Latest Threat to Earth: Golf Balls!

Be Afraid...Be VERY Afraid

Just when you think they can’t get any  worse, the Enviro-nuts come up with a new one. And NO, this is not satire from The Onion.

With an increasing number of golf balls discarded each year, the Danish Golf Association devised a number of tests to determine the environmental impact of golf balls on their surroundings.

It was found that during decomposition, the golf balls dissolved to release a high quantity of heavy metals. Dangerous levels of zinc were found in the synthetic rubber filling used in solid core golf balls. When submerged in water, the zinc attached itself to the ground sediment and poisoned the surrounding flora and fauna.

Course manager for the Danish Golf Union, Torben Kastrup Petersen, said the scale of the problem is unknown: “There has been very little research on the environmental impact of golf balls, but it’s safe to say the indicators are not good. We are planning to collaborate with environmentalists in America to conduct more tests to fully explore the extent of the problem.”

The rest here

Geeze, I can’t wait for them to join with our moonbats in the EPA and try to ban golf. That should be fun!

H/T  Tom Nelson

Well There’s Yer Problem

The problem with Democrats

California is broke. You hear the Guvenator hollering about it all the time. Now here’s an opportunity for more cash flow into the state, but right away the obstructionist Democratic government uses the same tired rhetoric to say no to oil drilling. There is so much oil off the coast of Santa Barbara it bubbles up from the bottom of the ocean and fouls the beaches. Some extra drilling could probably help with that too. Now I don’t know how much money expanding an oil drilling operation might bring in, but keep in mind, this is California, you need to pay for an EPA study and a permit just to fart.

LOS ANGELES —- Lt. Gov. John Garamendi said Thursday he opposes allowing a company to expand oil drilling off the coast of Santa Barbara because it could signal that California wants to renew offshore drilling.

Garamendi chairs the three-member State Lands Commission, which is set to consider a request next week to lease land to Plains Exploration & Production Co. for the drilling project.

“It raises many issues, doesn’t it?” he asked. “It’s been a long, long time since there’s been new leases in California, so the precedent is really, really important.”

Garamendi said revenue from any new offshore drilling should be used to reduce the state’s dependency on oil.

“I’m a no vote unless and until the revenue from any new lease goes to reduce greenhouse gas emission issues,” he said.

Even the environmentalists are for the expanded drilling.

In a landmark partnership, several anti-oil groups supported the drilling plan in exchange for promises by the company to shut down its local operations within 14 years and give away thousands of acres of land.

The criticism came as a surprise to the Santa Barbara environmental groups that lobbied hard for the project.

Linda Krop, an attorney representing the Environmental Defense Center, Get Oil Out! and the Citizens Planning Association of Santa Barbara, hopes the panel can be persuaded to issue permits to drill.

“Our fear is that we’ll lose all these benefits if this project is denied,” Krop said.

So what’s the problem? Democrats. They are always the problem.

Critics in the state Assembly and Coastal Commission recently challenged the proposal, saying it could encourage even more drilling in the future.

Garamendi said he has spoken with Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., as well as other members of the California congressional delegation who expressed “significant concern” that approving a drilling proposal could undercut their efforts to reintroduce a federal moratorium on the practice.

State Lands executive officer Paul Thayer said staff’s recommendation came in part because the proposal violated a long-standing position held by the commission.

“The commission has established a policy that offshore oil drilling in California is less beneficial to the state than the things that might be harmed by it,” Thayer said.

So there you have it. The problem is, as always, Democrats and their tired old rhetoric. It’s their policy, what the majority of people may want means nothing to them.

Source

Your Tax $ To Study Pond Scum

More of your tax dollars are going to the Greens to study the feasibility of pond scum becoming an energy source.

On Greenish Pond

The federal government is starting to throw money into it. The Department of Energy has invested $2.3 million in algae-to-fuel grants so far this year. It invested $2.2 million in algae research in 2006 and 2007, though it wasn’t specific to fuel production.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the research arm of the Defense Department, is launching a new program to study algal feedstock material, said Jan Walker, an agency spokesman.

Not all that much money you say? Take a look at this.

“We can grow algae. It’s been demonstrated,” said Al Darzins, a manager at the National Bioenergy Center at the National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden, Colo.

But it costs anywhere from $10 to $100 a gallon now, and “obviously that’s not cost-effective,” he said.

The Colorado lab led a $25 million study of algae from 1978 to 1996, before money dried up and government research shifted to ethanol.

Still no big deal?

“I’m convinced algae will work, but it’ll take a different, out-of-the-box approach,” said Silicon Valley billionaire Vinod Khosla, delivering the keynote address at the Algae Biomass Summit in Seattle last month.
The potential for algae to compete with fossil fuels is there, but it will take scientific breakthroughs to bring down costs and solve climate change, said Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, whose Khosla Ventures has invested in renewable energy, though not algae.

