said she “didn’t organize” the protest but only “helped with it.” She professed confusion as to who exactly had commissioned the event and whose idea it was to pay $85 a person for “extras.” She didn’t dispute the authenticity of the recruiting e-mail and she said she’d been in Texas for the May 28 protest and had just returned to California.

So rather than angry, environmentally conscious activists, Chevron was actually “protested” by unemployed actors looking to make a few bucks as extras in what they thought was a film project. Nice. What’s even better is the accidentally hilarious description of the advertisement to hire the actors provided by Ms. Gilbert herself.

Julieta Gilbert, executive producer of DFLA Films, said in the e-mail that the company “need to get a group of people to help us document this event. … We will pay each one of them $85. They will be there for a couple of hours (8am to 12 pm). We need ethically [sic] diverse people.”

Clearly she was going for “ethnically” but there’s a lovely bit of irony there. Of course, for the majority of people who answered the advertisement, it seems unfair to plaster a label on them. I get the impression that they had no idea what they were actually getting into and simply thought they were getting a paycheck to fill in a crowd scene.

But this should still serve as a reminder. If the anti-energy left can’t get real Americans riled up over Chevron’s right to exist and do business, they will hire dupes to give the media a convincing looking story. That says a lot about the people behind this charade.

(You can browse the full history of our coverage of the Ecuador Chevron shakedown here.)

• Share on Facebook 1
• 1 SHARES

Tags: Chevron, Ecuador, environmentalism, protests

Related Posts:

Source from: hotair

GreengroupstoHillaryClinton:Willyouor

Green groups to Hillary Clinton: Will you or will you not join us in our mindless quest to kill Keystone XL?

posted at 8:41 pm on May 21, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

• Share on Facebook 1
• 1 SHARES

Hillary Clinton has been deliberately cautious in her public evaluations of the pros and cons of the Keystone XL pipeline, but eco-radicals groups are evidently losing patience with the presumptive Democratic frontrunner’s wishy-washiness on the matter. Via The Hill:

A coalition of 30 green groups will send a letter to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Wednesday, pressing her to publicly oppose the Keystone XL oil pipeline. …

The Center for Biological Diversity is one of the 30 conservation groups that signed on to the letter, which will officially be sent to Clinton on Wednesday.

“Secretary Clinton, will you stand with us against Keystone XL?” the groups ask.

“Given your longstanding advocacy for the environment and the importance of battling the climate crisis, your involvement would lend an important voice to the struggle against this dangerous pipeline and in favor of energy sources that don’t threaten future generations of Americans,” the letter states. …

The CEO of CREDO Mobile adds that if Clinton does not stand against Keystone XL, then “environmental voters will know that she cannot be counted on in the fight against global warming.”

One hopes that President Obama will have manned up and made a decision either way before the 2016 election rolls around, but even if he doesn’t, the issue may be pretty moot by that point anyway as oil and gas producers increasingly use alternative shipping methods (i.e., railroads) and Canada starts making other plans. As ever, if green groups have been hoping to score anything more than a PR victory for environmentalism on Keystone XL, then they have got their priorities seriously mixed up, because Canada’s oil sands are going to get developed one way or another. All that these eco-radicals have really counterproductively accomplished is ensuring a railroad renaissance, a much more dangerous threat to ecosystems and communities than terrestrial pipelines:

President Obama’s own State Department answered the comparison question plainly in February. According to the report, pipelines larger than 12 inches in diameter in 2013 spilled more than 910,000 gallons of crude oil and petroleum products—compared with 1.15 million gallons for tank cars, the worst in decades. Comparing total oil spilled makes it appear, at first glance, that pipeline and rail safety records are similar. That’s only until you factor in that pipelines carry nearly 25 times more crude oil and petroleum products.

The State Department report estimates that the Keystone XL carrying 830,000 barrels a day would likely result in 0.46 accidents annually, spilling 518 barrels a year. Under the most optimistic rail-transport scenario for a similar amount of oil, 383 annual spills would occur, spilling 1,335 barrels a year.

