Alaska Oil Drilling Delay Could Cost $3 Trillion, Lawmaker Says The top Republican on the House Natural Resources Committee said legislation to delay the sale of land in Alaska for oil and gas exploration would hinder the U.S. economy. In a letter to Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) late Tuesday, Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) said he was "disappointed" by Markey's efforts to block oil and gas exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and more recently in the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) lease 193 along the Chukchi Sea. According to the letter, "OCS lease sale 193 is estimated to contain 15 billion barrels of oil and 77 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, for a combined total of 27.8 billion barrels of oil equivalent. ANWR is estimated to hold another 10.4 billion barrels of oil, for a total of 38.2 billion barrels of oil. "This would almost double the total United States proven reserves of oil," it states. "Lease Sale 193 and ANWR represent nearly $3 trillion to the U.S. economy, if we choose to develop them." Young also noted in the letter that people in Markey's home state of Massachusetts have been hit hard by rising energy prices, noting that former Rep. Joe Kennedy has been working with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to get oil from Citgo to help heat homes in the United States. "ANWR and Lease Sale 193 contain 36,000 times as much energy as Citgo, Hugo Chavez and our former colleague are providing for the poor and displaced in America," he said....
National parks robbed of heritage Looting of fossils and archaeological artifacts from national parks - such as Native American pottery and Civil War relics - is increasing as demand for such items rises on the Internet and the world market, National Park Service officials say. Over the past decade, an average of 340 "significant" looting incidents have been reported annually at the 391 national parks, monuments, historic sites and battlefields - probably less than 25% of the actual number of thefts, says park service staff Ranger Greg Lawler. "The trends are up," he says. It's "a chronic problem that we simply have not even been able to get a grasp on," says Mark Gorman, chief ranger at South Dakota's Badlands National Park. Park service investigators search websites, and the FBI helps track looted items, some of which are sold to collectors in Europe and Asia. Prices are rising for some items, including Native American pottery and garments, says Bonnie Magness-Gardiner, manager of the FBI art theft program. The most coveted items can cost "in the tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars," she says. Thieves caught last year at Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park sold a Confederate belt buckle for $3,300 and buttons for $200 each. The park service has 1,500 law enforcement rangers and 400 seasonal law enforcement rangers - one for about every 56,000 acres. "We really don't have enough manpower," Lawler says....Annual appropriations will start soon, so we will see the annual cry for more LEO's.
E.P.A. Chief Defends His Decision on California Defending his refusal to let California set limits on the greenhouse gas emissions of automobiles, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency insisted before a Senate committee Thursday that climate change posed no “compelling and extraordinary” risk to the state. Describing such change as “not unique to” and “not exclusive to California,” the agency’s administrator, Stephen L. Johnson, called it “a global problem requiring a global solution or, at least at a minimum, a national solution.” But internal agency documents cited by members of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works listed climate change effects specific to California, including wildfires and species loss. Fifteen states have signed on to follow California’s lead in regulating automobile emissions, and the governors of three of them — Maryland, Pennsylvania and Vermont — testified before the committee Thursday that attacking the problem was essential for their residents and the world as a whole....
