Bad Week for the Environment
 

I think it was Monday that Dubya adopted rules which accomplished the reductions in environmental protections that he could not get Congress to pass. Congress decides that these protections should remain, and Dubya does the end-around play and removes them through rule-making. Pretty cute, huh? This is your "president" I am talking about. The one whose agenda was known from the start. And whose performance is exactly what we predicted. Sulfur emission regulations are gone.

Today, I believe Congress will act on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge matter. For those of you who are curious, Dubya has an intense desire to drill for oil there, even though all analysts say not enough oil will be produced to make a difference in the nation's oil supply. It almost looks like someone owes a favor, or stands to make personal money out of this. Anyway, the measure has been defeated by Congress as a separate bill, but Dubya is using an interesting trick this time. He's placed this measure in the budget. Where it does not belong. Because as a budget measure, this act requires only a simple majority. Analysts also seem to be in agreement that the majority of the American people oppose this. Oh, that's right, when it comes to American lives, national security and other small matters like oil production and the environment, Dubya does not give a rat's ass about popular opinion. Cuz he's just that much smarter than the rest of us, I guess.

So, it's a bad week for the environment but an excellent week for Dubya. He's successfully thwarted both Congress and the American people, and gas prices are reaching a record high! (I guess the financial markets are not as impressed as the "political market" with the 'mission' we have 'accomplished' in Iraq.

I speculate that, should one or more oil companies commence drilling in the ANWR, we'll see a consumer boycott of that company or companies.

Supe - have you been listening to Air America again? I ask because it is grammitically incorrect to imply that the "environment" is having a "bad week". The environment is not a living being and is therefore incapable of having a 'good' day, a 'crappy' day, or a 'bad' day. Abusing grammatical rules for the specific purpose of denigrating a political party is a really cute trick though ...... :D

Sulphur emissions regulations are certainly not gone. Otherwise I'd be out of a job right now. Shell spent $350 million last year on five plants to produce low sulphur gasoline. They are spending another $350 million at five refinineries to produce ULTRA low sulphur diesel (<8ppm).

We should drill in ANWR. There's nothing up there but snow, mosquitos and oil.

The American people oppose $55/bbl oil. I wont be boycotting any oil company that drills there.

LOL! Touche'

A bad day? I’d say the environment is in the middle of a bad eight years.

Exactly how will the oil from ANWR reduce the price of oil used to make gasoline? Can you refine the oil from ANWR in the refineries around the SF bay area?

You mean like they boycotted Exxon after the Exxon Valdez? The American people are too greedy and self centered to boycott anything, especially cheap gas. What happened to the Nike boycott, the K-Mart clothing line boycott, etc. etc.? It just doesn't happen here. Americans are willing to speak up and protest, but if and when it ever comes down to personal inconvenience or expense, the big corporations know they have us right where they want us.

Drilling in ANSWR won't reduce the price of oil, it will simply bring more $^10 to GWB's oil buddies.

I hope you’re not serious. If you are, that’s a pretty uneducated statement. There is a reason it’s called a “Wildlife Refuge.” From the US Fish & Wildlife’s web site:

“Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was established to preserve unique wildlife, wilderness and recreational values; to conserve caribou herds, polar bears, grizzly bears, muskox, dall sheep, wolves, wolverines, snow geese, peregrine falcons, other migratory birds, dolly varden, and grayling; to fulfill international treaty obligations; to provide opportunities for continued subsistence uses; and to ensure necessary water quality and quantity.”

http://arctic.fws.gov/


Go to the website and get educated a bit before you make statements like that.

In my experience, our president has been deceitful to the point that I don't believe anything he says. Based on that I strongly suspect that Bush is pushing for drilling in ANWR for reasons other than the good of the country. I'm also skeptical of environmental groups (heck any group) because I realize that they depend on getting people excited about something real or not in order to further their agenda.