The report is even harsher on railroads when it comes to human injuries and fatalities. It estimates that tank cars will generate “an estimated 49 additional injuries and six additional fatalities” every year, compared with one additional injury and no fatalities annually for the pipeline.

• Share on Facebook 1
• 1 SHARES

Tags: 2016, Democrats, environmentalism, Hillary Clinton, Keystone XL Pipeline

Related Posts:

Source from: hotair

NewO’Keefevideo“punks”Hollywoodenviros posted

New O’Keefe video “punks” Hollywood enviros

posted at 9:21 am on May 21, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

•  Share on Facebook

For those who remember the controversy surrounding the financing of the anti-fracking Matt Damon film Promised Land, this new undercover video from James O’Keefe and Project Veritas will simply confirm suspicions. O’Keefe set himself up as an ersatz Middle Eastern oil baron in order to test the Hollywood environmental waters to see how welcome his supposed money would be in attacking American energy independence. The big names in this effort, Ed Begley Jr and Mariel Hemingway, will get the most notice but are in essence collateral damage. The real targets for this probe are Josh and Rebecca Tickell, award-winning producers who are all too keen to take Middle Eastern money to attack American natural-gas exploration:

“This latest investigation shows the dark side of Hollywood’s environmental movement. Hollywood is willing to take and conceal money from Middle Eastern oil interests in order to advance their cause of destroying American energy independence,” O’ Keefe said. He will be independently premiering “Expose: Hollywood’s War on US Energy” in Cannes, France Wednesday.

Within the video, actor Ed Begley Jr., an outspoken environmental activist and current Governor on the board of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science, Golden Globe and Oscar-nominated actress Mariel Hemingway, and liberal producer and director Josh Tickell are approached by an undercover reporter posing as a member of a Middle Eastern oil dynasty named “Muhammad” and his “ad executive” Steven Sanchton in the Beverly Hills Hotel located in Los Angeles, California. The pair offer $9 million in funding to American filmmakers to fund an anti-fracking movie.

“If Washington D.C. continues fracking, America will be energy independent and then they won’t need our oil anymore,” Muhammad states within the video. The “ad executive” accompanying him to the meeting later follows up, “Knowing where the money comes from..” At this point, he is interrupted by Hemmingway, who assures him none of the information regarding where the money is coming from to produce the movie will leave the table.

The Cannes launch got the attention of The Hollywood Reporter:

Muhammad, accompanied by a man pretending to be an ad executive, seemingly has the two actors agreeing to participate in the scheme, even after he acknowledges that his goal is to keep America from becoming energy independent. The meeting, which appears to have been secretly recorded, took place a few months ago at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

But the real target of the sting operation appears to be Josh and Rebecca Tickell, a husband and wife team known for their environmental movies, such as 2008′s Fuel, which won an award at Sundance and was later screened at the White House for members of President Obama‘s administration.

Begley tells THR that if it looks like he’s agreeing with faux Muhammad about anything, it’s because the Tickells asked him to be polite so that they’d get their funding for a movie they’re making called Fracked, a film that will argue a technique for extracting natural gas called fracking is bad for the environment. Also, Begley says that he is hard of hearing and couldn’t understand everything Muhammad was saying.

The video also includes some audio from phone conversations between the fake Muhammad’s representatives and the Tickells. “We’re confident that we can keep this zip-locked. You know, tight. Tight. Air-tight forever,” Josh Tickell is heard saying. “If we don’t protect who is kind of funding this thing … if we have to disclose that or that becomes a necessary part of it, the whole enterprise will not work.”

Rebecca Tickell adds: “Because if people think the film is funded by Middle Eastern oil it will, it will not have that credibility,” and Josh Tickell says, “It’s money, so in that sense we have no moral issue.”

Yeah, I suspect that last statement won’t be much of a surprise to anyone who’s worked in Hollywood, either.

