OPINION/COMMENTARY

WHO's to Blame?

Blaming global climate change for health problems, particularly in the developing world, is a convenient smokescreen for the miserable results of the WHO strategy. Ever since Mexico reduced its use of insecticides -- at the WHO's behest -- cases of ages-old endemic mosquito-borne diseases are reappearing in the US. A study out this month from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta found a pocket of endemic malaria in Palm Beach, Florida. Palm Beach hasn't suddenly become the Brazilian jungle; the malaria danger is not a question of climate, but of green anti-insecticide policies.
How many Americans have to die of West Nile Fever and other mosquito-borne diseases before pressure is applied to US agencies and the WHO to change its policies? Climate change may yet prove a danger but policies prompted by green zealots are already deadly...

Abundant Reserves Show Petroleum Age Is Just Beginning

And the age of petroleum has only just begun. For more than 80 years, geologists' estimates of the world's endowment of oil have risen faster than developers can pump it out of the ground. In 1920, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated just 20 billion barrels of oil remained in the world. By the year 2000, the estimate had grown to 3,000 billion barrels.
Every year, technological advances make it possible to draw upon petroleum resources whose extraction was once unthinkable. We can now drill wells up to 30,000 feet deep. The amount of oil that can be recovered from a single well has been enhanced by a technology that allows multiple horizontal shafts to be branched off from one vertical borehole. The ability to drill offshore in water depths of up to 9,000 feet has opened up the vast petroleum resources of the world's submerged continental margins.
The world also contains immense amounts of unconventional oil resources that we have not yet begun to tap. Tar sands found in Canada and South America contain 600 billion barrels of oil, enough to supply the U.S. with 84 years of oil at the current consumption rate. Worldwide, the amount of oil that can be extracted from oil shales could be as much as 14,000 billion barrels--enough to supply the world for 500 years...

McCain's Nose-Under-the-Tent Strategy

Who does Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) think he is fooling?
McCain's "Climate Stewardship Act" (S. 139), co-sponsored with Senator Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.), and soon to be voted on in the Senate, started out as a roadmap back to the Kyoto Protocol, the UN global warming treaty that President Bush rejected in March 2001. As originally introduced, McCain's bill would require the United States to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, chiefly carbon dioxide (CO2) from fossil energy use, to year 2000 levels in 2010 ("Phase I") and 1990 levels in 2016 ("Phase II"). Not as restrictive as the U.S. Kyoto target (7 percent below 1990 levels during 2008-2012), but close enough for government work. Too close, in fact, to be viable in today's political climate.
With or without Phase II, McCain's bill would -- like Kyoto -- establish the institutional framework for a succession of increasingly stringent controls on energy use. Indeed, Section 336 states that the Undersecretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere shall determine "no less frequently than biennially" whether the bill's emission caps remain "consistent" with the "objective" of preventing "dangerous" human interference with the climate system. Commerce would become a permanent lobbyist within the Executive Branch for new taxes or caps on carbon-based energy.
So when McCain asks colleagues to support Phase I, he might as well say, "I just want to put the camel's nose under the tent -- what possible harm could there be in that?"...