New administrator declaring that global warming pollution “endangers” Americans’ health and well being
http://www.blogsmonroe.com/world/2009/04/epa-administrator-issues-proposed-ruling-on-global-warming/.

Being ordered by the courts to come up with mercury emission standards in two years.

http://www.blogsmonroe.com/world/2009/02/stricter-mercury-rules-on-the-way/.

Latest air study showed many U.S. cities flunking horribly
http://www.blogsmonroe.com/world/2009/04/us-cities-recent-air-quality-reports%e2%80%94not-good/.

Non-existence when it comes to enforcement of the clean water act.
http://www.blogsmonroe.com/world/2008/12/collapse-of-national-clean-water-act-enforcement-program/.

Plus, the largest and longest government report on the affects of global warming on the U.S. was completed and predicted bad consequences.
http://www.blogsmonroe.com/world/2009/07/predictions-from-completed-government-report-on-global-warming/.

Senator Voinovich (R) Ohio and Senator Inhofe (R) Oklahoma put their request for the EPA study in writing, and although Voinovich read this request, Inhofe refused to expound on what his party wanted but reiterated it was in writing and left. The reason for leaving is that there is an (EPW) Environment and Public Works rule that at least two members of the minority have to be present before opening a markup, but it is not necessarily binding.

The funny part came when I actually listened to Senator Voinovich request the EPA do this modeling first so that Republicans can be informed with the latest reports. No wonder Inhofe didn’t want to expound. Voinovich ended up complaining about the EPA that when it did modeling before it used assumptions that were unrealistic. He said the EPA’s modeling is only as good as the assumptions built into it. What? Why would one request the EPA to do all this unnecessary work when one wasn’t satisfied with the EPA’s methodology to begin with? Is this the same type of convoluted request as wanting to be included then not showing up?

I state that the Republican senator’s request is unnecessary work because of the government’s recently completed and extensive global warming study that puts many parts of our country in a precarious position. And this same committee heard 54 witnesses on nine panels relative to climate change just last week. So there is already a large amount of climate change data available for review. Senator Boxer also brought in EPA officials to answer any questions the Republican senators might have. But a lot of good any of this important and recent information is when Republicans aren’t there to hear it.

Stall or no stall, the U.S. going to be surprised at the biggest gathering on climate change to date in Copenhagen this Decemeber because the scheme of things has changed. Cap and trade isn’t going to cut it anymore. There is much more at stake as the rest of the world is focusing on reparations by wealthy nations for the damage done. Stay Tuned.

Watch part of the committee meeting:

Senator Voinovich’s Request for EPA study

Evidently, the pipeline crosses Native American soil without their approval. It would also “impact over 200 water bodies and would destroy more than 1,200 acres of upland forested lands, more than 650 acres of open lands, and more than 1,300 acres of wetlands.” The Native Americans have support in the legal system through major Environmental Groups like Earthjustice, the Sierra Club, National Wildlife Federation and state environmental groups also.

Tar sand oil is some of the dirtiest and the Native Americans say that the pipeline is not is not keeping the ideology of moving toward cleaner energy promoted by the Obama Administration and that the Obama Administration is not listening to the petitions and voices of a growing number of Americans that want to move to a cleaner future for America.

I have to reiterate here that after the presidential election the number one issue people were concerned about was 1) NATIONAL HEALTH CARE, and 2) THE ENVIRONMENT. I was happy to hear that and blogged about it. I have to admit that I was a little surprised that the Iraq war was not in the one or two slot. I was also surprised to see the Obama Administration put so many conservative leaning politicians at the head of many of the Departments within the government relative to the environment and animal welfare like Ken Salazar, who to me is not any better than Kempthorne that headed up the Dept. of Interior under Bush. Salazar is nothing but a Blue Dog Democrat (might as well be a Republican) RANCHER, and therefore, the plight of polar bear has been ignored and we’re now slaughtering wolves in Yellowstone park even though they never grew to the numbers they were supposed to before control measures were needed.

Just so you know, we’re slaughtering wolves claiming they are over running their numbers when in fact 27% of all wolf pups suffered horrible deaths due to the parvo virus that can strike our own dogs. Nature balances many of our wild animal populations, plus we infringe on them horribly through urban sprawl and loss of habitat, and our pollution, but we insist on hunting them anyway because of the power of the HUNTING LOBBY and glorified NRA.

I’m glad Native Americans are finally speaking out to protect the land that was rightfully theirs to begin with. Hopefully, they will support efforts to keep wolves protected too since wolves have long been an honored part of their culture also.