The Tickells, Begley, and Hemingway are crying foul now. In comments to THR, they claim that O’Keefe’s editing made things look worse than they are, and are demanding the release of all the video. That didn’t do much to help ACORN, or for that matter, Planned Parenthood when dealing with Live Action’s exposés. The Tickells say that no deal was actually consummated, and that they would have done “due diligence” at that point, but O’Keefe wouldn’t have had $9 million anyway. The point of O’Keefe’s sting is to expose Hollywood enviro eagerness to accept oil-baron money from the Middle East to attack American energy production, and this video certainly does that much. Not that people couldn’t figure that much out from Promised Land‘s Abu Dhabi funding, if they wanted.

The Tickells have decided to keep trying to fund Fracked anyway:

Update: Late Tuesday, the Tickells created a video response that also serves as a pitch to raise $72,000 via an IndieGoGo crowdfunding campaign to make Fracked. “I’m about to tell you a story of the lengths that some people will go to discourage the transition to green energy,” Josh Tickell says in the video. “If it wasn’t so serious it might even be kind of funny. Recently, my wife and I were royally punked.”

Actually, the story is about how some Hollywood enviros will sell out to the worst offenders in order to build their soapboxes. And hey, why do they need to go on IndieGoGo anyway? Doesn’t Mark Ruffalo and Woody Harrelson have $72 grand between them?

•  Share on Facebook

Tags: energy, environmentalism, Hollywood, hypocrisy

Related Posts:

Source from: hotair

Oh,rapture:Obamaadministrationtoreleaseregson

Oh, rapture: Obama administration to release regs on existing power plants next month

posted at 7:01 pm on May 17, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

•  Share on Facebook

The steady trickle of irksomely fustian yet relatively measly climate-change-related regulations, executive orders, grandiose speeches, and frightening studies the Obama administration has been releasing in recent months to quell environmentalist anger have all been leading up to this: The big one.

The EPA will launch the most dramatic anti-pollution regulation in a generation early next month, a sweeping crackdown on carbon that offers President Barack Obama his last real shot at a legacy on climate change — while causing significant political peril for red-state Democrats.

The move could produce a dramatic makeover of the power industry, shifting it away from coal-burning plants toward natural gas, solar and wind. While this is the big move environmentalists have been yearning for, it also has major political implications in November for a president already under fire for what the GOP is branding a job-killing “War on Coal,” and promises to be an election issue in energy-producing states such as West Virginia, Kentucky and Louisiana.

The EPA’s proposed rule is aimed at scaling back carbon emissions from existing power plants, the nation’s largest source of greenhouse gases. It’s scheduled for a public rollout June 2, after months of efforts by the administration to publicize the mounting scientific evidence that rising seas, melting glaciers and worsening storms pose a danger to human society.

“This rule is the most significant climate action this administration will take,” said Kyle Aarons at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, one of a host of groups awaiting the rule’s release.

As Politico notes, the timing of this long-planned release isn’t liable to be very helpful for a slew of vulnerable red-state Democrats, and they along with Republicans are going to be touting the shuttered power plants, lost jobs, economic shrinkage, and expensive (some might say, “necessarily skyrocketing“) energy prices that are likely to come from this move for all they’re worth.

And while the Obama administration is looking to this crackdown on existing coal plants as the highest achievement of its climate-change legacy, never fear, greenies: Administration officials are going to keep eagerly occupying themselves with churning out more of those little economically damaging yet, global-warming-wise, ineffectual show maneuvers until the clock runs out, oh joy:

Officials at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are racing to churn out new regulations before the clock runs out on President Obama’s term.

The activity is evidence that Obama’s push to combat global warming with regulation has entered a critical phase, with officials hammering out the details of rules that carry major implications for the environment and the economy. …

The power plants rule has attracted more attention that perhaps any other Obama administration regulation. Industry and green groups have flocked to the White House in hopes of shaping the proposal, slated to be unveiled early next month.

Meanwhile, the administration has convened meetings on agency proposals for regulations involving oil refineries, the renewable fuel standard and a final rule revising regulations for the disposal of solid waste.

•  Share on Facebook

Tags: Barack Obama, climate change, coal, economy, environmentalism, regulations

Related Posts:

Source from: hotair

Interiorwouldlikeabiggerfirefightingbudgetbecause

Interior would like a bigger firefighting budget because — you guessed it — climate change

posted at 6:51 pm on May 2, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

I feel like I am taking crazy pills.