I'd love to reduce our dependance on foreign oil because I believe it will have a direct result in reducing the number of Americans sent to the Middle East to get shot at - people like my brother.
- How bad would drilling in the ANWR really be for the environment?
- I've heard that it will take 10 years before we see any of that oil and it won't be enough to make a difference in the nations oil supply. Obviously, if there is enough oil there that oil companies are willing to invest for 10 years before seeing any return there must be quite a bit of oil.

-Chris

The other issue has always been that our refineries can not refine alaska crude, so again I ask who will refine this gunk?

A significant way to recue our dependence is to go to hydrogen, but we need to spend some money now to reap the rewards later.

Increasing the supply of oil should lower the price, but the problem is that we can't refine it quickly enough. We haven't even had a new refinery built in 30 years, thanks to the damn hippies, and the ones that we do have run at 90% of capacity.

ANWR is a 19 MILLION acre refuge. Of that, Bush is proposing 1.5 million acres to be set aside for oil exploration. Out of that 1.5 million acres, only 2,000 acres will be devoted to drilling. That's .01% of the refuge.

cerg:

Just curious when you say the environment is not a living thing..

Really?

Look up the root meaning of the word..It is all around you.

Like we're currently doing in Iraq and what we did the Soviets?;)

- Skip

Drilling for oil can be done with minimal enviromental impact compared to strip mining which would obviously affect the enviroment. The tree huggers understandably use fear to try and scare the general public into opposing any kind of enviromental impact period.

That being said, I do claim that drilling in Alaska will solve any and all future oil problems, but it will help.

Hum, interesting article on alaska crude oil production
http://www.ncseonline.org/NLE/CRSreports/natural/nrgen-25.cfm?&CFID=14018578&CFTOKEN=79770560

will output from ANWR be like alaska crude?
http://powerpoints.wri.org/anwr/sld003.htm

from this we could just increase the refining of Alaska crude and really drop prices, sort of what happened in the early 90's

but then
"The West Coast oil glut elicited persistent expressions of concern from oil producers displeased with what they perceived as artificially depressed prices. "

We have plenty of oil now. We do not need to open ANWR.

boy, you guys and your persistent deragotory terms
damn hippies- Bryan you ain't old enough to use it
treehuggers- aka conservationists, environmentalists and almost anyone except a capitalist war monger

Can you discuss issues without using those terms?

George W is the principle archtitect is using fear to accomplish his goals.

Exactly what did we do to the Soviets?
On Iraq , is that a justification for starting the war or completing the job?

Chris, I don't think that's the way it works. If if the U.S. successfully migrated away from oil and depended on zero barrels of ME crude it would maintain a very active role in the ME. The loss of global power/leverage would be signifigant.

And how will we make the Hydrogen? You need energy to spilt the water into H2 and O2. Wind, hydro? gas? oil? or coal? The only one that really makes sense is nuclear and we know where that isn't going in the US.

stevepaa - simmer down, old timer, it doesn't take a genius to know a.) what a hippy is/was and b.) to realize what effects they had that can be seen today

It's interesting that if we fail to use enough imagination to predict some future event, we're shortsighted hillbillies, but when we do see something that may happen and act upon it, then we're using scare tactics.

Nearly all commercial hydrogen today is made from petroleum. You strip the hydrogen off of the carbon chains. Guess what you end up with from the process? CO, CO2, various nitrogen compounds--basically the same thing that comes out of a cars exhaust pipe. You really end up with no net reduction in emmissions.

Further, you have to store hydrogen in a presurized and sealed container. Don't forget the H2 + 02 is also used as rocket fuel. The kinds of accidents that can happen are much worse with hydrogen than gasoline.

Bryan, ascribing any meaning today to "hippie" is about as worthwhile as using "flower child", or "beatnik".

Nothing wrong with acting on something that may happen, but he did use fear and scare tactics to get popular support for this invasion of Iraq.

And he is doing the exact same thing on Social Security when he says to people younger than me that it will be bankrupt soon. That is a bald face lie, but he keeps on saying it.

He is a masterful policitician, and as such will use any tactic to further his agenda. If you thought Clinton was slick and Reagan was teflon, you ain't seen nothing yet.

