Posted by
JTD on Monday, June 23, 2008 5:49:15 PM
Okay, let's see if I have this right.
ANWR is 19,000,000 acres of desolation, all of it situated above the Arctic Circle. Only 60 days a year does it experience anything even close to full sunlight. If ANWR were a state, it would be larger than ten other states in the Union.
It is proposed that the U.S. permit oil drilling on a small portion of that 19,000,000 acres, about 12,000 acres or roughly the size of Dulles Airport in Washington D.C. But no, we cannot be allowed to defile this desolate, albeit pristine, wilderness.
Same with off shore drilling. Drilling platforms on the outer shelf would not even be visible from the mainland....not even from the highest skyscrapers near the coast.
But the environmentalists want to put wind farms in every conceivable pass or plain which affords steady, reliable wind flows. These wind farms consist of hundreds, even thousand of six to ten-story behemoths that are themselves a blot upon the landscape. Make the drive from Los Angeles to Palm Springs some time, and you will be appalled at the silhouettes of hundreds of these whooshing monsters sprouting like gargantuan mushrooms along the horizon.
How man millions of these mechanical abominations do the enviros propose that we scatter across the countryside from coast to coast? We already know that they are too ugly for Teddy "The Splash" Kennedy to abide in his watery play grounds off Hyannis Port or Martha's Vineyard.
And Solar? Let's concede that roof top solar panels can be relatively unobtrusive and that technology will continue to make them even less and less so.
But, what about the massive solar farms that are proposed by the greenies? Working technologies include massive solar mirror arrays covering thousands of acres of land. One technology includes solar water towers hundreds of feet high onto which acres of parabolic mirrors focus rays of sunlight that produce steam to run electric generators.
I don't know about you, but the wonder and majesty of the Mojave and Sonoran deserts and even Death Valley are some of the things I have come to love most about living in Southern California. I can't drill in ANWR. but it's okay for you to litter the desert with thousands of acres of new age Easy Bake Ovens. I don't get it.
As for the danger of polluting the pristine ANWR or the oceans of the outer shelf, can we please get real? Modern drilling technology is astonishingly enviro friendly. Can we not admit the truth that drilling in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska has for 20 years been effectively pollution free. None of the environmental perils envisioned by the green cassandras has occurred. The Prudhoe pipeline has been an unqualified success with no environmental incidents of significance.
Of course, we must not forget the caribou. We were told ceaselessly that drilling operations and the Prudhoe pipeline would pose a major threat to the precious caribou. Since drilling began in Prudhoe, the caribou herds -- a randy bunch apparently -- have increased from 3,000 head to more that 38,000. Some threat!
And let us not forget, that drilling technology has improved by quantum degrees since operations first began at Prudhoe, decades ago.
We obsess endlessly on the devastaton of hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. But, completely forgotten in the left's Katrina lamentations is that the hurricane blasted through the highest concentration of off shore drillling rigs in all of the United States without a single oil spill of consequence.
So let's cut the BS, please! DRILL HERE! DRILL THERE! DRILL EVERYWHERE, DAMNIT! AND DO IT NOW!
THE MAELSTROM QUOTE OF THE DAY: "I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it." Oscar van den Boogard, lamenting the demographic onslaught of Islam in his native Belgium. (Special thanks to Mark Steyn
www.Steynonline.com)
The Maelstrom