Read more: http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/sep2009/2009-09-03-091.asp

How friendly is it? The rallies are nothing more than the tangible power of polluting industries like coal and oil that are backing them and strangling the rest of America from moving forward with clean energy jobs, work on new infrastructure to deliver that clean energy, and economic turnaround, not to mention the health aspects of cleaner air and water for generations to come.

It’s ludicrous to call this movement “friendly” to America at all. Who releases invisible, and sometimes odorless, but nevertheless harmful pollutants into the air that also ends up in our water? Who dumps chemicals, drugs, and makes huge environmental mistakes like oil spills and coal slurry spills into our waterways? And did it ever occur to anyone that when we’re assured from the different polluting entities that the parts per million or PPM that is being released is well within the limits of what is healthful for humans that there are 100’s of other industries saying likewise? So the safe limits of PPM of mercury, ammonia, carcinogens from incinerators, and the thousands of supposedly controlled substances entering the air meet up with the PPM limits of mercury, lead, pharmaceutical compounds, big Ag runoff and the like found in our drinking water that meet up with the sometimes tainted food we eat full of additives like corn syrup solids that help along the Type II diabetes problem in the U.S.

The industries that do this to our air, water, and food protest global warming as way to sideline the real issue, which is their pollution, in order stop any policies that might make them clean up their mess, and to avert new green industry that is competition. It’s one of the greediest ploys ever and polluting industry is pulling out all the stops. They put saving jobs out front at these rallies to mask the bad they do to the environment and all of us including their employees in the long run. The rise in cancer rates and new diseases isn’t a coincidence but may be more of an indication of what we’re really eating, breathing, and drinking.

These anti-environmental rallies are called “grassroots” events but DeSmogBlog dubbed them “glorified company picnics.” A New Mexico blog FBIHOP reported: “The Houston Astroturf event [was] an ‘energy employee’s rally’ a more fitting description of the closed door event that drew somewhere between 2,500-3,500 oil industry employees who were bussed in and given yellow ‘Energy Citizen’ t-shirts in “‘another high-priced photo op for the oil and gas industry.’”

It was also stated that one of the rallies in Texas was organized by the DW Turner PR firm that represents BP and Chevron.

The biggest “Friends of America” rally slated for Labor Day in West Virginia is no different. It’s backed by none other than Massey Energy that is a notoriously dirty coal company. According to the Rural Blog, The Lexington Herald-Leader reported:

Massey Energy Co. will pay a record $20 million for polluting streams around its coal mines in Kentucky and West Virginia, and spend another $10 million to prevent future problems. The lawsuit filed by the Environmental Protection Agency last May charged that Massey discharged excess amounts of metals, sediment and acid mine drainage into hundreds of rivers and streams in the two states.

The Rural Blog also included Louisville’s The Courier-Journal statement:

The civil penalty [for Massey] is the largest ever for violating wastewater discharge permits, and “stems from the massive, 300-million-gallon slurry spill in Martin County, Ky., in October 2000, often described as the southeastern United States’ worst environmental disaster, as well as 4,500 violations of Clean Water Act permits at mines in the two states. Many of the violations exceeded limits by 40 percent, with some pollutants discharged at levels more than 10 times their limit, the government said.

So if you run across Massey’s CEO Don Blankenship’s invitation to the Labor Day rally on You Tube where he says: “Hello I’m Don Blankenship and I’d like to invite you to a Labor Day rally in West Virginia. We’re going to have Hank Williams and have a good time but we’re also going to learn how environmental extremists and corporate America are both trying to destroy your jobs,” beware of the devil who likes to confuse.

Massey IS corporate America at its polluting finest. These rallies support the real extremists.

BTW the rallies aren’t limited to a few states. Michigan has one slated for September 3rd, Detroit’s Burton Manor Banquet and Conference Center.

http://www.allbusiness.com/legal/trial-procedure-suits-claims/10272123-1.html
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http://irjci.blogspot.com/2008/01/massey-paying-record-penalty-for-water.html.

http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/verizon_massey/?rc=homepage.

Yu’s style of transformation was drastic but Baoding let industrial pollution go on for so long that drastic measures were necessary. Yu saw thousands of dead fish floating in Baoding’s largest lake. Yu took action and closed down “several hundred factories whose pollution was to blame. The city lost 2% in annual economic growth. That’s a high price to pay. In the U.S. this would be political suicide. Our fossil fuel industry would destroy the guy. But Yu learned a lesson that we should grasp quickly: “Polluting first and cleaning up later is very expensive…So we [Baoding] chose renewable energy to replace traditional industry.”

