Eco-Insanity and ANWR

By Alan Caruba

The abject desperation and evil intentions of so-called environmentalists can be seen in the call to turn the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) into a national monument on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of its designation.

This would provide ANWR with the same status as the Statue of Liberty—only there aren't billion of barrels of oil under the Statue, nor at George Washington’s birthplace in Virginia.

The idea of conferring national monument status on ANWR is so stupid that it should be laughed out of existence, but unfortunately we have a President who is so intent on denying Americans access to the vast treasure trove of energy resources—oil, coal, and natural gas—that common sense has nothing to do with his decisions.

Reporting from Anchorage, Alaska, for the Associated Press, Mary Pemberton noted that “National monument status could be an estimated 11 billion barrels of recoverable oil beyond the grasp of oil companies forever.” And that means beyond the use of Americans for the countless uses of oil that they depend upon every day for transportation, heating, lubrication, and the manufacture of thousands of products.

The usual nitwits have sent letters to the President, a combination of 80 members of Congress, 170 unidentified “scientists”, some 300 businesses and organizations (that might benefit if oil was in short supply), and 22 religious organizations. Nobody in Alaska supports this idiocy.

There are some well-known facts worth considering.

Alaska comprises 378 million acres.

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuse consists of 19.5 million acres.

The area in question where the drilling would occur involves only 1.5 million acres and, of that, only about 2,000 acres would be utilized.

By comparison, Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C. takes up an area that is five times as big, fully 11,000 acres.

The area designated for drilling is far from a “pristine” wonderland. While there are parts of Alaska that are breathtakingly beautiful, ANWR is a perfect definition for “when Hell freezes over.”

After visiting Alaska in 2001, Jonah Goldberg, a nationally syndicated columnist, wrote in 2001 that the more beautiful parts of Alaska are far from ANWR and, in particular, “The oil is on the coastal plain at the very top of ANWR on the coast of the Arctic Ocean. And it ain’t beautiful.” The greatest population of wildlife there are trillions of mosquitoes.

“Winter on the coastal plan lasts for nine months,” noted Goldberg. “Total darkness reigns for 58 straight days. The temperatures drop to 70 degrees below zero without wind chill.”

Far from being a tourist’s mecca, ANWR said Goldberg “is a colossal fetid petri dish for some of the worst flying pestilence you can imagine.” In addition to the mosquitoes, there are nostril flies that infest caribou and parasitic warble flies that make life on the plain a hell for its local fauna. The caribou, by the way, had in 2001 increased their population “fivefold since oil exploration began decades ago in nearby Prudhoe Bay.”

The area of ANWR where the oil is known to exist is a vast frozen tundra. Not the ecological treasure the environmentalists are always braying about. Oil drilling would require roads, drill pads, and pipelines. The 2,000 acres involved is 1/20th the size of Washington, D.C. It’s the equivalent to twenty of the buildings where Boeing manufacturers its 747s.

If you flew over, it would be a tiny speck in a huge frozen wasteland. And it would provide about two million barrels of oil a day that we would not need to import from Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.

An Arctic wilderness is not a national monument and it is an obscenity to even consider such a designation.

Editor's Note: For more information, visit http://www.anwr.org/

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Ga-Ga for Sarah

By Alan Caruba

As we know from the 2008 campaign, every so often Americans go ga-ga over some politician. A relatively slim majority of the voters were convinced that Barack Obama was the first or second coming of a great new future filled with “change”; all of which has turned out for the worst.

The inexplicable choice of Sarah Palin as John McCain’s vice presidential running mate instantly conferred fame on the now-former Governor of Alaska and brought out all the attack dogs of the media. I was instantly reminded of the Geraldine Ferraro fiasco when Walter Mondale selected her as his running mate in 1984.

At this point, Palin embodies all the discontent of a vast body of Americans who believe that the nation has lost touch with conservative principles of fiscal prudence, a strong national defense, and smaller government.

