Blame Clinton And The Greens For Gas Prices
By Henry Lamb
April 28, 2008
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.
The one thing on which scientists agree is that atmospheric carbon dioxide is currently about 375 parts-per-million. Eighty percent of this carbon is naturally occurring, and would be in the atmosphere had oil never been discovered. The remaining 20 percent, or about 75ppm, is generally attributed to all the smoke-stacks and automobiles and lawn mowers that humans have created.
Could all man-made carbon dioxide produced by humans be eliminated from the atmosphere, the difference would be undetectable. Visualize an Olympic-size swimming pool containing the standard 660,253.9 gallons of water. (web site) The average depth would be 7.480 feet. Remove the percentage of water equal to man-made carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and the new average depth of the pool would be 7.452 feet. Undetectable!
A reduction of 75ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would make no difference on any thermometer. And it would take total elimination of all man-made carbon dioxide to achieve this number. The Kyoto Protocol, had it been fully implemented, would have reduced carbon dioxide by only about 1ppm.
These results are simply not worth banning the use of fossil fuels.
Environmental extremists prefer to mandate the expanded use of ethanol, rather than using abundant oil supplies. This alternative produces less energy per gallon of fuel than gasoline, while driving the price of food upward, causing riots, (web site) and forcing the cultivation of more land where wildlife can no longer flourish.
Environmental extremists wring their hands and cry crocodile tears at the thought of "ruining" the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge by using only 2000 of the 18 million acres for oil production. But they seem to have no problems with the idea of covering millions of acres in the southwest with solar panels.
Environmental extremists celebrate their victory in banning DDT to save birds. But they have no problem with miles and miles of wind turbines that slaughter millions of birds every year. Nor do they seem to have any sympathy for the millions of people who have died from malaria as a direct result of the ban on DDT.
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