In The News
Natural Defense Resource Council and Sonar
Wednesday September 3, 2003
FACT: NRDC apparently cares more about whales than Navy officers and enlisted personnel on submarines. Notwithstanding the fact that LFA has not inflicted any harm on marine mammals—Dr. Darlene Ketten, senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and a leading expert in sensory adaptation of marine mammals, said in her April 2003 testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee: “To date, there is no evidence of physical harm [to marine mammals] from LFA [low frequency sonar]”—the decision undermines the safety and security of U.S. sailors. An exchange between Sen. Inhofe and Adm. William Fallon during a March 13 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing illustrates what’s at stake:
SEN. INHOFE: But there are some circumstances under which this sonar is the only way of detecting [quite diesel submarines].
ADM. FALLON: Yes. We -- the likelihood of detecting submarines without this in many circumstances we think is pretty low.
SEN. INHOFE: In an actual situation, not training, then if you had to shut down, what's the exposure?
ADM. FALLON: Well, we're not going to be able to get it online and we'll be forced to use what we have, which we don't think is adequate to meet this emerging threat.
SEN. INHOFE: So this is a life and death situation, it could be for your sailors?
ADM. FALLON: Well, if we end up in a position where we are asked to execute a mission with that kind of a threat and we can't detect that threat, then our forces are at risk.
McCain-Lieberman and Higher Gas Prices
Tuesday August 26, 2003
FACT: If drivers are fuming now, they’ll be downright apoplectic if the McCain-Lieberman climate change bill ever becomes law. Under McCain-Lieberman, gasoline prices, according to an analysis by the non-partisan Energy Information Administration, would soar to rising heights, with no relief in sight. “Delivered energy prices for the transportation sector increase significantly in the S.139 case compared to the reference case,” EIA found. “In the S.139 case, gasoline fuel price in 2001 constant dollars increases by 40 cents per gallon (27 percent) above the reference case price.” From 2008 through 2025, prices go up steadily, reaching, as EIA reports, a zenith of $1.90 per gallon in 2025. No doubt, then, will one still hear shrieks and cries of “Big Oil” gouging consumers at the pump.
Natural Gas and The Maze of Bureaucratic Restrictions
Friday August 1, 2003
FACT: That problem was a maze of bureaucratic restrictions, enforced with help from environmental extremists, which blocked HEYCO, and many companies like it, from producing much-needed natural gas. The New Mexico-based environmental extremist group Chihuahuan Desert Conservation Alliance (CDCA) said that, “oil and gas development just does not belong” on federal land. The list of CDCA-supported requirements and obstructions is endless, but here are a few gems: In 1998 the Bureau of Land Management proposed a prohibition on HEYCO’s drilling activities from January to July. The reason? Raptor breeding season. In addition, the Fish and Wildlife Service demanded HEYCO adopt a routine policy of surveying for any migratory bird nests every year from March through August. Upon discovery of a nest, HEYCO was required to remove any equipment within a quarter-mile. HEYCO was then required to give the agency three weeks' notice before moving any dirt near its work sites. To make matters worse, the BLM complained that HEYCO's proposed natural gas pipeline would trample some yucca (a type of grass), contributing to “grassland habitat fragmentation.” Said company representative Steve Yates: “It becomes so difficult to comply with [the restrictions] that it's just not worth drilling anymore.”
25 Kyotos to stop global warming
Thursday July 31, 2003
FACT: Kyoto will do nothing for the environment or have any impact on global temperatures. This is the unequivocal conclusion of Altero Matteoli, Italy’s minister for the environment and territory. With Italy hosting the next round of global climate negotiations, Matteoli said on July 7 that, “Within the framework of [Kyoto], we will manage to reach a 2 percent reduction in emissions at best, but we all know that we need to halve greenhouse emissions world-wide by 2050 in order to prevent further damage to climate.” Now, even if one concedes that man-made greenhouse gas emissions are causing global warming or damaging climate (they’re not), according to Matteoli, the world would have to reduce emissions by 50 percent to have any effect. Put another way, the world would need 25 Kyotos to stop global warming. The Energy Information Administration said one Kyoto, among other destructive effects, would cost the U.S. economy $400 billion annually. Guess President Bush ain’t so unsophisticated after all.
