[Emphasis added] What to do about oil? First it went from $60 to $80 a barrel, then
from $80 to $100 and now to $120. Perhaps we can persuade OPEC to raise
production, as some senators suggest; but this seems unlikely. The
truth is that we're almost powerless to influence today's prices. We
are because we didn't take sensible actions 10 or 20 years ago. If we
persist, we will be even worse off in a decade or two. The first thing
to do: Start drilling.
It may surprise Americans to discover that the United States is the
third-largest oil producer, behind Saudi Arabia and Russia. We could be
producing more, but Congress has put large areas of potential supply
off-limits. These include the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and parts of
Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico. By government estimates, these areas may
contain 25-30 billion barrels of oil (against about 30 billion of
proven U.S. reserves today) and 80 trillion cubic feet or more of
natural gas (compared with about 200 tcf of proven reserves).
What keeps these areas closed are exaggerated environmental fears,
strong prejudice against oil companies and sheer stupidity.
A new supermarket opened in my town. The Garden of Eden is part of a
chain that specializes in providing every kind of fresh and exotic food
one could want to satisfy a discriminating palate.
On opening
day shoppers were wandering from aisle to aisle examining all manner of
spices, mustards, vegetables, fruits, breads, selections of prepared
foods from all around the Earth. I came upon a canister of Café du
Monde, a special blend of coffee that I formally could not purchase
except from New Orleans, its home.
I stopped in front of a
display of freshly cooked brisket; its red center suggesting it had
been done to perfection. Would I like a taste? Yes, indeed! And then I
ordered two slices, cut to just the width I wanted. The display of
cheeses was dazzling. I bought a wedge of Jarlsberg and made a mental
note to get some brie the next time. In the end I just wandered around
the place in a happy daze.
So now it seems that while we sit on the heights and watch the seas
rise inexorably, and mop our brows in the unaccustomed heat, we're
going to be hungry as well.
As this millennium got into gear,
first it was international terrorism and the Iraq war that scared half
the world witless for years.
When that began to pall as a frightener, along came climate change and global warming to keep us in a state of anxiety.
And now that that has become a bit ho-hum, along comes the global food crisis.
I
remained untouched by the fear of terrorism, for I ventured only once
beyond these shores, and in any case I have long understood that when
my number is up then it's up.
He brought them together at the Earth Summit in
Rio in 1992. The fruits of his efforts and the policies they engendered
are now emerging and are hurting the poor and middle-income people of
all countries, with rising food and energy costs. They’re hurting the
people they were ostensibly designed to help, but more on that later.
For many years, I admired the mind of Newt Gingrich. In the 1980s and '90s, nobody, with the exception of Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley, articulated political conservatism with the effectiveness of Gingrich.
When Gingrich led the midterm Republican revolution in 1994, many of us were hopeful that the nation had suddenly realized that two years of lower-lip biting and 40 years of Democrat majority in the House and Senate were big mistakes.
Inevitably though, the luster of the Republican revolution slowly started to fade. The first thing you learn as a young voter is that politicians are not unlike some exercise equipment you see for sale on television: it always works better on TV, and the fat it promised to trim never comes to fruition. But I figured Newt's "revolution" was at least a good start.
From politicians who exaggerate and misrepresent the state
of climate science to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s consensus
building to the media’s ridicule of scientists who disagree, the attacks on
science are everywhere. The global warming movement poses as being scientific,
but is actually a profoundly anti-scientific movement.
Al Gore and others declare the debate over and smear those
who disagree as “deniers” and stooges of industry, placing them in
the same category with those who believe the earth is flat and the moon landing
was staged in a movie theater.
Mr. Gore has demonstrated his willingness to disregard
science — for example, by inserting biblical phases into his presentations —
if he thinks it will help his cause. And when asked about some of his alleged
scientific statements, he claimed his scientist confidants told him these
things privately and hadn’t published such views because they couldn’t prove
them.
SPOKANE -- In advance of a speech at Gonzaga on Tuesday, 20/20 co-anchor John Stossel gave a pair of interviews to KXLY 4 where he talked about the evolution of his political thought process.