If the Department of Interior really needs more money for their firefighting budget, fine. I totally get that. There is no denying that we have seem some absolutely devastating wildfires consuming ever-bigger swaths of the arid West in the past few years, and it is obviously better to be prepared than to get caught with your trousers around your ankles — but can we please, please, please be honest about the real reasons why Interior really needs that extra cash, courtesy of us, the taxpayers?

The Department of Interior and the U.S. Forest Service expect to spend $1.8 billion to fight wildfires this season, $470 million more than Congress provided, the agencies said Thursday, blaming climate change for the increased costs.

The agencies said climate change is causing longer and more intense wildfire seasons. …

“While our agencies will spend the necessary resources to protect people, homes and our forests, the high levels of wildfire this report predicts would force us to borrow funds from forest restoration, recreation and other areas,” Robert Bonnie, the Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) under secretary for natural resources and environment, said in a statement. The Forest Service is part of the USDA.

The cost prediction is the highest since a 2009 law took effect requiring three wildfire forecasts each year, the USDA and Interior said. The extreme drought in California, as well as other factors, will make the fires particularly dangerous this year.

In the name of all that is holy, stop using the weather as an all-purpose excuse for every single one of your self-administered problems. At best, warming temperatures may be a contributing factor in worsening the West’s historically parched summertime conditions, but for these guys, climate change is really just a convenient excuse for covering the Department of Interior’s utter failure to exercise smart land-use policies within the third of the surface area of the United States the federal government insisted on bringing under its ownership/stewardship throughout the 20th century.

Warming temperatures, these bureaucrats like to claim, are causing winter snows to melt and rain to evaporate more quickly, so droughts are getting worse and the fire season is getting longer — all of which completely glosses over the way the federal government caved to eco-radicals for decades and suppressed logging and grazing activities in a misbegotten attempt to protect whatever endangered sage grouse was in vogue at the moment. The Forest Service has improved and innovated on some of their policies in the past decade-ish, but we are now reaping the results of the previous decades of untended forests that subsequently got overly dense, overly dry, and are sittin’ pretty, ready to blow.

I can maybe understand why eco-radicals (mistakenly) think that free markets aren’t the best resource manager when it comes to environmental stewardship, but why on earth do they think that putting the landscape at the mercy of the inefficiencies of top-down bureaucratic control (and hence whatever political lobby happens to be most powerful at the moment) is any better? It’s a recipe for disaster, and maybe I’m beating a dead horse here, but the Obama administration and its eco-radical supporters cannot be allowed to act as if the federal government is the virtuous, efficient savior of all things green, when in reality, the federal government directly created a lot of this problem in the first place.

Tags: climate change, Department of the Interior, environmentalism, Obama administration, science

Related Posts:

Source from: hotair

CBS:Trainderailmenthighlightsoil-transportationissues posted

CBS: Train derailment highlights oil-transportation issues

posted at 10:01 am on May 1, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

A train derailment in Lynchburg, Virginia dumped as much as 50,000 gallons of oil, the latest such rail disaster in a recent series. Thus far, the spill doesn’t pose a safety issue for local water use, as the river into which the rail cars tumbled is only used as a drought resource. CBS News raises the point that the safety of oil transport by rail has become a serious problem, and that the federal government has thus far acted slowly to respond to it:

Concern about the safety of oil trains was heightened last July when runaway oil train derailed and exploded in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, near the Maine border. Forty-seven people died and 30 buildings were incinerated. Canadian investigators said the combustibility of the 1.3 million gallons of light, sweet Bakken crude released in Lac-Megantic was comparable to gasoline.

“This is another national wake-up call,” said Jim Hall, a former NTSB chairman said of the Lynchburg crash. “We have these oil trains moving all across the United States through communities and the growth and distribution of this has all occurred, unfortunately, while the federal regulators have been asleep.”

“This is just an area in which the federal rulemaking process is too slow to protect the American people,” he said.

