Congress, Environment, Politics, Society

Timber! Obama Reverses Himself On Protecting Millions of Acres of Wildness in New Concession To Developers and Drillers

President Obama has made another huge concession to developers and drillers this week. He has abandoned a pledge to restore eligibility for federal wilderness protection to millions of acres of undeveloped land in the West. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who was himself viewed as a decidedly anti-environmental Senator before being picked by Obama, announced that millions of acres will no longer be designated as “wild lands.”

As with civil libertarians, environmentalists have long been dismissed by the White House as having no where to go in the next election. Accordingly, Obama continues to rollback on environmental protections such as his radical expansion of coal permits as well as his opening up of pristine areas of the East Coast to oil exploration.

The effort to protect the lands was blocked by Congress but environmentalists wanted the Administration to fight on this ground. Various business groups and conservative members of Congress heralded the President’s move. At risk are some of the most pristine untouched lands left in the country.

Source: Yahoo

112 thoughts on “Timber! Obama Reverses Himself On Protecting Millions of Acres of Wildness in New Concession To Developers and Drillers”

  1. Thank you O.S. The point is the Vikings raised Cattle and grew crops, ie grapes in Greenland which equals warm then a funny thing happened, it got cold.

  2. If you want an original source from Brown University, you might take a look at the work of Dr. Brad Marston, who is a real honest to goodness scientist. Here is a link to one of his presentations not filtered through a media hack. It will take a while to wade through this presentation which is very heavy on data. Dr. Marston uses quantum physics to explain global warming and climate change.

    http://online.itp.ucsb.edu/online/colloq/marston2/pdf/Marston2.pdf

  3. How Greenland’s cold beat the Vikings
    New study underscores climate’s role in Vikings’ disappearance from Greenland

    a team of researchers led by Brown University came up with what’s believed to be the first factual reconstruction of temperatures from that time. And the evidence they found points to a steady drop in the thermometer starting around the year 1100.

    http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/05/31/scitech/main20067616.shtml

  5. The medieval warming is a myth.

    Maybe that’s why Michael Mann left it out of the hockey stick graph 🙂

  6. Otteray Scribe

    Elaine, I always get a kick, in a sad sort of way, by those who get their scientific knowledge from sources like Salon or Wikipedia.

    What Elaine M. said. Good catch with that follow-up article on Lind’s industry-fueled puff piece.

  7. The medieval warming is a myth. Widely studied by climatologists, and debunked. Here is a scientific treatise from Stanford University on the subject:

    http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/Bradley.pdf

    Here is a study done at Columbia University.

    http://iri.columbia.edu/~goddard/EESC_W4400/CC/jones_mann_2004.pdf

    What do they mean? The evidence used by reputable scientists indicate this claim is anecdotal at best. The data appear to refer to regional changes between Greenland and the Ural Mountains. There are no current data to support this claim on even a hemispheric basis, let alone a global basis. Furthermore, there is a chance that the Medieval Warming Period (MWP) and the Little Ice Age (LIA) both represented a gradual cooling trend as opposed to a periodic oscillation of global temperatures. Not an established fact, but a chance.

    As far as life in medieval times, it was harsh. The rich got richer and the peons and fiefs got poorer. Anyone got out of line, the established power came down on them like a ton of bricks. If an ordinary person, not one of the elite, lived to be forty, you were old.

  8. bdaman:

    what was the temperature increase during the medieval warming period? Didn’t that increase population and wealth for the average person?

  9. What Elaine M. said. Good catch with that follow-up article on Lind’s industry-fueled puff piece.

  10. Bdaman,

    Another salon article for you:

    A new golden age for fossil fuels? Huh?
    Natural gas is cheap and clean, but hardly the answer to our energy needs. It just buys us time
    By Andrew Leonard
    http://www.salon.com/technology/how_the_world_works/2011/06/01/response_to_lind/index.html

    Excerpt:
    If Michael Lind’s intention, in his Salon article published Tuesday, “Everything You’ve Heard About Fossil Fuels May Be Wrong,” was to throw so many bombs at once that critics would be too buried by shrapnel to respond, then he at least partially succeeded. It’s hard to know where to start grappling with a column that simultaneously dismisses the challenge of global warming, declares a new golden age of fossil fuels that could last millennia, ridicules renewable energy technologies such as wind and solar while advocating a massive nuclear power buildup, and even throws in a few digs at city living and organic agriculture, just for fun. Readers who might more logically expect to see such sentiments espoused in the National Review or the American Spectator than in Salon were unsurprisingly annoyed.

    The article is built on two parallel assertions. First, new technologies have unlocked vast quantities of natural gas (and will deliver a lot more oil, as well, to take care of all our energy needs into the distant future, and second, catastrophic climate change is a “low probability” event that we don’t need to worry about. Let’s start with the second claim, because how we think about climate change drastically affects how we think about fossil fuels.

    Lind:

    The scenarios with the most catastrophic outcomes of global warming are low probability outcomes — a fact that explains why the world’s governments in practice treat reducing CO2 emissions as a low priority, despite paying lip service to it.

    A better explanation for why the world is treating climate change as a low priority problem might be because the U.S. — historically the largest producer of greenhouse gas emissions — has refused to take any action at all. And that, in turn, is a direct result of fierce opposition from the fossil fuel energy industry and other entrenched special interests, as well as the decision of one major political party to utterly reject the conclusions of the scientific mainstream. (A willful display of ignorance unmatched by any other major political party or ruling government in the rest of the world. )

    But whatever the true reasons for our failure to act, Lind’s timing can’t be beat, because on the very day his article appeared, the International Energy Agency revealed that “greenhouse gas emissions increased by a record amount” in 2010.