The ABC news info went on to say, “In three years, Yu has transformed Baoding from an automobile and textile town into the fastest-growing hub of solar, wind, and biomass energy-equipment makers in China. Baoding now has the highest growth rate of any city in Hebei Province. Its “Electricity Valley” industrial cluster – consciously modeled on Silicon Valley – has quadrupled its business.” Uh, oh.

Heaven forbid this story gets around in the U.S. that environmentalists and the Obama Administration are on the right track attempting to turnover polluting industry in America to clean renewables and at the same time create thousands of jobs for a big profit in a short time, (I’m being facetious). Of course there will be much dissing over here about what Yu accomplished over there blah, blah, blah. It’s not like Yu didn’t come up against opposition in the form of COMMUNIST PARTY LEADERS, yet he prevailed. We can’t get past the argument about being responsible for pollution that affects our climate. Those that pollute win the argument here. What’s wrong with this picture? It shows the power of polluting industry doesn’t it?

On that note, be prepared for new “Tea Party” like grass roots protests across America waging war against environmentally sound progress. The protests are backed by the fossil fuel industry as the heat is on against cleaner air, water, and new industry that might disrupt the status quo. They are called “Energy Citizens” rallies. http://current.com/items/90713635_big-oil-trade-groups-plans-to-recruit-employees-to-attend-anti-clean-energy-rallies.htm. All the while China quietly continues to build on a money making turnaround. The big fear here should be that they emerge as the new green powered super power, and ideal model for other countries? Uh, oh—again.

Watch the following video of the flip side of China with the Dirtiest City on Earth:

You can see the pollution in hot spots like this all over the earth, but naysayers till maintain human pollution doesn’t affect atmospheric conditions, suuuuuuuuure. The video speaks volumes. People that argue against cleaning up our act relative to pollution cannot claim to be friends of the earth.

Professor Lindzen is a member of the Science, Health, and Economic Advisory Council of the Annapolis Center, a Maryland-based think tank that has been funded by corporations including Exxon Mobil. So it’s a wealthy, corporate think tank.

And SPPI is actually two groups with the same name. The 2nd SPPI is the source of my research, the one established by Robert Ferguson, SPPI’s president. http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/press/global_warming_not_catastrophic.html.
Source Watch reports Robert Ferguson, president of the 2nd SPPI, was also Executive Director for the CSPP, Center for Science and Public Policy, as a project of Frontiers of Freedom Institute the think tank associated with Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowicz, Dick Cheney and the Iraq War. The SPPI website of Ferguson’s draws on papers from Lord Monkton. Monkton is a journalist that writes papers about climate for the Guardian, and the American Physical Society. According to Source Watch, a writer for the Guardian George Monbiot points out that Monkton has a degree in classics and a diploma in journalism with no other qualifications.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Christopher_Monckton.

So Lindzen is a member of a corporate think tank that uses papers about climate by a journalist with no other qualifications than classics and journalism that are published on a website also referred to by Lindzen that is the creation of a man that was executive director of a pet project of another neocon think tank that brought us the Iraq war. I can’t help but smell oil. It’s just natural instinct.

I read Monkton’s entire article and looked and looked for the global surface temperature record that he said was updated and published every month on SPPI’s website that shows no statistically-significant “global warming” for almost 15 years. I couldn’t find it and quite frankly a decent writer includes links to the data simply because I’ve been looking everywhere for that mysterious cooling data. If you have the goods, you put them out there and much of his article had absolutely no links and the rest was graph after graph that more than likely used data from satellite sensors and ARGO floats.

What I found while trying to connect the dots was that for quite some time there were conflicting sets of data about worldwide surface temps. There is plenty of data out there from satellites in orbit using sensors and actual ships, buoys, and buildings. There are more stations near dense populations. However, out in the extremes of the Arctic and Antarctic, not so much. The problems lie in the way the numbers are determined.

There is the NOAA’s data collected from over 1000 land-based weather stations, and from approximately 7000 ships and 1000 ocean buoys. Likewise, NASA’s GISS, and Hadley HadCRU use surface and ocean temp measurement stations, while Remote Sensing Systems’ RSS, and the University of Alabama, Huntsville’s UAH are satellite sensing systems from outer space.

