Reality Check 101

On May thirteenth, while Americans were being assaulted with growing food and fuel prices, the U.S. Senate voted to again block oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and offshore areas of the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.  Their action took place in spite of the fact that a million-barrel-a-day operation would occupy only one one-hundred thousandth (0.0001) of ANWR’s 19 million acres. The National Center for Policy Analysis has now identified Congress, not oil companies, not OPEC directly and most importantly not consumers as the culprit for gasoline prices.

Congress, under both Republican and Democratic leadership, has spent thirty years blocking both domestic exploration and the building of new refineries.  Because of past inaction we are increasingly dependent on foreigners for our energy needs.  Now, once again, the House majority will offer yet another energy package which does nothing to encourage smart oil technology but continues using public money for unproven alternatives.  In true socialist fashion, the funding will come from taxing oil companies for being successful in a free market system.

The rationale for this ineptitude is a pervasive environmentalist ideology.  It is a foolproof system for accomplishing liberal causes.  Any criticism, however valid, is simply caricatured as callousness or ignorance. 

Human-caused global warming mythology has managed to drive the Bush administration toward a “new global deal” with the “international community” at the U.N. Climate Change Conference inBali,Indonesia.  The deal, a near administration reversal, would, by 2013, allow foreign supervision of American greenhouse gas emissions as well as the transfer of funds and technology to other countries.

It is possible that some of this might make sense if a threat existed outside of environmentalist imagination.  But the opposite is the case.  Lee Gerhard, senior scientist with the Kansas Geological Society, publically affirmed in 2007 that Earth’s mean surface temperature is cooler than it was 5,000 years ago.  He also noted that 900 years ago it was substantially warmer than it is now with 100 ppm (parts per million) less carbon dioxide.

In February of 2007 the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had to admit, through 2,500 scientists, that Al Gore’s much-lamented melting Antarctic Ice Sheets were actually too cold for widespread melting.  The IPCC also revealed that Greenland’s two largest glaciers had now reversed their melting and increased in over-all mass.

Just last month (May 1, 2008) Noah Keenlyside of Germany’s Leipzig Institute of Marine Science, published a study in Nature forecasting no more global warming for the next ten years.  The team found that the oceans’ temperatures will be “stuck” for a decade which, in combination with other factors, will neutralize global temperature increases.

Gerhard, Keenlyside and the IPCC’s 2,500 could be wrong, except for another announcement last month.  Neither the media nor blame-shifting politicians bothered to notice or mention the 31,000 signature petition organized by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (OISM).  The petition calls on the federal government to reject any global warming agreements.

The OISM’s petition further states that there is no convincing evidence that greenhouse gases are causing or will cause any disruption of Earth’s climate.  “Moreover”, it continues, “there is substantial evidence” that such gases produce beneficial effects “upon the natural plant and animal environments of Earth.”

If there is one thing thatWashingtonhas proven beyond any reasonable doubt over the years, it is that every governmental assumption of authority and therefore every surrender of citizen independence, only yields more of the same.  The truism behind that observation is that in a free nation, as government intercedes in the affairs of men, liberties diminish and oppression, be it economic or political, grows.