Since there are currently few Republicans in high office that can be considered front-runners in 2012, Palin gives party loyalists someone in whom they can invest their hope in the short run, if not as a candidate herself, at least as a spokesperson for the values they share.

It was fairly obvious throughout the campaign that Palin was not well-schooled in foreign affairs issues, although her strong suit was clearly energy issues due to her role in Alaska’s oil-rich good fortune. She is perhaps a quick learner and could yet master the myriad of things a national leader has to know in order to demonstrate competence.

Her fairly swift rise to high office in Alaska appears to have been powered by dissatisfaction with corrupt state politicians who had disappointed Alaskans sufficiently to take a chance on a fresh new face and voice. In office, she took on the oil interests and rid the state of wasteful spending. It should be noted, however, that the World Almanac puts Alaska’s population as of 2007 at 683,478 people. Most U.S. cities have larger populations.

I think Tina Fey’s Saturday Nigh Live depiction of Sarah Palin resonated with viewers for both its remarkable physical similarity and its clear suggestion that she too often appeared clueless during the campaign.

That was then and this is now. And now there is the soaring bestseller status of her book and the promotional tour that is intended to sell even more while establishing her as a significant voice for conservatives in general and Republicans in particular.

She is, in many ways, a media phenomenon and that includes most of the media that still abhors her, the remainder that wants to exploit her for ratings and circulation, and the few that want to provide her with a legitimate platform to express her views.

These days, Geraldine Ferraro, a Democrat, is called upon to occasionally comment on matters deemed appropriate for a former vice presidential candidate, a former Congresswoman, and a kind of political freak of nature.

Once the uproar over Palin’s book subsides, this is likely to be her role in life as well; a female Republican office-holder plucked from relative obscurity for whatever reasons John McCain had at the time.

The success of Palin’s book will help pay the enormous legal bills she and her husband faced as the result of malicious suits brought against her, all of which have ended in failure to find any wrongdoing. Her speaking fees will provide her family with a lifestyle that she has earned by being tough enough to meet the extraordinary challenges with which her political and personal life has presented her.

Beyond that, I do not see her reentering the political scene by running for Senator from Alaska, for its Governor again, or any other position, least of all the presidency. I think she will continue to evolve into a spokesperson for values and principles that many Americans share, but which are being eroded by a full scale attack by the Obama administration.

So, let’s all go ga-ga for Sarah for a little while and let’s hope she will eviscerate Barack Obama with the same gusto she hunted moose.

Sarah! Sarah! Sarah!

By Alan Caruba

Sarah Palin’s stunning announcement on July 3rd that she would step down as Governor of Alaska at the end of the month left all the political pundits gazing into their crystal ball desperately looking for an explanation.

The most obvious answer was the one she offered. She had done as much as she thought she could do for Alaska and now she wanted some time with her family. We are conditioned to never believe what politicians tell us and, in most cases, that is the wisest thing, but Palin breaks the mold in many ways.

The first thing everyone wants to know is whether she will run for President? She is enormously popular with many rank and file Republicans, but probably not with the power brokers within the party. She is, unlike John McCain, a true “maverick” because she actually believes in the major tenets of conservatism, limited government, strong defense, and fiscal prudence.

The GOP has long since strayed from those Reaganesque values and there is no better recent example than George W. Bush. For the life of me, I still have no idea how McCain got the nomination and things got really bizarre when he plucked Palin out of the wilds of Alaska and near total obscurity.

She was, after all, a woman. The last time a presidential candidate selected a woman as his running mate was Walter Mondale who chose Geraldine Ferraro and that turned out to be a Democrat disaster. What was McCain thinking? Of course, that’s what Republicans keep asking no matter what McCain says or does as he seems like some kind of stealth Democrat most of the time.

Palin was an instant hit; a sudden political superstar and, at the same time, also a candidate in over her head when it came to a national election. The press quickly lampooned her as a Moose-shooting rube from the only state less far away from the lower 48 than Hawaii. Even so, she was dynamite on the stump. And she still draws large, enthusiastic crowds to the consternation of Democrats and some Republicans.