GISS and HadCRU use many of the same recording stations (ARGO and XTB’s) but use different methods for computing in areas with little to no stations like the Arctic. GISS estimates within a 1200-mile stretch of actual readings, and HadCRU doesn’t include whole sections of the Arctic or Antarctic in their averages at all! The Arctic is warming at a faster rate than the rest of the world and it’s left out of the calculations? To add to that, RSS and UAH are satellite sensing systems that use Microwave Sounding Units (MSU’s) of orbiting satellites to estimate temperatures that “provide little coverage of Arctic and Antarctic regions” either according to an article on the Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media, http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/2008/04/common-climate-misconceptions-global-temperature-records/.

Besides problems with getting all global temp recording systems in sync until 2005, I ran across the website of the actual NASA scientist that made the mistake about ocean surface temps cooling. I also ran across explanations of the problems with ARGO float data and XTB’s. What really bothers me is that if I can find that there has been a problem with the data from all sources especially in the past 8-10 years then surely the skeptics know the very same but put conclusions out there based on it anyway instead of correcting for it. The Yale Forum I sited above explains the problems and the says the same that skeptics cherry pick their sources and bad data is a good place to start.

Along the way I found graphs by NASA that measure earth’s incoming heat versus outgoing long wave radiation too. NASA has been recording this since the 50’s. It was one of the flags that the ocean temp cooling data was in error because the graphs of the two are normally in sync. The problem is that NASA’s records oppose Lindzen’s new paper on outgoing long wave radiation. It will be interesting to see the debate.

Read about the scientist who goofed on the cooling ocean temps:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/OceanCooling/page1.php.

Problems with XTB’s:
http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/phod/goos/meetings/2008/XBT/bias_AMS.pdf.

So here we have what I’ve been trying to make clear all along. It is very easy to mislead about climate change by cherry picking sources, but in the end “whoever” always get tagged for leaving something out to fit his/her purpose. The truth is that much of the data used by skeptics to global warming is based on either satellite data or includes erroneous data. Until 2005 those satellites were even out of kilter with each other. Heck RSS was developed to counteract the poor readings of UAH. Yet the Free Republic website went so far as to accuse the NOAA of exaggerating global temperatures when quite frankly it wasn’t until just recently that GISS, HadCRU, UAH, and RSS finally got into sync with each.
http://webcommentary.com/php/ShowArticle.php?id=daleoj&date=080717.

And what about the IPCC? What reporting do they use? It’s hard to find because if you ask that question on Google you will get pages of skeptic reports about the supposedly nefarious IPCC. But I finally did find the IPCC Data Bank and holy cow they track everything and how it is or is not in sync with something else. Have a look. It is impressive. And we are still warming up.
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-chapter3.pdf.

The 25 years between 67 and 91 saw a lot of oil go into our oceans. Luckily, the past 20 years has seen a decrease in tanker spills worldwide. The Exxon Valdez was so horrible; the attention caused a marked improvement in reducing accident rates for oil tankers. Unfortunately, the concern wasn’t so much for the environment or wildlife as it was for the financial liabilities from a spill. A shame, since we know quite well that oil companies do indeed recover financially. We know what big oil’s net earnings are these days. The irony is that wildlife and the environment doesn’t seem to recover quickly at all, or ever for that matter.

Thirteen hundred miles of Alaskan coastline was spoiled from the Exxon Valdez oil spill.
Communities and fisheries were ruined. Four thousand otters died and at least one population of orca whales has yet to recover. Local livelihoods were destroyed, and many wildlife and fish populations are still depleted, while Alaska’s economy lost millions, according to the same newsletter.

It’s good to know we learned from that spill. Tanker spillage is drastically down but we haven’t licked the problem altogether. The same environmental research information from a consulting firm that reported tanker oil spills are way down, also said that pipelines have taken up the slack. It stated: “Since 1985, U.S. pipelines have spilled more oil than tankers and barges combined. Since 1991, pipelines have annually spilled 37 times as much as tankers. The change in the proportion U.S. pipeline spillage is largely due to the fact that since 1990, pipelines transport more oil across more miles than water carriers.” And that infrastructure is old and getting older. Luckily, we’re spilling less and less over the past two decades, but as the report went on to say:

While the statistics show encouraging downward trends, there is no room for complacency. An ill-timed oil spill that occurs in a sensitive location, regardless of spill size, can cause devastating damage to natural environments, property, and business, and, occasionally, to human lives. Aging pipeline and facility infrastructures,
as well as aging vessel fleets, may be ticking time bombs, especially as they become subjected to increasing oil throughput and transport in future years. Increased international attention to tanker safety has had a positive influence that is sorely needed in other vessel categories and for non-vessel sources, particularly pipelines.

