OPINION/COMMENTARY

Senate Takes Baby Steps To Strengthen U.S. Energy Security

Stopping far short of a previously passed House bill, the U.S. Senate voted 71-25 this week to direct the Interior Department to begin selling leases for oil and gas development in 8.3 million acres of the east-central Gulf of Mexico - about 100 miles from the nearest land and 125 to 310 miles from Florida beaches. According to an energy policy expert with the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA), prospects are dim for a more extensive effort at allowing increased domestic energy production. "The Senate's effort is better than nothing, but not by much," said NCPA Senior Fellow H. Sterling Burnett. "This is best described as a stumbling baby step towards decreasing U.S. reliance on foreign oil and gas." According to reports, any bill that goes beyond the 8.3 million acres would run into a filibuster in the Senate, requiring an unlikely 60 votes to overcome. Senate Democrats say they will block any attempt by the House to widen the bill's scope to include some 350 million acres on the Outer Continental Shelf previously passed by the House that are not addressed in the Senate bill. Lease Sale 181 off Florida collectively holds about 1.26 billion barrels of oil and 5.8 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. However, the Minerals Management Service (MMS) has estimated that the Outer Continental Shelf contains more than 85 billion barrels of oil, quadruple current U.S. reserves and more than 419 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Of these reserves, between 21 and 41 billion barrels of oil and between 94 and 164 trillion cubic feet of natural gas lie under the East and West Coasts, and in portions of the Gulf of Mexico where production is currently banned. According to Burnett, these moratoria were put in place due to environmental concerns. Yet technology has improved greatly since the earliest platforms were built....

Supreme Court wetland ruling a heads-up to lawmakers

Last month the United States Supreme Court issued a 5-4 decision on a pair of cases involving the authority of the federal government to regulate wetlands. Some see the decision as an assault on the Clean Water Act but others regard it as a necessary check on expanding federal reach. In the June 19 split decision on Rapanos v. United States and Carabell v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, four justices voted in favor of a broad interpretation of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ regulatory jurisdiction over wetland areas. Five justices explained a need to rein in the extent to which the Corps could assert its regulatory authority, but provided little additional guidance to the Corps as to what should constitute a regulated wetland. Wetlands themselves provide numerous valuable “ecosystem services.” They can act like sponges to mitigate and store flood flows, filter sediments and pollutants which might otherwise impair downstream waters, and provide habitat for a number of species. But not all wetlands are of equal value. Some wetland areas, hydrologically far removed from larger bodies of water, have a minimal effect on downstream waters. Others are small enough that their impact on larger bodies of water downstream is negligible. One might argue that the Corps should be able to regulate all of these waters but allow development on wetlands determined to be minimally influential. As Justice Scalia noted in his majority opinion, “the average applicant for an individual permit spends 788 days and $271,596 in completing the process.” The excessive expense and lost time in the evaluation, and sometimes litigation over every patch of mucky ground, is far from a trivial concern. The minority opinion, from Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsberg and Breyer, contended that the governments’ regulatory authority extended to “all identifiable tributaries that ultimately drain into large bodies of water.” This would have far overreached reasonable regulation....

California AG Puts Climate Skeptics on Trial

California Attorney General Bill Lockyer is apparently trying to position California as a leader in the movement to silence scientific debate. The State of California has filed a request in federal court to force auto makers to disclose all documents and communications between the companies and the so-called “climate skeptics.” California accuses the climate skeptics of playing a “major role in spreading disinformation about global warming.” The underlying litigation is a lawsuit by General Motors, DaimlerChrysler Corp., and the Association of Automobile Manufacturers against the state of California challenging the state’s greenhouse gas emissions limits for new cars, light-duty trucks and sports utility vehicles (Central Valley Chrysler-Jeep Inc. v. Catherine Witherspoon, No. 04-6663). California has been joined in the lawsuit by environmental activist groups including, the Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council and Environmental Defense...First, California and the global warming lobby doesn’t like what the skeptics have to say and, by virtue of this sort of intimidation, is apparently out not only to silence the skeptics but to make sure that no one dare support the skeptics lest supporters be implicated as aiding and abetting thought-crimes against California-approved, politically-correct global warming science. Next, I wonder whether Attorney General Lockyer disclosed to the judge that Gelbspan is a rather dubious character – for example, he misrepresented himself as a Pulitizer Prize winner on the jacket of his book, entitled “The Heat Is On.” Gelbspan never won a Pulitzer, nor was he ever even nominated. Finally, AG Lockyer has a track record of trying to silence scientific debate. In 2001, for example, the pro-gun control Lockyer gagged California state experts who opposed Lockyer’s dubious plans for pre-sale ballistics fingerprinting. The so-called “climate skeptics” are all that stand between junk science-based global warming alarmism and higher energy prices, reduced economic growth and increased Green political power....