Palin suffered from one of the worst political campaigns in recent memory. McCain had no central message, few new ideas, and poor delivery whether delivering a speech or in an interview. The man was painful to watch. He looked old. He sounded old. The contrast with his young running mate made some think the wrong person was on the top of the ticket running for president.

Palin was, by virtually any political standard, unique. Plain-speaking, possessed of a photogenic family and with personal, religious, and political values that rang true with a lot of people who sensed she was the real deal as a conservative.

She also did not appear to have much depth when it came to the major issues challenging the nation. She tended to speak in clichés and still does.

She brought out the very worst in Democrats/liberals. I cannot recall when a candidate was so viciously attacked. The mainstream media parachuted reporters into Wasilla, Alaska in a desperate effort to find anything bad to say about her. On Saturday Night Live, a devastating satirical portrait by Tina Fey turned her into a joke; someone who “could see Russia” from her front porch.

If the GOP could bottle whatever it is she does that drives liberals like New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd insane, we could begin to win some elections again. Citing another hit job, a profile by Todd Purdum in Vanity Fair, Dowd notes that some regard Palin as suffering from narcissistic personality disorder, but clearly has not noticed any evidence of this in President Obama.

So why did she quit and what will she do now? I think the girl from Wasilla wants some time with her family while she and they are still young. She has five children and one grandchild. They are Track, Trig, Bristol, Willow and Piper. Unwed, teenage Bristol is the mother of Tripp. This is definitely not the Brady Bunch.

She probably also needs time away from the horrid attacks. I don’t think most of us give much thought to the toll such savagery takes on a public figure. She surely has done nothing to deserve it other than to become a rising star among a fairly dull Republican roster of potential presidential candidates.

Larry Kudlow, the columnist and radio host with a brilliant take on economic issues, thinks she is the new head of the Republican Party and I think he may be right.

And, finally, I keep thinking she would really like to take off the gloves and tear into Barack Hussein Obama. The Alaskan Governor’s office is not the right place to do that. Combine that will a quarter million in legal expenses to defend against spurious charges, and the reason for leaving early seems fairly obvious.

She needs a bigger platform and her new freedom gives her one.

The President becomes more vulnerable to serious criticism with every passing day and, so far, Republicans have been too quiet. Palin is likely to do politically to Obama what she has already done to a Moose.

The Price to Be Paid

By Alan Caruba

I’m betting that, by the end of 2008, Americans will have adjusted to gasoline that costs $4 or more per gallon. We won’t like it, but we will accept it as the price one pays to live in a world that is filled with oil, but one where it resides mostly in nations unfriendly to our welfare and ambitions, as well as in difficult places such as the ocean depths.

Europe which has no such oil reserves save those in the North Sea off of England has long since paid large sums of money for the gasoline it requires, importing much of it from Russia, a nation that oil and natural gas has helped sustain through seventy years of horrid history under Soviet communist domination and now in the new version of czarist control by Vladimir Putin and his friends.

Russia, like so many other oil-rich nations, however, has demonstrated that political control of oil is a recipe for mismanagement and corruption. Ironically, it is the Saudis and the Gulf states that have invested more wisely in their vast oil and natural gas industries, planning ahead to transform themselves into financial centers and even tourist destinations. The African oil nations remain despotisms wracked with internal mutinies and factions. In South America, it runs the gamut from Venezuala's declining capabilities to Brazil's massive new discoveries.

Meanwhile, Americans are finally coming to the realization that they have permitted those who prefer to keep Alaska and our offshore areas “pristine” bastions devoted to creatures such as caribou, polar bears, and loons that could care less whether we are forced to pay exorbitant amounts of money to fuel our cars, keep our trucks on the road, and heat our homes.