"I'm going to talk about what I've learned over 35 years of reporting," Stossel said Monday night, referring to what he intended to cover in Tuesday's lecture. "When I started out I saw business as evil; it's ripping us off. Capitalism is OK - it gives us stuff - but it's by and large unfair and we've got to have government fixing it."
After decades of covering these issues, though, Stossel found his opinion had changed drastically.
A majority of [Tampa Bay] readers are not convinced that enough evidence exists
to support claims that the earth's temperature is rising and dramatic
impacts will follow.
Global warming is "pure theory," said 138, or 35 percent of the 388
responses to the latest Business Pulse Survey, the newspaper's
nonscientific weekly online poll designed to provide a snapshot of what
readers are thinking.
Of the remaining respondents, nearly a third -- 113 votes, or 29
percent -- said that human impact is warming the plant while 64 voters
were "in between." Another 73 people chose an "other" category
suggesting that there is a vast range of opinion and understanding on
the issue.
A growing contingent of scientists has been
brave enough to stand athwart the politically fashionable global
warming steamroller. More than 500 such skeptics convened in New York
at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change last month. They
argue factually and persuasively that what warming the world has seen
in the last hundred years is at best minimal and at worst exaggerated.
Conversely, radical increases in global
temperatures or rising sea levels proclaimed by Al Gore and his ilk
aren't facts. They're merely guesses, some of them hysterical, about
conditions decades or centuries into the future and based on
assumptions about innumerable variables, many of which are beyond our
scientific comprehension and expertise.
A pioneering expert
on hurricane forecasting says he may soon lose funding due to his
skepticism about man-made global warming, according to a report in the
Houston Chronicle.
Dr. William Gray (pictured),
who once said that pro-global warming scientists are "brainwashing our
children," claims that Colorado State University will no longer promote
his yearly North Atlantic hurricane forecasts due to his controversial
views.
Gray complained in a memo to the head of
Colorado State’s Department of Atmospheric Sciences that "this is
obviously a flimsy excuse and seems to me to be a cover for the
Department's capitulation to the desires of some (in their own
interest) who want to reign [sic] in my global warming and global
warming-hurricane criticisms," the Chronicle reports.
With gas prices now yon-side of $3.50 per gallon, wouldn’t it be great to have an extra million barrels of domestic oil flowing daily into the American pipeline? Blame William Jefferson Clinton, who vetoed a bill in 1995 that would have opened the Alaska reserves that could have been producing much needed domestic energy today.
Blame the green environmental extremists who block every effort to expand domestic energy supply, whether in off-shore oil reserves, expansion of clean coal production, or the construction of new nuclear energy facilities. It’s just plain dumb to allow the shortage of readily available energy to drive prices so high that the entire economy and food supply are in jeopardy.
The fear-mongering extremists bring up the “global warming” hobgoblin every time a new initiative is introduced to increase the energy supply. Atmospheric carbon dioxide from human activity makes little or no difference to the climate.
[Emphasis added] What to do about oil? First it went from $60 to $80 a barrel, then
from $80 to $100 and now to $120. Perhaps we can persuade OPEC to raise
production, as some senators suggest; but this seems unlikely. The
truth is that we're almost powerless to influence today's prices. We
are because we didn't take sensible actions 10 or 20 years ago. If we
persist, we will be even worse off in a decade or two. The first thing
to do: Start drilling.
For many years, I admired the mind of Newt Gingrich. In the 1980s and '90s, nobody, with the exception of Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley, articulated political conservatism with the effectiveness of Gingrich.
From politicians who exaggerate and misrepresent the state
of climate science to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s consensus
building to the media’s ridicule of scientists who disagree, the attacks on
science are everywhere. The global warming movement poses as being scientific,
but is actually a profoundly anti-scientific movement.
SPOKANE -- In advance of a speech at Gonzaga on Tuesday, 20/20 co-anchor John Stossel gave a pair of interviews to KXLY 4 where he talked about the evolution of his political thought process.