Eminent Domain and Other Corporate Welfare

Driving south on I-65 through Alabaster, Alabama, last week, I noticed a sprawling new shopping center on my left. Wal-Mart stood out prominently, but I also saw Belk and Old Navy stores. Ross and Pier One were there too. J.C. Penney and Target will open next year. This was of interest to me because people's homes once stood where those stores now stand. Most of the homeowners had no choice but to leave because the Alabaster city council used its power of eminent domain to seize their properties and transfer them to a shopping-center developer. (Two homeowners managed to beat the city.) In America, as elsewhere, government is the ultimate de facto owner of the land. The apparent owners use it at the government's pleasure, and sometimes -- alarmingly often these days -- the government decides it would rather have someone else use a particular parcel. The direction of transfers is predominantly from the working class to Big Business. Is it any wonder that people can't always see the connection between capitalism and freedom? As everyone knows, local governments and their development authorities may legally compel people to sell their property to make way for projects that are expected to produce greater tax revenues. This is said to serve the social good, though I thought that being able to live peacefully in our homes is one big advantage to living in a society. Funny how means can become ends, which then justify other means. My melancholy at seeing the Alabaster center was lifted somewhat by the news that the Ohio Supreme Court refused to let the city of Norwood, near Cincinnati, and its business-accomplices get away with the same kind of land grab in that state. Three homeowners in a working/middle-class neighborhood resisted the intimidating alliance of a municipal government and a well-connected land developer. After losing in lower courts the plaintiffs finally prevailed when the state Supreme Court ruled that Ohio cities may not take land strictly for economic development. The developer, Jeffrey R. Anderson Real Estate, will now have to find a consensual method of building his $125 million shopping center and office complex. But the plaintiffs are not unscathed by the ordeal. The homes they once lived in are all that are left of their former high-density neighborhood, the others having been demolished after their owners sold under duress. In fact, the plaintiffs don't own the houses anymore because the city went ahead with the transfer to the developer while the court case was pending. If the former owners and the developer can't agree on what happens next, a judge can give the properties back to the plaintiffs. No one is sure how this will actually play out....

Agenda 21 and the United Nations

Agenda 21 is a 300-page, 40-chapter, "soft-law" policy document adopted by the delegates to the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. The document is not legally binding; it is a set of policy recommendations designed to reorganize global society around the principles of environmental protection, social equity, and what is called "sustainable" economic development. At the heart of the concept of sustainable development, is the assumption that government must manage society to ensure that human activity conforms to these principles. The idea that government is inherently empowered to manage the affairs of society is diametrically opposed to the idea that the just power of government is derived from the consent of the governed. As these conflicting principles collide in the arena of public policy, the people who are governed are losing the ability to limit the power of government. Consequently, government power over people is expanding. Nowhere is this transformation more dramatic than in the policies governing private property rights and the use of land and its resources. Historically, the right to own and use private property in America has been considered to be a sacred right. This right is being usurped by government, which now dictates to private property owners how their land may - and may not - be used. This paradigm shift from sacred private property rights to government-managed land use, is a perfect example of how sustainable development is transforming America into a government-managed society....

Evangelical Group Offers Conservative Global Warming Perspective

An evangelical group is presenting an alternative view on global warming. Just months after another evangelical group called for Christians to help combat what it sees as the crisis of human-caused climate change and its effects, the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance is casting doubt on the theory of catastrophic global warming. Recently, 86 evangelical clergy, college presidents, mission and ministry heads, and other leaders signed a document called "Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action," which called on the U.S. government to pass federal legislation requiring significant reductions in carbon dioxide emissions to fight global warming. This group argued that such changes are necessary to protect the poor from the much touted harmful effects of an "unprecedented" environmental warming trend. In response to that document, the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance issued one of its own, titled "A Call to Truth, Prudence, and the Protection of the Poor: An Evangelical Response to Global Warming." In that report, the Alliance presents evidence arguing against the extent and significance -- and possibly even the existence -- of the purported "scientific consensus" on catastrophic, human-induced global warming. More than 100 scholars and religious leaders have endorsed the Alliance's report. Among these is Professor Calvin Beisner of Knox Theological Seminary, who contends that human efforts to stop global warming are largely futile and would likely do more harm that good. "Mandatory carbon emissions reductions would have almost no significant effect on global warming," Beisner says. But requiring the international community to make such changes "would be very damaging to the global economy," he asserts, "especially to the poorest of the world's poor."....

NUCLEAR POWER BACK IN FAVOR

Fossil fuel prices -- and particularly the price of natural gas, which fuels most recently-constructed power plants -- have soared in recent years, reigniting interest in nuclear power with economists, legislators, and the general public, says James Taylor, managing editor of Environment & Climate News.

In response, General Electric and Hitachi have recently announced a joint venture to build two nuclear power plants in Texas, which would be the first commissioned in the United States since 1978. The plants, scheduled to be built in Matagorda County, about 70 miles southwest of Houston, will bring economic benefits to the region:

* Construction of the plants will cost $2.6 billion each, but they will thereafter produce power for a fraction of the cost of traditional power plants.
* Officials expect the new plants will create 6,000 new construction jobs and 1,000 permanent operator jobs.

Nuclear power has also been gaining acceptance for reasons other than economic:

* New technology has made nuclear power safer than ever.
* Nuclear plants produce energy without greenhouse gas emissions.

"Quite simply, nuclear power offers the only large-scale, feasible alternative to fossil fuels," says H. Sterling Burnett, senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis. "Wind and solar power are intermittent, and solar power in particular is prohibitively expensive. It is not surprising that to the extent people buy into global warming theory, nuclear power is becoming the power source of choice."

Source: James M. Taylor "Texas Will Host First New U.S. Nuclear Plants Since 1970s," Environment and Climate News, Heartland Institute, August 1, 2006

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