These same folks, environmentalists and those who hate America’s success, have no problem proposing that massive wind “farms” be erected in those same offshore areas where one can watch them try to generate a mere pittance worth of electricity if only the wind will keep blowing. It doesn’t keep blowing all the time no matter where these monstrosities are located. Wind power is one of the most idiotic forms of energy and exists only because of massive subsidies and government mandates. They must be backed up by those wonderful old-fashioned coal-fired plants or, God willing, by the construction of more nuclear ones.

In the May issue of Energy Tribune, editors Michael J. Economides and Robert Bryce devote its pages to Alaska and other places around the world that are going to be more and more in the news as the price of oil and natural gas continues to rise. This is because investors, watching the value of the U.S. dollar decline, are putting their money into commodities futures. In an article by Ron Oligney, the author recalls that, “Almost as soon as the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline System construction was complete and oil began to flow in 1977, the talk around our dinner table and across Alaska turned to the next great pipeline project—the Trans-Alaskan Gasline System.” Today, thirty years later, it has not been built.

I suspect that Alaska is going to emerge as a major political issue in the months and years ahead. Unfortunately for the voters, all three candidates have drunk deeply of the environmental Kool-Aid and the two Democrats have voiced deep antipathy to the only thing that will provide any measure of national energy security, Big Oil. It costs billions to drill for oil, to transport it via pipelines, to refine it, and to make it available to people who need to drive to work.

Americans need Big Oil's enterprise and their investor dividends, but Congress insists on thwarting every effort they must make, every dollar they must risk, and every job they provide, by making them the enemy. If you want to see what a real enemy looks like head south and take a look at Venezuela's Hugo Chavez.

Congress, seeking to divert attention from its decades-long, appallingly stupid energy policies, prefers to drag Big Oil's executives before its committees, demanding that they abandon the capitalist notion of making a profit and, in the case of Rep. Maxine Waters, threatening to nationalize them. This is what communists and others do.

As Robert Bryce says, “America has never quite known what to do with Alaska. For many, the state—far from the lower 48, cold, and largely unpopulated—is more a notion than a place. That may help explain why oil and gas development in Alaska carries so much political baggage."

The Bush administration has just declared the polar bear, currently a thriving population, as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act, claiming that a computer model of global warming in fifty to a hundred years will be bad for them. This ignores the cooling cycle the Earth has been in since 1998. This puts Alaska's oil and gas reserves in its vast offshore areas off-limits to any exploration and extraction.

Billions of barrels exist beneath the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge and offshore. Americans are going to want to get at it. They are going to become more and more vocal about it as the price of gasoline increases and they will be years away from getting any once the drilling begins.

Alaska is preparing to sue the U.S. government for depriving Americans of the riches Congress refuses to access in as little as 2,000 acres of the Refuges’ 19.5 million acres.

Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, in places like India and China, the demand for oil is growing as their economies grow. China cannot build coal-fired electricity generation plants fast enough to keep pace with its billion-plus population and India is planning an ambitious program of nuclear plants for its billion-plus population.

In the United States, we make it as difficult as possible to build a single new plant.

It’s a new era of prosperity and America, so accustomed to being the wealthiest place on Earth, is going to have to make some changes—and soon—if it wants to be a player. It needs to scrap its idiotic ethanol program. It needs to open up its offshore areas to exploration and extraction. It needs to drill in ANWR.

There is a price to pay for being stupid. We are all going to pay it until Congress and whoever occupies the White House next January begins to listen to the rest of us.

Polar Bear Lies

By Alan Caruba

We live in a day when lies about polar bears are used to deny Americans access to the vast oil reserves—billions of barrels—that are known to exist in the Alaska National Wildlife Reserve and coastal areas. Extracting it would barely take up a fraction of one percent of ANWR and, as with the previous oil development, the wildlife are totally indifferent and unaffected.

The lie is that polar bears will become extinct in fifty years if they are not declared “endangered species” under the utterly useless, stupid legislation that environmentalists pushed through as yet another means to harm the economy. Polar bears are not endangered. Their numbers have risen from 5,000 in the 1950s to an estimated 22,000 today.

