Environment

The weather has been crazy this year, that is certain. With all the massive flooding in the Midwest, another weather problem seems to be - droughts in the South:

Officials in the Oklahoma Panhandle are appealing for government aid to help with the effects of a drought that has harmed crops and livestock forage.

"This area is starting to look like the Sahara Desert," said Ann Boyd, a 76-year-old rancher in Cimarron County, at the western edge of the Panhandle. "There's just nothing here. Even the weeds are dying. The buffalo grass isn't coming up. There's nothing."

The area is now declared to be drier than during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

All of this is going to lead to even higher prices at the grocery store. Add to that the rising fuel prices and things are going to get really bad.

More at DKos.

Last week John McCain flip-flopped on the environment by calling for opening up drilling on the coasts of the U.S. Now he wants to appear to be concerned about the environment again by offering $300 million to any person/company who can develop a new battery that could power cars.Of course that $300 million would have to come through Congress, and I am sure his own party would do what they can to prevent that.

So Bush is supposed to make a big speech today on climate change. The problem is he still doesn't want to do anything:

Bush will speak forcefully about concerns he has over a possible rush to address the Earth's warming through a hodgepodge of regulations under existing federal laws such as the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act.

Senior White House officials last week told a group of conservative Republican lawmakers in a private meeting that the administration wants Congress to act on climate change to avoid regulating carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping - or greenhouse - gases under existing laws.

Perino says the administration is concerned about a potential regulatory "train wreck" as a result of climate-related court rulings.

Yeah because regulation has killed the economies of Europe, Australia and others. That's why we dominate all of them. Just when you think Bush couldn't be anymore dumb, he proves you wrong.

As oil prices teeter above $112 a barrel, I have heard recent debates about how the high prices are good for the environment. I have been in debates about this in the past, and while people might consume less oil, it is such a wrong way to go about it.

A couple of years ago, after Katrina and oil prices spiked, I got into a debate on a forum with a west coast liberal about the high oil prices. She insisted how it was good for the environment and needed to be done. As a Midwest liberal, I can safely say that is a very bad way to handle the over consumption of oil. Why? Because it hits the people it shouldn't - the middle and lower class.

Countless cities and states around the country are suffering financially. Think about all the fire trucks, ambulances, police cars, school buses, road repair trucks, etc. that your city and state operate. They are having to fill those vehicles up with this high dollar gas. That means other things end up being cut, or the use of those vehicles end up getting cut. "Sorry Mr. and Mrs. Jones, but your child now has to walk the two miles to school. We can no longer afford bus service". Don't think that happens? It happened here back after the Katrina oil price surge.

How about the family that already has to work two jobs just to stay in their home? Now they are paying a lot more to get to and from those two jobs. A medical emergency hits and their child needs special medical care. They don't have the money to take care of that child, simply because the money that was once there is now in the gas tank.

There seems to be a major disconnect between the coasts and middle of this country when it comes to this point. One of the great excuses I hear from coastal liberals is "take public transportation". One big problem with that - what public transportation? We don't have it where I live, and a lot of middle America doesn't have public transportation.

Another argument is to use alternate transportation, like walk or bike. This one really pains me, as an avid biker, but there are also problems in that. Take people who live in rural areas. They might live 20 or 30 miles from work, or even the nearest store. Are they expected to walk or peddle that far? Unless you ride regularly, I would not advise it. During the summer I can ride 40-50 miles a day without much problem, but this time of year my trips are generally 10 miles a day. After the winter biking hibernation, it takes time to get back in condition. Peddling 30 miles when you haven't rode in years, and out of a reason of need is the wrong answer.

The final argument I hear, that really gets under my skin, is that people in the U.K. pay a lot more than we do. Again the entire facts aren't looked at. In the U.K. a majority of what they pay at the pumps go into taxes. Those taxes are earmarked for things like public services, and public transportation. Here, the higher gas prices mean higher profits for the oil company. The extra money isn't dumped back into the system. If we had a system like the U.K., where people who couldn't afford gas had plausible alternatives, then I would not have a problem at all paying these prices (or more) at the pump. But we don't.

So to the liberals out there that think these high oil prices are good for the environment, this liberal asks that you rethink your position. Yeah people might not burn as much gas with higher prices, but the benefits are disproportionate to the negatives. The people with the big guzzling SUVs aren't necessarily cutting back, it's the average family struggling to survive. Unless we come up with a way to ensure decent public transportation for all the country, we can't price middle America out of their vehicles. They are necessary for life.