First BLM cattle seizures for trespassing Nevada since 2002 Federal agents seized more than 100 cattle and jailed a 66-year-old woman who owns some of them in the first U.S. criminal or civil enforcement action in five years against Nevada ranchers accused of trespassing livestock on public land. Bureau of Land Management rangers began impounding the cattle across a 10-mile stretch of the high desert rangeland of north central Nevada near Winnemucca on Monday. They said Inger Casey and Larry "Dudley" Hiibel had been grazing cattle on BLM land without a permit for more than three years and failed to comply with federal court orders this fall demanding they keep them off U.S. land. Long at odds with the BLM, the two ranchers -- and fellow advocates of state and private property rights -- maintain the U.S. government has no legal jurisdiction over rangeland in Nevada, although federal courts have ruled otherwise. "They are arresting people for doing nothing but trying to drive their cattle," Hiibel told The Associated Press. On Thursday, he was working with his daughter and brother in a snowstorm to try to move some of his remaining cattle off BLM land and onto a neighbor's field. "I'm behind about 150 cows in a blizzard with icicles on my whiskers," Hiibel said from near the Pershing-Humboldt county line about 165 miles northeast of Reno. "We're trying to get them out of the way of the BLM as a temporary thing. They didn't get them all." Casey, whose family has ranched there for 30 years, spent Monday night in the Washoe County jail in Reno on charges she assaulted rangers rounding up the cattle. Casey went before U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert McQuaid on Tuesday on the criminal complaint filed by the U.S. Attorney's Office alleging she "knowingly did forcibly assault, resist, oppose, impede, intimidate and interfere" with BLM law officers.....She's lucky David Iglesias isn't the U.S. Attorney in Nevada. He kept NM rancher Kit Laney from being released on his own recognizance.
Park Service Deceiving World About Threats to Park Bison In 1995, the World Heritage Committee of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, declared Yellowstone National Park as a World Heritage Site in Danger due to threats to park bison, water quality, cutthroat trout, inadequacy of park roads, overuse by tourists, and from mining activities beyond park borders. In 2003, Yellowstone was removed from the in “Danger” list because of “considerable efforts” made by the National Park Service to address the threats. Though the Committee felt the park was no longer in “danger,” it asked the National Park Service to provide progress reports on the original threats. Last month, the Yellowstone National Park released a draft of its fourth progress report. In it, the National Park Service trumpets the success of its 2000 Interagency Bison Management Plan describing it as a “carefully crafted consensus-based plan” that “has now been successfully implemented for seven years.” The National Park Service explains that the plan is “incremental” and that it “becomes more wildlife-friendly … with each incremental success achieved.” Such claims are not just inaccurate, they are blatantly deceptive intended only to placate the Committee while avoiding the truth. The Interagency Bison Management Plan has been an abject failure resulting in the unnecessary killing of nearly 2,100 bison since its inception. The bison are needlessly hazed and harassed, shot, and captured and slaughtered because approximately half of the herd have been exposed to Brucella abortus – the bacterium the causes brucellosis. To prevent the transmission of brucellosis from bison to cattle, bison who approach or cross Yellowstone’s northern and western boundaries are targeted for removal....Surely we should let the U. N. set management guidelines for our natural resources and surely a few bison are more important than the livestock industry in an entire state, don'tcha think?
Subsidies and High Crop Prices The boom in agricultural commodity prices has been good for many farmers and companies providing farm products. But other groups—including food producers and consumers—are feeling the negative effects of the boom in the form of higher prices. What especially irks some of them is their belief that these prices are not simply the inevitable product of the marketplace but rather the unintended consequence of several U.S. government policies. Even some farmers are unhappy. As grain prices rise, so does the price of livestock feed. As a result, beef, pork, poultry, and dairy farmers are incurring record-high feed costs. according to Cal Dooley, president of the Grocery Manufacturers Association, about 40 percent of the cost of producing pork, for example, comes from feeding the livestock. That hits consumers, too: A May 2007 study by Iowa State University economists found that "the direct effect of higher feed costs is that U.S. food prices would increase by a minimum of 1.1 percent over baseline level." What's causing grocery bills to rise? Some blame policies that have made it especially profitable for farmers to divert their crops into corn for the production of ethanol. "The ethanol industry is hogging more and more of the corn supply, and that is squeezing ranchers and dairy farmers," says Daniel Griswold, director of the Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank. The federal government gives preferential treatment to domestic, corn-based ethanol in the form of a 54-cent-per-gallon tax on imported ethanol, which largely affects Brazilian producers of ethanol from sugar cane. That tax comes on top of a 51-cent exemption from the federal excise tax on gasoline that goes to fuel mixed with ethanol. These subsidies raise the demand for domestic ethanol. That drives up the price of not only the corn used to produce the ethanol but also of wheat and soybeans, which farmers plant less of because they switch to corn. That, in turn, translates into a scarcer supply—and higher prices....Yes but what does the U.N. think? Thank goodness bison don't eat corn.
