A manufactured crisis
Posted by Richard on November 9, 2007
John Coleman, founder of The Weather Channel:
I do not oppose environmentalism. I do not oppose the political positions of either party. However, Global Warming, i.e. Climate Change, is not about environmentalism or politics. It is not a religion. It is not something you “believe in.” It is science; the science of meteorology. This is my field of life-long expertise. And I am telling you Global Warming is a non-event, a manufactured crisis and a total scam. I say this knowing you probably won’t believe a me, a mere TV weatherman, challenging a Nobel Prize, Academy Award and Emmy Award winning former Vice President of United States. So be it.
I have read dozens of scientific papers. I have talked with numerous scientists. I have studied. I have thought about it. I know I am correct. There is no run away climate change. The impact of humans on climate is not catastrophic. Our planet is not in peril. I am incensed by the incredible media glamour, the politically correct silliness and rude dismissal of counter arguments by the high priest of Global Warming.
As oil climbed toward $100 per barrel, Investor's Business Daily noted that:
… By falsely demonizing oil in the debate over global warming, we assure an energy-impoverished future.
…The real problem behind soaring oil prices — a lack of supply — hasn't been addressed at all. Today we have what economists call a "demand shock." It's a result of the greatest global economic boom in history — a result of more poor people in more countries being pulled out of poverty than ever, thanks to fast-growing economies and free trade.
…As Weather Channel founder John Coleman said this week, global warming is "the greatest scam in history." Literally thousands of reputable climatologists agree with this.
Yet fear of warming is giving rise to all kinds of bad ideas that will cost hundreds of billions of dollars and deliver very questionable benefits. These ideas include "carbon" taxes on all of us and "windfall" profit taxes on oil companies, bans on drilling for new oil in Alaska and off our coasts, and expensive new mandates — such as higher fuel economy for cars — to reduce "carbon footprints."
…
As the chart shows, our failure to replace our depleted domestic oil reserves has left us with a serious mismatch of supply and demand. We use more oil each year, but supply less of it ourselves.
That makes us vulnerable. We send hundreds of billions of dollars overseas each year to the Middle East, Africa and South America, helping fund terrorism and prop up some nasty regimes.
As Sterling Burnett, a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, notes, if we had started drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in 1995 — when President Clinton nixed the idea — we'd be pumping millions more barrels today. Ditto if we had more vigorously pursued our offshore reserves.
But would that matter? According to the American Petroleum Institute, we have at least 131 billion barrels of oil and more than 1,000 trillion cubic feet of natural gas that we can get at now, with current technology. It's just waiting for us to find and pump it. But Americans — cowed into submission by aggressive global warming propaganda — are afraid to do so.
This is where Congress could be of help. Right now, we have an oil-based economy. We can't escape it — we need more oil.
If lawmakers stopped dithering and acted, we could turn our energy future around — feeding our need for oil in the short term, while spinning out new technologies like hydrogen fuel cells, clean coal and modern nuclear power plants over the long term.
That, however, would take vision and courage — two traits that today's leaders in Washington conspicuously lack.
So what else is new? Sigh.
Hathor said
I was hoping your link would be to John Coleman’s credentials, because every one of us can find another person that agrees with us. You know a lot of stuff is getting confusing, I thought that it was the to save the environmental landscape of the refuge, that made Americans less willing to drill for oil.
rgcombs said
Gee, I thought that when I quoted someone, it was sufficient to identify that person and link to the source of the quote. I didn’t know I was supposed to provide a biography or curriculum vitae; I figured Google and Wikipedia could answer such questions.
As for the impact from tapping the 10 billion plus barrels of oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: ANWR contains 19 million acres, and its coastal plain (a small portion of which contains most of the oil) encompasses 1.5 million acres. The entire “footprint” (surface area disturbed to build drilling rigs, support buildings, etc.) needed to get at the oil would be about 2000 acres — ”’13/100th of 1%”’ of the coastal plain, and about ”’1/100th of 1%”’ of the entire refuge.
The dire warnings of environmental damage and loss of wildlife in ANWR are the same ones the environmentalists predicted for the Prudhoe Bay drilling in the 70s. None of them came to pass there, and none will come to pass if we drill in ANWR. At Prudhoe Bay, the caribou herds supposedly endangered by the project are thriving. And the Prudhoe Bay project, which used much more primitive methods, impacted far more acreage than drilling in ANWR would (it’s also produced far more oil than originally predicted, and so might ANWR).
There’s a good brief overview of why we should drill in ANWR here. Wikipedia has a somewhat negatively-slanted entry, but with a decent history, useful stats, and a nice map.