Environmentalists have feared that Bush would try to use his last year in office to push for opening up areas for drilling, and that is exactly his plan:

The Bush administration has proposed allowing oil and gas drilling in an area of the Bering Sea considered important for the recovery of the world's most endangered whale.

The proposal opening up 5.6 million acres off the Alaska coast to energy development was published Tuesday in the Federal Register by the Minerals Management Service.

Under the leasing proposal, the North Aleutian Basin lease sale would be held in 2011. Exploratory drilling could begin the next year.

Bush has been a disaster on the environment, and he will leave with a bang. Hopefully Congress has the ability to hold up his plans until we get a new President.

People are turning more the public transportation, and usage is now at a 50 year high.

And the dolphins win one:

President Bush cannot exempt the Navy from environmental laws banning sonar training that opponents argue harms whales, a federal judge ruled Monday.

Navy officials did not immediately respond to the ruling by U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper. Mark Matsunaga, spokesman for the Navy's Pacific Fleet, headquartered in Hawaii, said officials needed time to review it before commenting.

The president signed a waiver Jan. 15 exempting the Navy and its anti-submarine warfare exercises from a preliminary injunction creating a 12 nautical-mile no-sonar zone off Southern California. The Navy's attorneys argued in court last week that he was within his legal rights.

Imagine that - saying the President can't ignore laws nilly willy. Sounds like some sort of activist judge to me.

Because losing in court means nothing to him:

The White House yesterday sought to overrule a federal court's decision limiting the Navy's use of sonar in training exercises, exempting the service from complying with two major environmental laws.

Environmentalists who sued to limit the use of loud, mid-frequency sonar -- which can be harmful to whales and other marine mammals -- said the exemptions were unprecedented and could lead to a larger legal battle over the extent to which the military has to follow environmental laws.

In a court filing yesterday, government attorneys said President Bush had determined that allowing the use of mid-frequency sonar in ongoing exercises off southern California was "essential to national security" and of "paramount interest to the United States."

That sonar really worked good in determining that it wasn't a boat from Iran trying to get us - didn't it?

This is from a press release that went out this afternoon from The Heritage Forests Campaign:

The Bush administration today released documents announcing its intention to remove protections for more than six million acres of roadless areas in the national forests of Idaho. Idaho’s roadless backcountry areas are some of the nation’s last intact national forests and this proposal would open the door to their development by corporate special interests.

[SNIP]

“Last year, a federal judge struck down the Bush administration's attempt to remove protections for our nation’s wild forests. Today, 50 million acres of roadless national forests, in all states except Alaska, are protected from road construction and logging. Now, under the cover of the hectic holiday season, the administration is trying to open the door to new development in the roadless backcountry of Idaho’s national forests.

Mor e trouble for our planet:

limate change has caused the greatest thaw of Greenland's ice in half a century, perhaps heralding a wider meltdown that would quicken a rise in world sea levels, scientists said on Tuesday.

"We attribute significantly increased Greenland summer warmth and ice melt since 1990 to global warming," a group of researchers wrote in the Journal of Climate, adding to recent evidence of faster Antarctic and Arctic thaws.

Of course the deniers will spin this because of the 50 year mark. They look for any loop hole, without thought of consequence for their ill thinking.

But Henry Waxman is on the case and not too happy.

It doesn't look like it:

The recent price rally in farm commodities such as grains, oilseeds and sugar beet can be attributed partly to higher biofuel demand but their share of the blame has been exaggerated, a top official of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Loek Boonekamp, a division head in the Agro-food Trade and Markets Division at the Paris-based OECD, said the surge in farm product prices -- with cereals more than doubling last year -- would have happened even without the rise in biofuel production.

"Closing your eyes and blaming the current high prices to biofuels is just too simplistic," he told the Reuters Global Agriculture and Biofuel Summit.

The deniers want to blame the people trying to save our planet and ourselves for all the problems. The flaw in their logic is that it's false. Now we have proof coming that their claims are baseless, and that proof is from a food manufacturer. Of course they will try to spin this some other way.

China is banning plastic shopping bags effective June 1. Does that mean the U.S. will soon follow suit? I wouldn't hold my breath on that one.

A car that runs on compressed air!

How long before the oil and auto industry tells us how dangerous compressed air is to the environment? You know that will be coming, or them saying that it costs too much in fuel to power a compressor to fill the car (which I incidentally have a compressor like they are using and have had it on an entire day while using a nail gun and my electric bill didn't go up).

Bob Cesca and Cliff Schecter have more on this.