What Is the Real Deal With Biofuels? If you haven’t heard, biofuels are apparently the next big thing. And corn is the king of court. Given that the conversion to biofuels from oil has been going on for so many years without success, it would probably be better called the court jester. Can corn be used to create a fuel? Yes. Can that fuel be burned in automobiles, just like fossil fuels? Yes. Would the raw material for that fuel be considered as a "renewable" resource? Sure. Would the use of fuel from corn replace oil as a fuel in the US market? No. (More accurately, "Hell no!" Details below.)[...]Pimental has updated his calculations and published them as well. According to his 2005 paper, "Ethanol Production Using Corn…" we find: Energy outputs from ethanol produced using corn, switchgrass, and wood biomass were each less than the respective fossil energy inputs. The same was true for producing biodiesel using soybeans and sunflower, however, the energy cost for producing soybean biodiesel was only slightly negative compared with ethanol production. Findings in terms of energy outputs compared with the energy inputs were: * Ethanol production using corn grain required 29% more fossil energy than the ethanol fuel produced. * Ethanol production using switchgrass required 50% more fossil energy than the ethanol fuel produced. * Ethanol production using wood biomass required 57% more fossil energy than the ethanol fuel produced. * Biodiesel production using soybean required 27% more fossil energy than the biodiesel fuel produced (Note, the energy yield from soy oil per hectare is far lower than the ethanol yield from corn). * Biodiesel production using sunflower required 118% more fossil energy than the biodiesel fuel produced....This guy better hide, from the U.N., from Bush, and from Congress. I mean, a 51-cent tax exemption for a fuel that uses more energy to produce than it produces in it's final form? Surely our illustrious leaders wouldn't implement such a dumb policy, would they?
Colo. Advocates Sue to Halt Gas Drilling Environmentalists are suing the federal government to prevent drilling on what they say is the last untouched area of the San Juan Basin in southwest Colorado. The lawsuit filed in federal court Wednesday alleges new gas drilling in the foothills of the steep and rugged San Juan Mountains would cause landslides, water and air pollution and drive away wildlife in the area known as the HD Mountains. Named in the lawsuit are the U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, which gave two companies, Petrox Energy Corp. and Elm Ridge Resources Inc., the go-ahead in April to drill for coal-bed methane in the mountains. Environmentalists say there are plenty of gas wells already in the San Juan basin. Mark Pearson, executive director of the San Juan Citizens Alliance, said there are about 25,000 gas-producing wells between Farmington, N.M., and Durango, and another 12,000 pending....
Clones on the range Eating, like sex, is both an act and an idea. It satisfies a physical need but also an emotional urge (think comfort food). That explains the furor unleashed last week by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. It ruled that meat and milk from cloned animals and their offspring is as safe to eat as that from conventionally bred animals. Scientific evidence suggests that's the right decision. But the immediate outcry was deafening. Food advocacy groups decried the decision. Within hours, the U.S. Department of Agriculture had called on producers to keep products from cloned animals, but not their offspring, off the market — at least for now. Human beings have been intervening to shape the production of crops and animals for the last 3,000 years. Cloning is just the latest method. Ranchers and dairy farmers long have used artificial insemination in breeding their animals. Today, they routinely use in vitro fertilization and embryo-transfer technology to breed more productive or hardier cows. But the 1997 birth of Dolly the sheep, the first cloned animal, raised both ethical and food-safety concerns. The ethical issues remain a source of contention, but the safety questions seem to have been adequately addressed by scientists in both the United States and Europe. Not only is there no difference between products from cloned and uncloned animals, researchers here and in Europe have said, but it also is not scientifically possible to tell them apart. That raises the possibility (some have said the probability) that the offspring of clones already have entered the food chain somewhere....