There is the problem I have with alternative energy. I don’t want to pay for the research. Look at this Khosla person for instance. He’s a billionaire. He has more money than the government (trillions in debt) yet he doesn’t want to put his own money into the research. Either the idea is not really that good, or he’s just another Algore. These people get up and preach about what a great idea they have but do you see anyone actually spending their own money or living the lifestyle they want you to live? No. They don’t do it. They want the government (you and me) to pay for it, and for everyone but them to sacrifice their lifestyle so they can buy some carbon credits and live guilt free. And some even buy their carbon credits from a company they own. Imagine that!

Source

The Church of the Environment

Charles Krauthammer has a good article today about how the Do As I Say environmental elitists are reviving socialism. Here’s part of it.

For a century, an ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous knowledge class — social planners, scientists, intellectuals, experts and their left-wing political allies — arrogated to themselves the right to rule either in the name of the oppressed working class (communism) or, in its more benign form, by virtue of their superior expertise in achieving the highest social progress by means of state planning (socialism).

Two decades ago, however, socialism and communism died rudely, then were buried forever by the empirical demonstration of the superiority of market capitalism everywhere from Thatcher’s England to Deng’s China, where just the partial abolition of socialism lifted more people out of poverty more rapidly than ever in human history.

Just as the ash heap of history beckoned, the intellectual left was handed the ultimate salvation: environmentalism. Now the experts will regulate your life not in the name of the proletariat or Fabian socialism but — even better — in the name of Earth itself.

Environmentalists are Gaia’s priests, instructing us in her proper service and casting out those who refuse to genuflect. And having proclaimed the ultimate commandment — carbon chastity — they are preparing the supporting canonical legislation that will tell you how much you can travel, what kind of light you will read by, and at what temperature you may set your bedroom thermostat.

Only Monday, a British parliamentary committee proposed that every citizen be required to carry a carbon card that must be presented, under penalty of law, when buying gasoline, taking an airplane or using electricity. The card contains your yearly carbon ration to be drawn down with every purchase, every trip, every swipe.

There’s no greater social power than the power to ration. And, other than rationing food, there is no greater instrument of social control than rationing energy, the currency of just about everything one does and uses in an advanced society.

So what does the global warming agnostic propose as an alternative? First, more research — untainted and reliable — to determine (a) whether the carbon footprint of man is or is not lost among the massive natural forces (from sunspot activity to ocean currents) that affect climate, and (b) if the human effect is indeed significant, whether the planetary climate system has the homeostatic mechanisms (like the feedback loops in the human body, for example) with which to compensate.

Second, reduce our carbon footprint in the interim by doing the doable, rather than the economically ruinous and socially destructive. The most obvious step is a major move to nuclear power, which to the atmosphere is the cleanest of the clean.

But your would-be masters have foreseen this contingency. The Church of the Environment promulgates secondary dogmas as well. One of these is a strict nuclear taboo.

Rather convenient, is it not? Take this major coal-substituting fix off the table, and we will be rationing all the more. Guess who does the rationing.

The Rest Here

Here’s What I Wanted To Say

This is the point I was making in my previous post, The Real Oil Crisis is Politics. Investor’s Business Daily has it all right here.

Who Is Really Responsible For The High Prices You Pay For Gasoline?

By INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Monday, May 12, 2008 4:20 PM PT

For the last 28 years, Democrats in Congress and a few Republicans have again and again opposed our drilling for oil in Alaska’s ANWR area when we knew it contained at least 10 billion barrels of oil we could be using now.

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IBD Series: Breaking The Back Of High Oil

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• For the past 31 years, Congress repeatedly prevented us from building any new oil refineries that we now badly need.

• More recently, congressional Democrats defeated and discouraged any bill that would let us drill in the deep sea 100 miles out. However, it’s somehow OK for China to drill there.

• As a further indictment of our Congress, since the 1980s it has continually stopped all building of nuclear power plants while France, Germany and, yes, Japan, plus 12 other major nations, did build plants and now get 20% to 80% of their energy from their wise and safe nuclear plant investments.

• From 1990 to 2000, U.S. crude oil demand rapidly accelerated by 7.41 quadrillion BTUs, according to Department of Energy data. And our rate of foreign oil dependency dramatically increased while our domestic oil production steadily declined.

Under the eight Clinton years alone, U.S. oil production declined 1,349,000 barrels per day, or 19%, while our foreign imports increased 3,574,000 barrels per day, or 45%.

During this time, President Clinton vetoed ANWR drilling bills that would have clearly made Alaska our No. 1 state in the production of our own vitally needed oil supply, not only for all Americans but also for national defense emergencies.

So were Democrats and members of Congress together merely short-sighted, with only a few having any real business experience?

Or were they just ignorant about economics — the fact that the law of supply and demand determines the price of all commodities such as oil, steel, copper and lumber?

Or were they simply and utterly irresponsible and incompetent in their actions that led us to become dangerously dependent on increasing oil imports from foreign countries?

We think it was “all of the above.”

