Everyday Disasters on Capitol Hill

By Alan Caruba

It is helpful to be wired into the behind the scenes action on Capitol Hill and I don’t mean the predictable reporting the various liberal or conservative news magazines or newspapers churn out.

Take, for example, a Science & Technology subcommittee meeting this week on the subject of polar bears and the Endangered Species Act. Suffice it to say this is one of the most idiotic pieces of legislation passed. The notion that humans, not Nature, should determine what species survive and which do not is egotism squared. For the record, easily 90% or more of all the species that ever lived on planet earth are extinct. Darwin called it “survival of the fittest.”

When it comes to being designed to survive in the harsh waters of Arctic, polar bears are the winners. They are superb swimmers and, despite everything Al Gore keeps telling you, their population has been steadily growing for many years. However, at the subcommittee meeting, you wouldn’t know that. Its witnesses were a hand-picked bunch of Greens whose testimony, like so much of what Greens have to say on any subject, was just so much hogwash. Only Representative Rohrabacher (CA) was there to introduce any real facts into the discussion.

These meetings are designed to be bits of charade by which to advance the Green lies and the Green policy agendas, all of which end up costing taxpayers and animal lovers a lot more than they are worth, if indeed, like the ESA, they are worth anything. Billions have been wasted already on "saving" animals, but many weren't even endangered at all.

Elsewhere Myron Ebels of the Competitive Enterprise Institute led a “Cooler Heads” meeting on Tuesday designed to point out how the ESA is being used on federal lands to insure that no natural resource—coal, natural gas, oil, timber—can be accessed, extracted, mined, or harvested.

If the polar bear lies become law, the entire north slope of Alaska will be off limits in terms of its extensive oil and natural gas deposits. They will stay buried while the U.S. grows more dependent on the Middle East and other nations, some of whom do not like us.

What does that mean to you? Well, a barrel of oil today is now fetching $83 to $86 and you can expect it to go to $100 if this keeps up. You will have time to see how all this fits together when you’re pumping gasoline (with an ethanol additive) into your car’s tank and experiencing sticker-shock at how much it’s costing you.

For that you can thank the Greens and all the others who hate Big Coal, Big Oil, Big Timber, et cetera.