    From the Guardian:

    The shock rise means the goal of preventing a temperature rise of more than 2 degrees Celsius — which scientists say is the threshold for potentially “dangerous climate change” — is likely to be just “a nice Utopia,” according to Fatih Birol, chief economist of the IEA. It also shows the most serious global recession for 80 years has had only a minimal effect on emissions, contrary to some predictions.

    Last year, a record 30.6 gigatons of carbon dioxide poured into the atmosphere, mainly from burning fossil fuel — a rise of 1.6Gt on 2009, according to estimates from the IEA regarded as the gold standard for emissions data…

    “Such warming would disrupt the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people across the planet, ” [said Professor Lord David Stern, author of the Stern Report on the economics of climate change], “leading to widespread mass migration and conflict. That is a risk any sane person would seek to drastically reduce.”

    I’m not sure what definition of catastrophe Lind is using, but the unprecedented frequency of extreme weather events that we are already witnessing all across our planet is a strong indicator that global warming is already contributing to serious disruptions. If you accept the science of climate change, then the fact that we are pumping record amounts of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere is not a good thing.

    Which brings us to the main thrust of Lind’s piece, his celebration of how hydraulic fracturing technologies — or “fracking” — have allowed energy companies to tap huge amounts of natural gas.

    And sure, there are reasons environmentalists should be happy about a dramatic rise in accessible natural gas supplies. Burning natural gas for heating or electricity generation releases much less carbon dioxide than other fossil fuels. If forced to choose between natural gas or coal as a source of electricity, any environmentalist would pick natural gas. This is no secret — even as ardent a climate change activist as Climate Progress’s Joseph Romm called fracking a potential “game changer” as long as two years ago.

    But Lind is far too quick to dismiss the potential environmental problems associated with fracking. While there may not be a meaningful scientific consensus as to whether the fracking process results in significant greenhouse gas emissions, I defy anyone to read the New York Times’ massive, exhaustively reported series on pollution problems associated with fracking and still not be concerned with threats to the nation’s drinking water supply or the multiple failures of our regulatory system. There are clearly reasons to be concerned. Just this week, Texas — Texas! — passed a “fracking disclosure” law requiring oil or gas well operators who perform hydraulic fracturing “to disclose the volume of water and the chemical ingredients of the fracturing fluids used.” Also this week, in New York, state Attorney General David Schneiderman announced he was suing the federal government for “failure to study ‘fracking.'”

  11. Bdaman,

    No. I just posted links to stories on fracking and natural gas that I had already posted at my fracking article for the Turley blog.

    BTW, I know there’s a lot of natural gas in this country. The problem has been with the hydraulic fracturing method used for extracting it from the rock/shale and with a number of chemicals companies have used when fracking for natural gas. I don’t suppose you’d like it if your drinking water was polluted or if you could set the water that comes out of your faucet on fire.

  14. Buddha,

    I think Frank nailed a big part of the problem “Business in in business for only one goal – to turn a profit. Increasingly in today’s society that means this quarter. ”

    If businesses can make more money in the short term by fooling us than it can by investing in R&D into carbon free tech., then that’s what they’ll do.

    What’s driving the whole set up is that somewhere along the line we let ourselves get talked into the idea that what’s best for any particular industry is whatever is best for those businesses that happen to exist right now. So that’s what our laws are engineered towards. Not growth with any sort of development, but expansion. Not strategic growth, just blind expansion. Basically, we’ve got the Blob as a model for our economy.

  15. Otteray Scribe:

    I dont know, it looks to me like he did his home work. He has links to various university studies. And apparently one of the posts Elanine M used about has been debunked due to the size of the data set (well, god dam you were right. :))

  16. bdaman:

    thanks for the link to that salon article. here is a quote:

    “If gas hydrates as well as shale gas, tight oil, oil sands and other unconventional sources can be tapped at reasonable cost, then the global energy picture looks radically different than it did only a few years ago. Suddenly it appears that there may be enough accessible hydrocarbons to power industrial civilization for centuries, if not millennia, to come.”

    interesting. We are up to our eyeballs in hydro-carbons and people want green energy? Why? Maybe in a couple of hundred years it might make sense.

    The fact that universities are looking to mine the solid methane at the bottom of the sea tells me all I need to know about the market potential for wind and solar. And didn’t GE get 5 billion dollars to produce turbines and other “green” energy? Now I know why they call it green energy, that green is the tax payers money being spent on speculative endeavors.

  17. Carbon.

    Chemically carbon still retains atmospheric heat.

    Burning natural gas still produces carbon as a byproduct as it is, duh, a hydrocarbon.

    The goal isn’t simply oil free power.

    The goal is carbon free power.

  19. Elaine, I always get a kick, in a sad sort of way, by those who get their scientific knowledge from sources like Salon or Wikipedia.

    Back when I was in undergraduate school, someone asked a question of the professor that required more than a simple yes or no answer. The prof pointed out the window and said, “See yonder red brick building across the way? It is called the library. You will find the answer to your question there. Go find the answer and get back to me; we will talk about it then.”

    Nothing like looking something up in a scientific journal. But that takes WORK, unlike a story that a reporter probably got at least partly, if not completely, wrong.

    When I see a story like that Salon article, I am always suspicious of the source. That read like an industry puff piece, spoon fed to a media stenographer.

Comments are closed.