The unintended consequence of the Congress members’ poor judgment and meddling micromanagement of U.S. energy policy is that they actually hurt most the very people they always profess to be able to help — the average American consumer, lower-income workers and those in the inner city who can’t afford an extra $100 a month to drive to and from their jobs.

Democrats kowtowed to the wishes of their environmental supporters over the basic needs of 300 million American citizens.

It is a national disgrace that all they now know how to do is relentlessly criticize, complain and condemn. They always attempt to blame, investigate and scapegoat someone else, in this case U.S. oil companies, when Congress is the true villain of ineptness for constantly blocking and obstructing every effort for us to become more productive and less dependent on foreign oil.

Do those now in Congress really think Middle America’s voters are so gullible that they will believe that its latest best and brightest answer to increasing our supply of oil and gas is to slap a 25% windfall penalty tax on oil companies and remove all other incentives for oil companies to drill and explore for oil?

The right time to release oil from, or stop adding to, our Strategic Petroleum Reserve is not now. That will do nothing to increase our ongoing oil supply needs and will have limited affect on oil prices while increasing our national security risks.

Only after we first announce to the world a bold new change in our policy by proclaiming that we intend to begin drilling in ANWR and selected outer sea areas, plus adopt new conservation programs, will the release of oil from our reserves have a major impact on breaking the price of oil.

If our congressional leadership can’t muster the courage to begin reversing past mistakes now and allow our companies to drill in ANWR and off-limits offshore areas, and build essential refineries and safe nuclear power plants, what will an even-more-discredited Congress do in 2009, 2010 and 2011, when millions of new city dwellers in China and India will be driving the cars their countries are now producing, thereby materially increasing their already huge demand for oil and gas?

It’s wake-up time for America. Maybe we should investigate the blame-throwing investigators in Congress.

Doomsday Cult Can’t Get It Right

It’s not just the Goracle and his cult that have been wrong on all the predictions of doom and gloom. There’s a history of all naysayers being wrong. I can’t think of any of the looming disasters I’ve heard about since the late 60′s coming true, not that I wanted them to, mind you. Walter E. Williams takes a look back at some scary predictions that turned out to be hot air, so to speak.

Now that another Earth Day has come and gone, let’s look at some environmentalist predictions they would prefer we forget.

At the first Earth Day celebration, in 1969, environmentalist Nigel Calder warned, “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.”

C.C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organization said, “The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed.”

In 1968, professor Paul Ehrlich, former Vice President Al Gore’s hero and mentor, predicted that there would be a major food shortage in the U.S. and “in the 1970s . . . hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.”

Ehrlich forecast that 65 million Americans would die of starvation between 1980 and 1989, and that by 1999 the U.S. population would have declined to 22.6 million.

Ehrlich’s predictions about England were gloomier: “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”

In 1972, a report was written for the Club of Rome warning that the world would run out of gold by 1981, mercury and silver by 1985, tin by 1987 and petroleum, copper, lead and natural gas by 1992.

Gordon Taylor, in his 1970 book “The Doomsday Book,” said Americans were using 50% of the world’s resources and “by 2000 they (Americans) will, if permitted, be using all of them.”

In 1975, the Environmental Fund took out full-page ads warning, “The World as we know it will likely be ruined by the year 2000.”

Harvard biologist George Wald in 1970 warned, “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” That was the same year that Sen. Gaylord Nelson warned, in Look magazine, that by 1995 “somewhere between 75% and 85% of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”

It’s not just latter-day doomsayers who have been wrong; doomsayers have always been wrong.

In 1885, the U.S. Geological Survey announced that there was “little or no chance” of oil being discovered in California, and a few years later they said the same about Kansas and Texas.

In 1939, the U.S. Department of the Interior said American oil supplies would last only another 13 years. In 1949, the secretary of the interior said the end of U.S. oil supplies was in sight. Having learned nothing from its earlier erroneous claims, in 1974 the U.S. Geological Survey advised us that the U.S. had only a 10-year supply of natural gas. The fact of the matter, according to the American Gas Association: There’s a 1,000- to 2,500- year supply.

Here are my questions:

In 1970, when environmentalists were making predictions of man-made global cooling and the threat of an ice age and millions of Americans starving to death, what kind of government policy should we have undertaken to prevent such a calamity?

When Ehrlich predicted that England would not exist in the year 2000, what steps should the British Parliament have taken in 1970 to prevent such a dire outcome?

In 1939, when the Department of the Interior warned that we only had oil supplies for another 13 years, what actions should President Roosevelt have taken?

Finally, what makes us think that environmental alarmism is any more correct now that they have switched their tune to man-made global warming?

Here are a few facts:

More than 95% of the greenhouse effect is the result of water vapor in Earth’s atmosphere. Without the greenhouse effect, Earth’s average temperature would be zero degrees Fahrenheit.

Most climate change is a result of the orbital eccentricities of Earth and variations in the sun’s output. On top of that, natural wetlands produce more greenhouse-gas contributions annually than all human sources combined.

Source: IBDeditorials via JunkScience