Preventing Forest Fires
Tuesday July 29, 2003
FACT: Klein came up against the legal obstructionism of environmental extremists, who systematically stopped attempts to thin Arizona’s Black Mesa forest district, which Klein manages, and who oppose President Bush’s Healthy Forests Initiative, which will save and preserve forests. The result was a massive wildfire that left a swath of desolation, killing everything, animal species included, that got in its way. Klein blames the Center for Biological Diversity, who blocked thinning repeatedly, for the fire. Her reaction is worth recounting in full: “If we had done all this thinning we wanted to over the years, we could have kept this fire from exploding, and we could have saved the towns it burned through. All those arguments we heard about how ‘your timber sale is going to destroy Mexican spotted owl habitat,’ ‘your timber sale is going to destroy the watershed.’ And our timber sale wouldn’t have had a fraction of the effect a severe wildfire has. It doesn’t scorch the soil, it doesn’t remove all the trees, it doesn’t burn up all the forage. And then to hear their statements afterward! There was no humility, no acceptance of responsibility, no acknowledgment that we had indeed lost all this habitat that they were concerned about. All they could do was point their finger at us and say it was our fault.”
Kennedy and the financial burden of Kyoto
Thursday July 24, 2003
FACT: CEG could find itself even busier if the policies championed by Joe Kennedy’s friends in the Democratic Party and the environmental movement become law. Those policies, which call for, among other things, regulating carbon dioxide emissions, would hit the poor and elderly the hardest, as several independent, non-partisan analyses have convincingly shown. There are several: the international Kyoto Protocol, which Wharton Econometric Forecasting Associates (WEFA) says would cause a doubling of energy and electricity prices; the Clean Power Act, which in 2010, according to EIA, would increase overall residential-energy costs by 17 percent and household electricity costs by 25 percent; and the Climate Stewardship Act of 2003, a Kyoto implementation bill, that EIA says would make electricity prices 46 percent higher in 2025.
S. 139 Climate Stewardship Ac: Increasing Taxes on the Poor
Tuesday July 22, 2003
FACT: A lot, considering that those who, in the shrillest of tones, demanded justice for the working poor are simultaneously supporting environmental policies that will INCREASE taxes on the poor. For example, S. 139, the Climate Stewardship Act of 2003, expected to reach the Senate floor next week, would establish a Kyoto-like cap-and-trade system to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions. In a 2001 report on carbon cap-and-trade programs, the Congressional Budget Office couldn’t have been more direct: “The economic impacts of cap-and-trade programs would be similar to those of a carbon tax: both would raise the cost of using carbon-based fossil fuels, lead to higher energy prices, and impose costs on users and some suppliers of energy.” And further: “[A] cap and trade program would be regressive—that is, it would impose a greater relative burden on lower-income households than on higher-income households.”
Natural Gas Crisis, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and the Natural Defense Resource Council
Tuesday July 15, 2003
FACT: Following California’s lead is not exactly sound advice. There is a serious natural gas crisis, and it can be traced in large part to lawsuits filed by NRDC and its extremist allies, who have blocked natural gas production on federal lands for years. In January, Peter Morton, of the Wilderness Society, warned energy companies that environmental groups will sue them if they try to obtain leases allowing energy production on federal lands. Fed Chairman Greenspan, during last week’s Senate Energy Committee hearing, candidly discussed the consequences of Big Green obstruction: “I do say this: I say that it is essential that one recognizes what the cost in energy policy is if you restrict the access to certain areas where preliminary seismic analysis has indicated very significant capabilities in gas.”
Taxes and Global Warming
Friday July 11, 2003
FACT: No. Environmentalists are using global warming to impose taxes on the American people--taxes that restrict the freedom to use affordable energy and SUVs, two things environmentalists just can’t stand. The method is clear: scare the public about a future world plagued by all of the above, then force through taxes on fuel, cars, electricity, carbon dioxide, whatever. J.W. Anderson said it best in today’s Washington Post. A journalist in residence at Resources for the Future, and former editorial writer for the Post, Anderson wrote: “The better and, in the nonpolitical sense of the word, more conservative policy would be to start now, gently and gradually, to discourage fuel use and encourage efficiency with a small tax on fuel--and put the country on notice that in years to come, if necessary, it would rise.”
Europe and Kyoto
Thursday July 10, 2003
FACT: Those Europeans: always haughty, always wrong. As President Bush rightly understood, Kyoto is unrealistic, provides no environmental benefits, and is economically destructive. Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain can’t seem to meet their Kyoto targets. As the Wall Street Journal reported last week, “For the second straight year, Europe's emissions of six greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, have risen. Most of the 15 nations are falling farther behind in their efforts to cut emissions and meet their combined Kyoto commitment to reduce emissions 8% below 1990 levels by the end of the decade. Based on current trends, the European Environment Agency predicts emissions will come down only by 4.7% by the time the targets become binding from 2008 to 2012.”