There have been eight significant oil train accidents in the U.S. and Canada in the past year involving trains hauling crude oil, including several that resulted in spectacular fires, according to the safety board.

This has become an issue, although more in the Midwest and Plains states. The product of the Bakken field has to get shipped by rail to refineries in the South, which has also involved a series of rail accidents.  The federal government and the railroad industry reached an accord on new voluntary measures to reduce oil-related rail accidents in February, but these either didn’t get implemented in time, or don’t address the cause of the Lynchburg failure (which may have been storm-weakened soil under the tracks).

There are really only two ways to address oil-transport issues. Either we need to build new refineries closer to production, or we need pipelines rather than rail for transport. The US has barely budged on new refineries over the last 30-plus years, and the regulatory hurdles for building new plants — even though demand would support it — makes this option nearly impossible. That leaves us with pipelines, and this administration has used the regulatory hurdles on the Keystone XL pipeline to indefinitely stall the project. They may kill it to appease their allies in the environmental movement.

That won’t stop us from producing and moving oil, however, even if that’s the real goal of the environmentalists blocking refinery and pipeline projects. It just means that we’ll continue to do so in the least-safe manner.

Tags: derailments, environmentalism, Keystone XL Pipeline, oil production, refineries

Related Posts:

Source from: hotair

TheObamaadminisdelayingtheKeystoneXL

The Obama admin is delaying the Keystone XL review process through the election. Yes, again.

posted at 4:01 pm on April 18, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

The déjà vu is smacking me in the face right now. Just take a quick gander at this NYT piece from November of 2011, and then soak in the similarities of the latest from Time:

The State Department said Friday that while the public comment period will not be extended, executive agencies need more time to review the submitted comments as well as consider a Nebraska court case surrounding the pipeline. The indefinite extension could put off a decision on the pipeline, which would carry crude oil from Canadian tar sands to American refineries, until after November’s midterm elections.

“On April 18, 2014, the Department of State notified the eight federal agencies specified in Executive Order 13337 we will provide more time for the submission of their views on the proposed Keystone Pipeline Project,” the department said in a statement. “Agencies need additional time based on the uncertainty created by the on-going litigation in the Nebraska Supreme Court which could ultimately affect the pipeline route in that state. In addition, during this time we will review and appropriately consider the unprecedented number of new public comments, approximately 2.5 million, received during the public comment period that closed on March 7, 2014.

“The Permit process will conclude once factors that have a significant impact on determining the national interest of the proposed project have been evaluated and appropriately reflected in the decision documents,” the State Department statement continued. “The Department will give the agencies sufficient time to submit their views.”

Which is to say, “the Permit process will conclude” whenever we damn well please.

Back in February, a judge in Nebraska ruled that the administrative channels through which the state had completed its own environmental impact report (which concluded that the pipeline would pose “minimal” risks to Nebraska’s environment, by the way) and subsequently approved the pipeline were void, due to a relatively recent law change that meant the pipeline’s final approving authority should have rested with the Nebraska Public Service Commission rather than the governor. The judge was careful to note that the decision had “nothing to do with the merits” of the pipeline, but was rather a state constitutional matter. The Obama administration is essentially using the issue to excuse punting the pipeline past yet another clutch election — but what in the world an internal dispute in Nebraska has to do with the State Department’s umpteenth review of whether the pipeline is of a net national benefit… has not yet been sufficiently explained to us.

Since Obama reportedly told a group of bipartisan governors he’d be making a decision within a few months in February, I’ve been leaning toward the theory that President Obama will wring every last possible Democratic donation dollar out of the wealthy, Manhattan-and-California-based, Tom Steyer-ish green aristocratic set before finally approving the pipeline shortly before the election — the better to provide a last-minute lift to vulnerable red-state Democrats like Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana — but it sounds like I spoke way too soon. Approving the pipeline would indeed infuriate the aforementioned radical eco-contingent; they may be few, but they are well-monied and their useful-idiot followers are obnoxiously energized. No need to risk that kind of concentrated backlash, and of course, abiding by their wishes and rejecting the pipeline could be directly harmful for those vulnerable Dems (since, you know, almost two-thirds of America approves of the project, no big deal or anything).

