The increasing recognition of politicians of climate change has been a welcomed change from the long denials of the past. However, Alaska Gov. Bill Walker has made a curious pitch in a BBC interview: increased oil drilling to offset climate change that most people associated with oil consumption.
Walker told the BBC “We are in a significant fiscal challenge. We have villages that are washing away because of the change in the climate.” This destruction is described by Walker as “very expensive” and requires more revenue from drilling. The BBC host then asked “So you’re saying that given the climate change impacts in Alaska, you need to be allowed to continue to drill and explore and produce oil to pay for some of those impacts in Alaska?”
Walker’s responded: “Absolutely.”
The governor’s odd argument reflects the reality of a state that does not have an income or sales tax and instead draws 90% of its day-to-day expenditure from levies on the production of oil and gas. The huge Trans Alaskan Pipeline that transports oil from the northern production fields to the tanker terminal in Valdez is running at about 25% of its capacity as existing oil field production declines.
Source: BBC
Governor is campaigning for reelection. Each citizen of AK gets a check each year because of the drilling.
forgot, Good find. I can think of few more despicable politicians than Cuomo and Gore. Both sons of politicians.
Cuomo paid state workers to fill seats at climate change event
By Michael Gartlan October 14, 2015 | 1:34am
Cuomo paid state workers to fill seats at climate change event
Andrew Cuomo, along with Al Gore, spoke about climate change at Columbia University last week. The speech was full of state employees, who were paid full wages to be there.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo wasn’t taking any chances that there might be empty seats at a speech he delivered last week on climate change — so state workers were summoned on the taxpayer dime to fill the audience, The Post has learned.
The workers said they left their jobs in the middle of the day Thursday and were paid their full salaries to hear Cuomo at Columbia University announce the state was joining a global effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
“I’d rather be at the park,” said one of the workers, who is employed by the state Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation and who has no connection to climate issues.
He explained that he went because his boss “asked me to make some time available in my schedule.”
The worker confessed that he didn’t know what the event was about before he agreed to go.
He said attendance is not required, but is viewed favorably, and that the practice is common throughout state government to support Cuomo.
“They often ask,” he said, referring to supervisors. “We get emails, and they’ll ask us if we want to go.”
The worker said he would not have volunteered if he were not getting paid his regular salary. “It’s better be on the clock,” he said.
The 2:30 p.m. event, which lasted about an hour and included speeches from former Vice President Al Gore as well as Columbia President Lee Bollinger, focused on Cuomo’s plan to have state agencies work with other states and cities worldwide to reduce carbon emissions.
A state Department of Health worker told The Post that supervisors offered employees the option of attending the event “instead of working.”
If they watched Cuomo, they could go home afterward instead of returning to work, the employee said.
He called the practice “AstroTurfing” — an attempt to fabricate grassroots support.
“Public employees take an oath that they won’t use their position for their personal advantage,” the employee said. “How can you expect any state workers to take it seriously when the boss isn’t leading by example?”
Good-government advocates questioned why state workers were being paid to attend an event designed to bolster an elected official’s credentials.
“It’s a questionable use of state resources,” said Dick Dadey, executive director of Citizens Union.
A Cuomo spokesman acknowledged that state workers attended the Columbia event, but insisted that was proper.
“A handful of staff from relevant state agencies had the opportunity to attend this important announcement, which impacted their work. They were a small number of the more than 500 people who attended the event,” said spokesman Frank Sobrino.
He said about 20 workers went from four agencies, including Environmental Conservation and the state Energy Research and Development office and decisions on whom to send were made “at the agency level.”
He also said that climate issues are “directly relevant” to health employees and are “an enormously important issue” to parks workers after Hurricane Sandy.
Oil is abiotic. What is “fossil fuel?”
No fossil has ever been found below 16,000 feet.
Exxon’s deepest oil well is 40,000 feet.
__________
Exxon sets world record with the deepest oil well on the Russian shelf
Exxon Neftegas Ltd (ENL) has completed drilling the world’s deepest well in the Chayvo oil field on the Sakhalin shelf in the Russian Far East.
Corporate news, Resources
The shaft of well Z-44 is 12,376 meter deep, which is the equivalent to 15 times the height of the world tallest skyscraper the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.
“We are proud of this achievement, which furthers the successful implementation of this remarkable project,” ENL chief James Taylor is quoted as saying. Six of the world’s ten deepest wells, including Z-44, have been drilled in Russia for the Sakhalin-1 project using ExxonMobil drilling technology – the so-called “fast drill”, he added.
