Thursday, February 10, 2005

The Day of the Jackal and the Last Ice Age

All week long as I’ve slogged through the snow, froze as I scrape the ice off my windshield, and listened to the furnace rumble on again and again; I’ve wondered, “where is this global warming they’ve been promising?”

There have been a few warm winters, the snows in Siberia are a bit dryer than in the 80’s, and we are told there is an earth devistating warming trend on its way. Not only earth devastating, but man caused – specifically SUV sales and George W. Bush caused. I’m quite sure that if the Enviro-Nazis would have been around at the end of the last ice age their complaints against troglodyte campfires would have preempted human evolution.

“In August was the Jackal born;
The Rains fell in September;
Now such a fearful flood as this.’
Says he, ‘I can’t remember!’”

These lines from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books are given as a rebuke to a young jackal whose pretended wisdom amuses those wiser beasts who have “been around” a few more seasons. Environmental extremists, desperate for a cause capable of frightening the masses into accepting their demands, have latched onto a few warm winters as a club to bludgeon their agenda down the global craw. Fortunately there are a few of us who have been around. I say fortunately, because these self-serving fund raisers are capable of preempting our way of life. Perhaps the most pernicious manifestation of this falsehood is the environmental hammer lock on American Oil production. A situation made possible by the vilification of fossil fuel production as well as consumption. American is not allowed to utilize its oil and coal resources, and condemned for exploiting the foreign energy sources available to us. These agitators damage us all by hanging a theory of planetary disaster on a few decades of weather fluctuations and pasting the blame for this weather on American. Their harm is real and recognizable.

1. They damages our economy by giving advantage to foreign competitors and waists enormous time and recourses in frivolous law suits which clog our over burdened courts and put off necessary projects. (Think Legacy Highway!)

2. Anti - administration pundits exacerbate anti-American attitudes across the world. Giving America’s enemies propaganda weapons to use against this country. They entangle the Iraq war in false claims of oil greed; which emboldens terrorists.

3. They lock up American resources, increasing our dependency on “Arab Oil” and putting our nation at a strategic as well as economic disadvantage in a very competitive world.

4. They increase the suffering of the poor by:

a) Preempting economic growth and the jobs cheaper energy could stimulate into existence,

b) Increasing food production and transportation costs which, to use the sensational rhetoric of the left, forces the poor to choose between spending their money on food, medicine, or fuel. I wonder how many grandmas have frozen this “globally warmed winter” because there was no cheep American fuel to warm them.

5. They send up production prices, transportation prices, the cost of heating or cooling working places, school, and stores; increasing consumer prices as personal resources are wasted.

6. They force up airline cost and harm this valuable part of our economy and all its adjunct industries.

7. They increase the cost of auto production. These artificially forced up expenses are passed on to consumers who barley can afford the “guilty pleasure” of driving their own cars.

8. They encourage global methane production, which shoots up as the population of pooping Caribou skyrockets. (Alright – I admit I am kidding here, though I actually had a University Professor tell a class I was attending that beef cattle were causing global warming by relieving themselves. When I asked him why the same wasn’t true of the billions of buffalo that once roamed the Pre Columbian plains – he said I was being “too negative”.)

I remember the bitter winters of the 80’s when the environmentalists were predicting the beginning of an Ice Age. When the mountains of snow flooded over dams and sent the waters of the Great Salt Lake across Weber, Davis, and Salt Lake Counties. Then in 1988 a drought brought a summer of fire to Yellowstone. I can also remember the heat and the drought of the decade before that.

1977 was the last of several years of drought. I spent that summer in the Yellowstone backcountry at Camp Loll BSA. Some weekends I took the kids who worked for me on drives past Grassy and Jackson Lake. As the water in these man made reservoirs disappeared, my staff became concerned. They came to me one Saturday afternoon, after the scouts had left. They demanded they be allowed to spend the next two days building a dam across the end of Lake of the Woods – the natural lake on which our camp sits.

“Why?” I asked.

“To keep the Lake for running out.”

“How deep is Lake of the Woods were it runs into Cascade Creek?”

“About this deep,” one of the staffers said, holding his fingers about three inches apart.

“When the lake goes down three inches won’t it stop running out on its own?”

“Oh ya,” they said, and walked away without a word - no thanks for the wisdom that freed up their weekend.

The world needs to seek a little truth too. Phony science used to prop up attacks on America must be debunked. We must not listen to the yapping of the Jackals. We need to find some wiser heads.

8 comments:

Dan said...

I have to post for this one. While I agree to all of the environmental comments made, I must strongly disagree with the idea that the energy companies are being handicapped.

I have had the misfortune of having a more first-hand experience recently with the greed and avarice of an energy company. I can't think of an industry in our country that I have less respect for. They have proven themselves to be completely without a social conscience. They have tried their best to destroy a mans career who tried to hold them up to the standards required by law.

I was a strong proponent of domestic drilling, and still am, but I will no longer believe the lies of the energy companies when they claim that they are not allowed to drill. Currently energy companies are drilling or exploring in less than 5% of the land that they hold leases to. (this is not a statistic from environmentalists, it is according to state BLM numbers.)

On top of this, they are pushing for the state to open up more and more lands for lease. They have proven that they are dishonest, and untrustworthy with the current project going on in Nine-mile Canyon.