Nope — the most politically pusillanimous course of continued delay could very well mean the least net damage for the White House here, so why not just keep making up convenient excuses as they go along and telling Canada to go jump in a lake? I suppose that when Obama told those governors he’d be making a decision “one way or the other in a couple of months,” he was just casually, carelessly, dishonestly putting them off, too — just like the rest of us.

Tags: environmentalism, Keystone XL Pipeline, Obama administration, Senate Democrats, State Department

Related Posts:

Source from: hotair

Statelegislators:Hey,youknowwhatwereally

State legislators: Hey, you know what we really need right now? More federal land!

posted at 7:31 pm on April 15, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

I should probably go ahead and get it out of the way and say that, unfortunately, I agree that Cliven Bundy is legally very wrong in refusing to pay federal grazing fees and instigating a potentially violent standoff with the Bureau of Land Management — but that being said, that does not mean that the law of the land he is opposing is a good one.

As I have written before, the fact that the federal government currently owns a full third of the surface area of the United States is nothing less than a scandal that directly results in countless economic opportunity costs as well as inefficient, uninformed management practices and environmental degradation. For decades, eco-radicals flying the banner of “environmentalism” and “conservation” have been using the auspices of the federal government to slowly take lands out of the hands of private individuals and rural communities and instead put them in the hands of a politically-driven, top-down gigantic bureaucracy wielding the hammer of regulatory power, usually in the name of saving the sage grouse or something.

The “conservationists” that have been advocating for the subsequently restrictive land-use policies and wilderness designations tend to believe that commercial activity and free enterprise (as it pertains here, that means drilling, mining, logging, grazing, etcetera) are fundamentally and necessarily at odds with fostering environmental quality, and generally would really like to see human beings relocated almost entirely into cities.

The federal government hasn’t even designated the requisite cash it takes to properly manage the property it already owns, resulting in a major maintenance backlog, and yet it is constantly acquiring more land — largely via the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which President Obama has oh-so-proudly declared he will fully fund to the tune of around $900 million a year. Perhaps instead of using that money to acquire more land and thus expand those restrictive land-use policies, the feds could instead use that money to better steward the existing federal estate? And hey, while they’re at it, perhaps they could actually sell off some of the federal estate, or even just relinquish some of it to state control, the better to service that $17 trillion debt in which we’re floundering? Maybe?

Alas, expanding those restrictive land-use policies is kinda‘ the goal for these progressive “environmentalist” types. Federal land management essentially means political land management, and they’d like to keep it that way. A timely case in point:

A group of 230 state legislators on Tuesday encouraged President Obama to brush aside Republican opposition and designate more public lands as national monuments.

Public areas in the United States are valuable for tourism and outdoor recreation, the lawmakers said, but the threats of mining, logging and drilling put the lands at risk.

“As legislators, we encourage action from Congress to protect these landscapes but, as you know, for the last three years Congress has passed just one bill to designate new wilderness,” they wrote. …

They want him to declare the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks in New Mexico and Boulder-White Clouds in Idaho as monuments.

“Your administration can deliver a bold agenda for permanently protecting our most critically important cultural and natural heritage in your remaining years in office,” they wrote.

Here’s the letter, and yes, they do actually say that not designating these monuments increases “the risk of mining, logging and drilling,” whilst applauding the president’s support for the LWCF. The fact that decades’ worth of the federally-directed prevention of thinning activities like grazing and logging has directly resulted in unnaturally dense forests that have been erupting into the explosive wildfires we’ve lately been experiencing, was not mentioned (because, of course, they’d like the shift the blame away from themselves and onto climate change). Nope — for these guys, ushering more land into the federal estate is just another tool through which “environmentalists” can exert their whims, deter fossil-fuel investment, squash rural economies, and shepherd more people into urban areas.

Tags: bureaucracy, Democrats, environmentalism, federal government, land, Land and Water Conservation Fund, natural resources

Related Posts:

Source from: hotair