Damn hippie environmentalists with their clean air and water! :mad:

legion, good point.

Seriously, so why is there still a significant push for hydrogen powered cars?

I hear what you are saying Steve, but in this forum, both sides seem to enjoy the mud slinging. I like to think of it as a tit for tat
kind of thing. Oh and your description of treehuggers above, well it proves my point ("capitalist war monger").

If these posts did not contain a little controversy, I doubt many of us would waste the time here. There is zero chance that anyone will change 350 or Supe's political views and it is very unlikely that anyone here will change mine.

I've said before and I'll say again, and American president should step up to the plate and do a "JFK." He should challenge this nation to become xx% energy independent through use of emerging technologies, by the year 20xx. 'Course an oil baron is not going to say that, and the president who does say it will not be popular with some industries. But the technology is probably there already, it's just a matter of the infrastructure. And the tendency of industrial concerns to maximize the bottom line even when it serves the people poorly. Energy independence would be one of the most effective ways of battling terrorism, as well as environmental damage, etc. Leadership. It's so hard to find.

I think that most people seriously don't realize where hydrogen comes from. I mean, it's an element, right? That must mean it's abundant in its native form...

I also think that some people believe that pushing us to hydrogen would force us to find renewable methods of creating it. You could build a solar-powered hydrogen refinery that simply takes water and separates the hydrogen from the oxygen. The problem is, that such a setup is more expensive to build and run compared to refining it from petroleum. Refining it from petroleum is more expensive than just running cars on gasoline and diesel. Think of how high oil prices would have to be before renewable hydrogen becomes the cheapest energy source. In a perfect world, we would all use renewable energy, but there's no incentive to try when you can get it much cheaper from the ground.

My best friend's dad has been working in a government-funded program on developing economical fuel cells for four years--with just that goal. Guess who initiated the program? Clinton? Nope. GWB.

As an aside, this very man is a hard-core liberal. Bites the hand that feeds him, if you will. He's also been dissapointed to see his three U of I educated, top of their class, super-genious sons become hard-core conservatives. Kinda funny.

I've long thought that this president has made many of the right moves and then picked the worst reasons for justifying them.

Tim
yeah I just threw that capitalist war monger in as an example.

Well, I may not expect to change anyone's mind, but I am sure some people have worthwhile information that I am not aware of. Like the information Legion just posted.

And sometimes we need to dissect an argument, to strip away fabrications and generalities, and get to root specifics.

Yes, there are technical hurdles to clear. Another thing that a leader, like I described above, would do with this JFK-style mandate, is to remind us of who we are. We are Americans. I hope I do not even need to explain further. Other countries have lower wages and industrious assembly-line workers. Americans are the doers of the impossible. We are the pioneers. We solve problems. In ten or twenty years, my nation could swell with pride over a job well done. At that time, perhaps we'd find that battery technology could improve to the point where cars are all electric. Sure, electricity costs money to produce, but could be made from any energy source. Wind, for example, or solar. I am personally okay with nuclear (or, if you're living in the White House, that would be noocyaler).

And no, I think that if our need for ME oil was zero, we'd flip them the American gesture of good friendship and never look back. They can go back to camels and tents. Our strategic attention would turn toward the East.

But all this is just talk. Talk about pride and American ingenuity. Talk about national security. That's all worth less than the favors Dubya owes, and the money he stands to make for the Bush family's future.

It is also interesting that the shortsighted hillbillies are the ones influenced by GW and Co's scare tactics.

<i>"Just curious when you say the environment is not a living thing.."</i>


Money - I said it is not a "living being" and is incapable of having a "bad week". You're not implying that 'Mother Earth' has feelings of pain, happiness and sadness .......... are you? :eek: If she does, she's obviously going thru PMS today because the sun was shining this morning and now it's a friggin' white-out style blizzard!

She heard you.

No cerg..