Chayvo is one of the three Sakhalin-1 fields and is located off the northeast coast of Sakhalin Island in eastern Russia. The Sakhalin-1 project is being developed by an international consortium led by ENL, which holds a 30% stake, the Japanese SODECO (30%), India’s ONGC Videsh Ltd (20%) and subsidiaries of Russian oil major Rosneft – RN Astra (8.5%) and Sakhalinmorneftegaz Shelf (11.5%).
The total project is estimated to cost $10–12 billion. The fields of Chayvo, Odoptu, and Arkutun-Dagi are estimated to yield 2.3 billion barrels of oil and 17.1 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.
Anyone interested in the truth about global warming should begin their research here:
“Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming’?
By James Delingpole Politics Last updated: November 20th, 2009
456 Comments Comment on this article
If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka CRU) and released 61 megabytes of confidential files onto the internet. (Hat tip: Watts Up With That)
When you read some of those files – including 1079 emails and 72 documents – you realise just why the boffins at CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be “the greatest in modern science”. These alleged emails – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory – suggest:
Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.
One of the alleged emails has a gentle gloat over the death in 2004 of John L Daly (one of the first climate change sceptics, founder of the Still Waiting For Greenhouse site), commenting:
“In an odd way this is cheering news.”
But perhaps the most damaging revelations – the scientific equivalent of the Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses scandal – are those concerning the way Warmist scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause.
Here are a few tasters.
Manipulation of evidence:
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.
Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up:
The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.
Suppression of evidence:
Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?
Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.
Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.
We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.
Fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Sceptic scientists:
Next
time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat
the crap out of him. Very tempted.
Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP):
……Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back–I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “MWP”, even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back….
And, perhaps most reprehensibly, a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority.
“This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?”
“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”“It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !”
Hadley CRU has form in this regard. In September – I wrote the story up here as “How the global warming industry is based on a massive lie” – CRU’s researchers were exposed as having “cherry-picked” data in order to support their untrue claim that global temperatures had risen higher at the end of the 20th century than at any time in the last millenium. CRU was also the organisation which – in contravention of all acceptable behaviour in the international scientific community – spent years withholding data from researchers it deemed unhelpful to its cause. This matters because CRU, established in 1990 by the Met Office, is a government-funded body which is supposed to be a model of rectitude. Its HadCrut record is one of the four official sources of global temperature data used by the IPCC.
I asked in my title whether this will be the final nail in the coffin of Anthropenic Global Warming. This was wishful thinking, of course. In the run up to Copenhagen, we will see more and more hysterical (and grotesquely exaggerated) stories such as this in the Mainstream Media. And we will see ever-more-virulent campaigns conducted by eco-fascist activists, such as this risible new advertising campaign by Plane Stupid showing CGI polar bears falling from the sky and exploding because kind of, like, man, that’s sort of what happens whenever you take another trip on an aeroplane.
The world is currently cooling; electorates are increasingly reluctant to support eco-policies leading to more oppressive regulation, higher taxes and higher utility bills; the tide is turning against Al Gore’s Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. The so-called “sceptical” view – which is some of us have been expressing for quite some time: see, for example, the chapter entitled ‘Barbecue the Polar Bears’ in WELCOME TO OBAMALAND: I’VE SEEN YOUR FUTURE AND IT DOESN’T WORK – is now also, thank heaven, the majority view.
Unfortunately, we’ve a long, long way to go before the public mood (and scientific truth) is reflected by our policy makers. There are too many vested interests in AGW, with far too much to lose either in terms of reputation or money, for this to end without a bitter fight.
But to judge by the way – despite the best efforts of the MSM not to report on it – the CRU scandal is spreading like wildfire across the internet, this shabby story represents a blow to the AGW lobby’s credibility from which it is never likely to recover.
UPDATE: I write about this subject a lot and the threads below my posts often contain an impressive range of informed opinion from readers with solid scientific backgrounds (plus lots of cheap swipes from Libtards – but, hey, their discomfort and rage are my joy).”
Boy that climate sure is changing. I am a witness.
Yesterday it was sunny.
Today it rained.
Whatever will we do?
Sorry, meant this video…
bananotechnology
p.s.