I am all for domestic drilling, but I think that the energy companies should be held to high standards that protect the lands they use. I don't think that this is too much to ask.

A_Shadow said...

Ok... This is a little time for disagreement, but first:

Dannyboy, is this Utah Power that you're talking about, or some other power company? I have other comments, but they're mostly only pertinent based off of the company...

Anyways...

I fully understand the arguments for homeland drilling, drilling in Alaska, etc. I don't argue with the wisdom of that. I find it odd that we have to go half the world away to buy from nations that have a third of the oil industry and we are sitting on that much (in theory) our selves... It's an odd thing. I'm also not going to disagree with the scare tactics of Enviro-Nazis. One of my favorites that shows the idiocy of how they approach their cause is when they burned down a lumber mill in southern Utah because they're forklifts weren't efficient. So I wonder which was worse? A few forklifts or several tons of burning lumber. And then there's the case of the mink farmers, if you have heard of that gem.

What I would like to disagree with though is the necessity for the call for drilling in Alaska. Global warming or not, wouldn't it just be wiser to use an alternative fuel? I'm talking something like hydrogen fuel cells, or simply making the industrial standard a hybrid model of car (which yes, would use gasoline still, but far less of it). The point for that call, in my eyes, is the very real fact that we are depleting resources that we won't have once that's done. If we go past the debates about global warming and the like and hit on the relatively unrenewability of crude oil, we could see a problem. My call is more a "sooner than later". Because once the oil runs out (and whatever other side disasters and consequences that brings) we will have to do something. I just hesitate to call for the drilling of more oil over the research for better power. I'd much rather do that than put up an Alaskan drilling site.

Dan said...

I'm sorry, my comment was not very specific. I said energy company, and meant the companies that extract the fuels and minerals from the ground.

My specific problem right now is with the Bill Barret Co. They drill all over Utah and the rest of the United States.

I also have to agree with A_Shadow about the change of mindset. Congress could very easily raise the average fleet fuel efficiency level required by 10 miles per gallon. This would encourage more hybrid cars to be produced which would in turn lower the cost, both manufacturing costs and retail costs.

I also think that it would be good domestic policy to encourage industry to go to different sources of energy. Though hydrogen cells have the best P.R. people around, I think that alcohol is at least as good if not better of an idea. It burns almost 100%, it can be made from almost any organic material, and very little would have to be changed to the current internal combustion engine in order for it to be switched to alcohol.

In short, though I agree wholeheartedly with the stupidity of the so-called "environmentalist" movement. I also think that the stranglehold that oil companies have on policy is dangerous and counter productive to progress.

A_Shadow said...

Hmm... I hadn't really thought about alcohol engines, and I have heard that they are easily converted. They just don't seem to get much press, and I don't know a whole lot of fact behind them. But isn't only supposed to release water and some minor, unharmful chemical? I'll have to look it up... But that just shows that there are good alternatives to using oil, no matter which banner you wish to hang your hat on.

James Wilcox said...

Lysis although your generation may be dieing off within the next couple of years *evil laugh*. what about you children's generation and their children's generation? Wont they also need fuel?

Although I am also a little skeptical of environmentalist theory of global warming (and the theory of evolution) I still feel that there should be some pressure against the use of fossil fuels and other non-renewable resources. Pressure that pushes us into development of more efficient ways of using and finding a source of fuel.

(Heres a little article CNN did in July of 1999 http://www.cnn.com/NATURE/9907/28/global.warming/ )

Lysis said...

I agree with you all; we should not waste our resources, nor should we allow them to be exploited by greedy and unscrupulous companies. On the other hand, as we continue to develop alternative sources of power, we should stop exporting so much of our wealth over seas to pay for energy which we could recover from our own territory. Every cent we send to the middle east unbalances our trade and puts other nations at an advantage. President Bush has called for the development of alternative energy sources. The use of solar, nuclear, and biomass to supplement US power needs are all on the Bush agenda. However, with so much fuel within such easy reach, we should not pay out our national treasure to others while we wait for these technological wonders to be developed. There is nothing wrong with using coal or domestic oil for the time being. The problem I sought to address in this posting was the scare tactics put forward by the eco-terroists seeking to prevent the very developments our nation needs.

Taza, thanks for the web address, I’ll give it a look!

Lysis said...

I agree with you all; we should not waste our resources, nor should we allow them to be exploited by greedy and unscrupulous companies. On the other hand, as we continue to develop alternative sources of power, we should stop exporting so much of our wealth over seas to pay for energy which we could recover from our own territory. Every cent we send to the middle east unbalances our trade and puts other nations at an advantage. President Bush has called for the development of alternative energy sources. The use of solar, nuclear, and biomass to supplement US power needs are all on the Bush agenda. However, with so much fuel within such easy reach, we should not pay out our national treasure to others while we wait for these technological wonders to be developed. There is nothing wrong with using coal or domestic oil for the time being. The problem I sought to address in this posting was the scare tactics put forward by the eco-terroists seeking to prevent the very developments our nation needs.

Taza, thanks for the web address, I’ll give it a look!

Dr. Health said...

They have tried their best to destroy a mans career who tried to hold them up to the standards required by law.