I am not going "Gaia" on you. I am saying that the environment consists of not only the inanimate rocks but all the organisims that inhabit the planet. Your environment consists of everything around you. I do feel for you with all that snow, although. Could be your attitude that brought on the blizzard...Like the old commercial "It's not nice to fool Mother Nature"...

As for nature "having a bad day", it happens all the time. Out here, it is forest fires. Why? Because the so-called extreme environmentalists balk at the idea of selective and prudent thinning of forested areas, despite the data out there that describes the dire results of not doing what nature itself does. By "preventing" the small fires and allowing the tinder to accumulate, when the inevitable happens, it is a catastrophe. Nature can indeed have a "bad day", generally because of man's interference or benign neglect.

Maybe it is because I live in a relatively fragile environment that I am so sensitive about it.

Looks like great news about ANWR today!

Why aren't these environmentalists over in the MidEast, staging protests out in the desert to stop the oil drilling? Isn't the potential for damage the same (or worse) over there as it is in ANWR? Sounds a lot like 'not in my backyard' to me. :rolleyes:

That would be a little bit of an irony, wouldn't it? I mean, how would they get there? Enjoying the conveniences of modern transportation, no doubt.

I think a little self-preservation may be a factor as well. They are infinitely more likely to wind up rotting in a real jail or worse yet, shot. I lived a funny little microcosm of this behavior myself years ago with my wife. I took her to a somewhat ritzy opening for a show in Seattle years ago (WAY out of character for me...); the PETA folks managed to splash blood on a few of the more well-dressed ladies, decrying the animal furs they were wearing. Mere days later we were in the Kingdome parking lot for a rather large and well-publicized biker event. There were more dead animal skins adorning this crowd by a factor of hundreds. Funny, PETA never showed up to splash blood on us. It seems their conviction is inversly proportional to the likelyhood of getting hurt or in serious trouble.

Anyway, all of that out of the way, I'm not sure how I feel about this morning's news. I'm a big supporter of wildlife refuges and Alaska is one of my favorite places. Is there anywhere left that we will ever agree should be completely untouched, regardless of the riches that await us there? How much oil are we talking about anyway, enough to make any difference? I think the only real impact will be to the refuge and some already very well-to-do oil baron's pocketbooks. The rest of us will never see the difference.

Jeff, I'm going to remind you again that your characterization of people who refuse to mindlessly accept the violent and oversimplified solution chosen by your brave president is neither accurate nor honest. The peaceniks you are having fun inaccurately characterizing, also contain members who from time to time perish in the pursuit of trying to draw attention to the truth. Some of the most terrible and patriotic moments in this nation's history, or any nation's history, center on these people you are trying to characterize as cowardly.

There is a reason someone might hope to protect ANWR rather than ME desert. Sure, there is life in the desert but nothing like at ANWR. Nothing at all. You'd think that marine abundance would occur where the water is warm. Think again. Fishing boats leaving Seattle head North. That's where 350-lb halibuts are caught. That's where we find crabs nearly ten feet in diameter (yes, including legs). It is ignorant or dishonest to characterize the ANWR as a thinly populated preserve. It is just the opposite. Plus, its oil is harder to refine, and its oil reserves are not even a shadow of the volume of oil underneath a place like Iraq.

It is a sad day for Americans, wildlife, etc. I hope we can quickly get some leadership in Washington DC to stop this greedy carnage. You guys' "president" distinguishes himself in only two meaningful ways. His boldness/bravado, and his greed.

Hey Supe, I do not think they are talking about strip mining up there. I really do not care for the protester groups in general (note: I refrained from using the word treehugger), but that does not mean I want to trash the whole planet. Industrializing a few square miles out of thousands, does equate to trashing the enviroment. That only requires common sense to see.

Life is full of compromise right?

Supe are you saying you would support those nutjobs (oops, I mean valiant, patriotic?, truthseekers) that Jeff mentioned above that threw blood on some women at a social event?

Blood throwers, tree spikers not to mention suicide bombers, do their causes more damage than good. Most SENSIBLE people can only come to one conclusion: These people are crazy.