Think I am making this up? As the American Land Rights Association recently noted, “Ask timber workers in the West whose industry was all but eliminated by critical habitat designation for the spotted owl—whose numbers were later found to be declining, not because of logging, but due to invasion of its habitat by the more aggressive barred owl.”

“Ask those who used to farm in Oregon’s Klamath Valley who lost their irrigation water to protect fish that were later found to not be harmed by using the water for irrigation.”

“Ask the ranchers in Idaho’s Owyhee County who finally threw in the towel after their grazing allotments were so severely restricted they couldn’t continue.”

These are just three examples of the war on the timber industry, farming and ranching that is the hallmark of the environmental movement. They view oil as their greatest enemy and that is why there is a great push on to get the polar bears declared endangered.

What is endangered is a nation that already has to import most of its oil because so much of our national supplies and potential reserves are off limits.

What is endangered is the right of loggers, farmers, ranchers and all others who are an essential element of our economy to go about their business.

There are people in our government you need to contact NOW!

Joshua Bolton, Chief of Staff @ (202) 456-6798 - Fax: (202) 456-0192
mailto:456-0192joshua_b._bolton@who.eop.gov

Patrick Aylward, Director, Office of the Chief of Staff @ (202) 456-6798 - Fax: (202) 456-0192
mailto:456-0192patrick_s._aylward@who.eop.gov

Edward Gillespie, WH Communications @ (202) 456-7910 - Fax: (202) 456-1539
mailto:456-1539edward_w._gillespie@who.eop.gov

Cynthia Bergman, Communications @ (202) 456-2777 - Fax: (202) 456-2505
mailto:456-2505cynthia_l._bergman@who.eop.gov

Joseph Hagin, Assistant to the President @ (202) 456-6798 - Fax: (202) 456-1907
mailto:456-1907joseph_w._hagin@who.eop.gov

Emily Willeford, Office of Deputy Chief @ (202) 456-2450 - Fax: (202) 456-1907
mailto:456-1907emily_willeford@who.eop.gov

Fred Fielding, White House Counsel @ (202) 456-2632 - Fax: (202) 456-6279
mailto:456-6279fred_f._fielding@who.eop.gov

There is no legal, factual or scientific basis for declaring that polar bears are threatened or endangered. Under the ESA, a species is "threatened" if it is likely to become endangered within the foreseeable future throughout all or a significant portion of its range. Total polar bear population is about 22,000 animals.

There is no danger to arctic habitats and no evidence of imminent threat to polar bears.

Computer models, hype, headlines and pressure tactics are not evidence.

Temperatures in Alaska have ranged from +100 (Fort Yukon, 1915) down to -80 (Prospect Creek, 1976). Any analysis beginning in 1975 will likely show a warming trend upward from a very cold period. The polar bears survived both and will continue to do just fine.

Contact Secretary of the Interior, Dirk Kempthorne @ (202) 208-3100
dirk_kempthorne@ios.doi.gov

Green PR to Influence Presidential Candidates

By Alan Caruba

Have you ever wondered why hardly a day goes by without your reading or hearing about some Green program? It’s not just happenstance. The environmental movement has one of the most varied and impressive public relations programs extant. And it spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on it.

Take, for example, a $250,000 contract that Fraser Communications, a Los Angeles PR and advertising firm, just secured to promote the Presidential Climate Action Project. It is described as “an academic, government and interest group push to make climate change a priority for the next U.S. president.” Think about that, we haven’t even had a primary yet, but this program is already thinking about how to bring pressure on whoever is elected to continue dealing with climate change or, as it used to be known, “global warming.”

About the only person still using the term “global warming” is the gaseous former Vice President, Al Gore. He has, despite his Nobel Prize, evolved into a laughing stock for his near-term predictions of global catastrophe.