Oil is a leaky business both on land and sea. We’re faced with more oil exploration in the sensitive areas spoken about here. In 2007, Bush lifted a longstanding executive ban on off shore oil leasing in Bristol Bay, Alaska. According to WWF’s newsletter, Bristol Bay is known as America’s fish basket that contributes $2.2 billion to the economy annually. It is near the Bering Sea, “which produces nearly half of America’s wild seafood.” Do you like seafood? Consider Gulf shrimp also, since the recent Senate version of the energy bill includes more oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. We’re messing with our food supply when we go for the crude. We endanger wild life, and the economy of the regions at risk for “oil spillage.” Right now the U.S. Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia vacated Bush’s plans for oil leasing in Bristol Bay. Help keep it that way. Contact your representatives and tell them to limit oil drilling, especially in areas that have long been protected FOR GOOD REASON. Besides, we only have 3% of the world’s oil supply, and use 25%. This horse is not going to win the race this time. The math dictates we must find replacements for our energy needs or forever be dependent on nations that, well, just don’t like us.

http://www.environmental-research.com/publications/pdf/spill_statistics/paper4.pdf

If we’re going to compare CO2 levels back then and now, shouldn’t we also take into consideration all the other variables from then and now? A few hundred compared to almost 7 billion people worldwide is an extreme difference from then until now as are decreasing forests and open land compared to an unspoiled earth, unpolluted vs. polluted seas, air that was devoid of particulate matter from industry unlike now, and literally no man made contaminants to add to the mix back then. Maybe without all the other contaminants 1000 ppm for CO2 was all right, but I’ve read a lot of reports of excess CO2 killing fish, trees, and other living things.

The urgency now is about stopping a rise in CO2 before it reaches 500 ppm because “When the CO2 exceeds 500 parts per million, the global temperature suddenly rises 6C and becomes stable again despite further increases or decreases of atmospheric CO2. This contrasts with the IPCC models that predict that temperature rises and falls smoothly with increasing or decreasing CO2.” (Dr James Lovelock at a Royal Society event in 2007).

This amounts to what has been predicted about global warming all along, that we have ten years to turn things around. After that, whatever we do is of no consequence. I trust Dr. Lovelock foremost since he is the first scientist to realize the enormity of environmental science as we try to study it today. It involves all the scientific disciplines, physics, chemistry, and biology applied to the study of thousands of ecosystems worldwide that have a symbiotic relationship to one another. When a system is crippled it does little to help, and many times hurts other systems.

We’ve polluted the crap out of everything, cut down forests, and injured many of the ecosystems that work to right imbalances that will cause drastic climate change. We even seem to be entering a cycle where a worsening climate perpetuates itself, i.e., forest fires, floods, volcanic activity, etc. Fires put more pollution in the air, take out trees that eat CO2. Floods carry huge amounts of toxins straight to the ocean, and cause rotting plants that emit more bad gases.

So this is not only about CO2 but all types of pollution and overuse. By curbing CO2 emissions, we curb a lot of other pollutants like mercury in our fresh water supply, and particulates in the air that cause respiratory problems.

But most importantly, Happer received way too much money from Exxon Mobil to be an impartial scientist. Hundreds of thousands of dollars have flowed Happer’s way from big oil over the last decade. Ethically, he is a bad source to speak about CO2 emissions.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/27/co2-famine-exxon-paid-sci_n_170473.html

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Previewing October 14^th on PBS is a presentation called “Climate Change; Then and Now.” Watch it as it will be replayed on either WGTE or PBS Detroit again. If you want to hear what has happened since the words “global warming” first graced our ears some ten years ago, you might be surprised. The results are in and we definitely have an impact on what’s up with the weather. Read more: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/story/2008/10/heat.html.

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I watched another presentation on WGTE’s Frontline last night relative to the oil industry and the environment that’s part of a larger series entitled “Heat.” I swear that it was a compilation of many of the blogs I’ve done over the course of two years from the net wealth of the oil industry down to Detroit automakers. It’s nice to know I’m not totally daft.�

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The program began by showing Exxon Mobil’s baby “Hibernia” the largest (by weight) oilrig platform in the world. It’s 16 stories high and 200 miles off the coast of Newfoundland in God forsaken nowhere. Every 5-6 days a tanker leaves with a load worth 500 million dollars. This rig cost Exxon 4 billion dollars!