I’ll let davidm describe how carbon emissions contribute to the positive feedback loop concerning the defrosting of the permafrost in the northern climate regions and how their melt will release tonnes of methane gas exceeding what humans could ever match by burning fossil fuels. And how that release will contribute to an even greater rise of greenhouse gasses trapped in the atmosphere.
bananotechnology
“Is there some reason why no one ever says “global warming” any more?”
= = =
It’s a political ‘Hot Potato’ of a term. Like Bengahhh Zeeee!
Naw, really it was because far too many uneducated Americans couldn’t wrap their pea brains around the word ‘Global’. See, they think that if it’s snowing in their backyard, that proves Global Warming is a lie. And, in reality, the warming is not always accurate in certain areas around the globe. So it’s confusing all around. However, the term Global Climate Change is more accurate in describing the overall affect of what the changing weather patterns are doing and how the temperature trends change and rise and cause significant shifts in events of nature. The climate around the globe IS changing patterns as observed through scientific means. This means having the ability to not only record current data, but also seek older data and even search for ancient data, prehistoric, in fact. This way, relative comparisons can be made.
One thing to keep in mind and many people, commonly referred to as deniers, forget about is this one element… even though the earth has experienced similar carbon levels and eventually experienced catastrophic life ending events as a result of increased emissions from natural sources, humans were never around to experience such levels… until NOW!
OK… What should we do to mitigate this current rapid rate of carbon emissions? Nothing?
The argument can be made that the rise is from ‘other sources’. No one denies this fact. However, as ‘RESPONSIBLE’ adults, we do have a role to play in adding or subtracting to this current rate of rise…
It’s about making personal choices about being personally responsible for contributing to the survival of future mankind, aka, your grandchildrens’ children’s future.
davidm,
Extra credit for clearly describing what a positive feedback loop is, when talking about a chain of cascading events such as what Kivalina is experiencing…
davidm
There are many factors at play concerning eroding coastlines…
You know this as much as any educated person does. That one factor alone is never the one culprit of a chain of events as is in this instance of Kivalina. Those storms… yes, let’s DO talk about those storms. What is driving them… ?
bananotechnology
The answer is because “Global Warming” was proven wrong in the “Climate Gate” episode at the University of East Anglia.
The data was falsified.
Oops.
Kinda like Brian Williams at PMSNBC.
David,
There is one reason, and only one reason that coal, oil or natural gas is cheaper than solar. And that is that we don’t make them clean up after themselves. The day we do that, if we ever do, solar and other renewables will be the best deal in town.
For now we are all capitalists on the mining, processing and selling, but socialists on the cleanup. Exxon will not be paying for the seawalls in NYC, the people will. Same with the billions of dollars in damages from storms, rising seas, drought, loss of habitat and wildlife.
I’m glad to hear you support good energy policy. And glad to hear you are a skeptic, as there are so many outright deniers on this board.
If we stopped subsidizing coal, oil and gas, and made them start cleaning up after themselves, the true costs would be revealed, but perhaps we are not willing to live with that reality and instead will suffer the disasters, large and small, coming our way.
Is there some reason why no one ever says “global warming” any more?
Has this term become politically incorrect?
Or just inconveniently incongruous with reality?
“Anthropogenic global warming” is, of course, a falsifiable hypothesis.
“Climate change” is no more falsifiable or controversial than “river current” or “earth rotation.”
So, yeah, choose a term that by definition is always true, but by repetition LINK it to a hypothesis that is demonstrably false.
It’s just one of many creepily totalitarian, NewSpeak-ish aspects of this whole agenda.
It is becoming cartoonishly creepy, like Bugs Bunny playing Hitler.
I would think it hilarious if it weren’t also massively armed, dangerous, deluded, and fanatically willing to stomp out freedom in the name of a hoax.
Ninety percent of their govt is funded by oil revenue….yet how many moved to alaska before oil developed? Jobs…..jobs have to exist for an income tax….and not much sales tax can be had from broke ppl either. I don’t see how relying on the derivative taxes from oil production (income and ppl buying bc they live and work there) is any less precarious than
relying on it direct from the well. ?????? Sure when oil prices tank you can go another yr or two off the ppl. Maybe money grows on trees too.
If the governor actually believes that sinking villages is due to “climate change” as in “human-caused global warming,” then he is as misinformed as Mr. Turley and other anthropogenic global warming religion faithful.
Alaskan villages have been sinking into permafrost for at least 70 years
Permafrost: the cold, hard facts