The Presidential Climate Action Project (PCAP) has an “advisory committee” that includes the Johnson Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, and the National Wildlife Federation, among other groups.

One almost instantly wonders why a governmental agency like NOAA that presumably takes its direction from Congress is involved in trying to influence a future president? Isn’t that just a tad inappropriate? Unethical?

As to the others, from the beginning when the environmental movement first took off, it has been leftist foundations that have provided the funding, so there’s no surprise in that. Here again, however, one wonders what the National Wildlife Federation’s interest in climate change is all about? Since the Green mantra is that climate change is manmade, the result of human activities, why is a group devoted to bison, bunny rabbits, and other furry creatures involved?

The whole object of this endeavor and the charge that its PR firm will undertake is to apply “public persuasion” strategies related to policy and the environment. The key goal is to “set the stage for candidates running for public office in 2008 to take positions on specific proposals to address climate, energy, and national security.”

Whoa! The name of the project is “Climate Action”, but it turns out that this Green project is also about energy and national security.

One can understand “energy” because the primary goal of the Greens is to cripple the ability of the U.S. to acquire the energy resources it requires to maintain our economy and our lifestyle. Using the Endangered Species Act, the Environmental Protection Agency, and every other means, the bottom line is to insure that no coal-fired electricity utilities be built anywhere and to continue to slow any progress toward nuclear facilities. As for oil, they hate it. That’s why they have conspired to limit access to the billions of barrels of oil untapped in ANWR, Alaska’s North Slope, and 85% of our nation’s continental shelf.

You want national security? You better be able to fuel our Air Force squadrons, our Army’s tanks, and our Navy’s carrier fleets. You better cut our current 75% imports of oil and become more self-sufficient.

But somehow I suspect that PCAP’s agenda is about influencing presidential candidates to take positions that they genuflect to the myth of global warming. That means a President who will sign off on carbon dioxide limits on every industry and activity that might emit CO2. And that includes backyard barbeques.

Billions of Barrels off Brazil's Shoreline

By Alan Caruba

It's not getting much news coverage, but the Associated Press had a story on November 9th that "a monster offshore oil discovery and promising fields near the find could help Brazil join the ranks of the world's major exporters...."

There's lots of oil to be found in and offshore South America. The new field called "Tupi" is significant, not just for the size of its estimated reserves of some eight billion barrels, but because it is "light crude", the most favored type. Initial production is anticipated to exceed 100,000 barrels a day. Petroleo Brazileiro SA will start pumping in 2010 or 2011.

Brazil intends to keep the oil as a nationally owned commodity and not sell it off to foreign international oil players. Considering that the major Big Oil companies combined own only about 4.8% of the world's reserves, this is not good news for them, but oil is sold in a global market and Big Oil does not set the price.

Indeed, I doubt they are too happy about oil flirting with $100 a barrel because the more it costs the consumer, the less the consumer wants to buy it. Granted, we all need gasoline for the car, oil to heat the house, but if people decide to switch to natural gas for heating purposes or buy a hybrid car, that just cuts into future profits. Affordable gasoline and oil is their objective.

The Tupi field, by the way, "lies under 7,060 feet of water, almost 10,000 feet of sand and rocks, and then another 6,600 thick layer of salt." That, my friend, is a hell of a lot of drilling, but the payoff is going to be worth it.

There's lots and lots more oil to be found, but like Tupi it is going to be more costly to find it and then to extract it.

It's worth noting that Brazil's oil reserves currently rank it 17th in the world. Add in Mexico's oil reserves and the oil tar fields of Canada, and there's going to be plenty of oil in the North and South American continents to meet our needs for a long time to come. The wild card is Venezuela whose dictator's ravings are part of the geopolitical reason the price of oil is rising.

Now if we can only get those idiots in Congress to open up Alaska's ANWR where America has billions of untapped barrels of oil and to permit exploration of the 85% of the Continental Shelf they have declared off-limits, Americans might actually have a smile on their face when they pull into the gas station.