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The storyline then settled in with the statement that no one has resisted change like big oil. The reporter harped about, the ratio of net income for every major U.S. oil company compared to what they invest in alternative technologies. There were quite a few times oil company spokespeople were flustered and could not answer the interviewer. I mean how do you say “we’re greedy?” The coverage then shifted to the Rockefellers, (not so greedy stockholders) demanding in public court that Exxon invest in more alternative energy. Let’s face it, the oil companies are not going to let their bread and butter go without a fight, and do they have the money to fight.

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The fight consisted of spin regarding the state of our environment. This spin has made the plight of the environment political rather than scientific, inciting even more divisiveness. The program showed that big oil had a connection to many denial machines like “The Heartland Group, Competitive Enterprises,” and I have to add “Friends of Science,” Senator Inhofe’s favorite. Inhofe was included in last night’s foray of who and what helped stifle the movement toward alternative energy.

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Not to be left out, there was a segment on American auto companies. I could not believe my ears when a scientist being interviewed reiterated my words about our auto industry: “Where was the foresight?” It continued to show that Clinton funded the American auto industry to develop hybrid cars in 98. The prototypes were shown. The auto companies rolled them out and bingo, Bush got into office. That all stopped. The American car companies made bigger and bigger gas-guzzlers like SUV’s, Hummers, etc.� But Japan kept up with the hybrid idea since that time. Now Japan is 10 years ahead of us.� Japan’s factories are also aiming to cut emissions drastically more than they already have. If only we could work on the dolphin/whale thing…

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It was quite a night for me to see the same content of some my past blogs come to life in a presentation. We live chaotic lives at times and so our news becomes disjointed and senseless. We only get bits and pieces. Heat is a long series to catch in its entirety. There are 9 chapters. But you can view them online. It’s nice to see it all strung together and for that effort we can always thank Public TV.

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http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/heat/view/6.html

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The NRDC and other organizations like Greenpeace and Center for Biological Diversity have filed a suit against the Bush Administration again on behalf of the polar bear according to the NRDC. The polar bear is on the endangered list, but it seems its habitat is not. Soooo there is a lot of leeway (loopholes) in that plan for Big Oil.

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The White House has been flooded with petitions to protect the polar bear and its habitat, but the NRDC and others have had to file suit even as Bush’s time in office is limited. Likewise, the Center for Biodiversity has a lawsuit against the Dept. of Interior, lead by good ole Dirk Kempthorne, for attempting to expand oil and gas development in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas or the “Polar Bear Seas.” It’s called the “Five Year Plan.” Real nice. In five years we should be on our way to oil independence.

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It’s more tail chase logic. Allow oil companies to invade polar bear country with the industry that produces the fuel that emits CO2 fueling global warming that is melting the polar bear’s habitat in the first place. It’s another pretty package with little inside from the Bush administration. Apparently, we are to assume the package itself is a big portion of the actual present. And so goes this administration’s polar-bear-is-an-endangered-species offering that sounds right and just but turns right around and gives oil companies the upper hand in the Arctic.

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An Arctic that is diminished with one million square miles, six times the size of California, melted away in the past 30 years. For those that want to argue this all happened before, well it wasn’t the Medieval Warming Period from somewhere in the 900’s-1300’s era. We’re a heck of a lot warmer now. According to New Scientist Environment website we might have to go back 6000 to 125,000 years to get as warm as we’re getting and it’s only going to get worse. This is not just natural phenomenon happening here. Anyway the difference between thousands of years ago and now is almost 7 billion people.

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Look at the more dense population areas of the world. They are along the water. Take a pitcher of water with ice cubes in it and watch as they melt. No water level change, but add ice and that pitcher overflows. Imagine the scenario if all the ice that covers the land in our coldest regions slips into the surrounding water. That’s adding some mighty big ice cubes to our albeit mighty big oceans/seas but the pitcher will still overflow.

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Big Oil’s intrusion in the Polar Bear Seas is adding insult to injury or in this case certain death to the polar bear. And it’s unnecessary. There are some 63 million acres of land leased for oil exploration that hasn’t been touched. The intruder polluters also endanger birds, fish, and other mammals with potential oil spills.

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Organizations like the NRDC, Earthjustice, Greenpeace, Center for Biodiversity, and others are making progress. Shell put off drilling in the Beaufort Sea off the Arctic Refuge coast for another year. Now if they can just hold the Bush Administration and Dirk Kempthorne at bay for oh, a couple of months, maybe a new administration will have a little more empathy for the polar bear and our environment.�

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http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/climate-change/dn11644

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http://www.nrdc.org/naturesvoice/feature1.asp

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http://www.nrdc.org/media/2008/081006.asp

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