CALIFORNIA YANKEE

Happy Earth Day

Earthrise - The Apollo 16 crew captured this Earthrise during the second revolution of the moon. Apollo 16 launched on April 16, 1972 and landed on the moon on April 20. The mission was commanded by John Young; Thomas K. Mattingly II was the command module pilot and Charles M. Duke, Jr. served as the lunar module pilot.

Image Credit: NASA

Blue and Green - President Bush Protects the Pacific

Not satisfied with having already established the world's largest marine protected area -- the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Marine National Monument -- President Bush will also create three more marine national monuments, preserving huge areas of the central Pacific Ocean:

The new areas make up the largest area of ocean set aside for marine conservation in the world -- 195,280 square miles -- and, coupled with a 138,000-square mile designation in Hawaii two years go, mean that Bush will have protected more of the ocean than any other president.

Mining and commercial fishing will be banned in the protected area, which includes the Mariana Trench, the  Rose Atoll in American Samoa and seven islands strung along the equator:

The atolls, reefs and underwater mountains of the designated area are the habitat of hundreds of unique species of birds and fish including the world's largest land crab and the rare Malaysian megapode, a bird that incubates its eggs in the heat of underwater volcanoes.

President Bush's action requires no Congressional approval and, like the   139,000-square-mile Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument in the northwest Hawaiian Islands, he created the new monuments under the federal Antiquities Act.

The vibrant beauty of the oceans is a blessing to our country. And it's a blessing to the world. The oceans contain countless natural treasures. They carry much of our trade; they provide food and recreation for billions of people. We have a responsibility, a solemn responsibility, to be good stewards of the oceans and the creatures who inhabit them. -- President George W. Bush, June 15, 2006, Designation of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Marine National Monument

The preservation of these large areas of the Pacific, will ensure President Bush a blue/green legacy.

Images courtesy of the Associated Press.

Jay Leno On Oil Drilling In ANWR

Jay Leno takes the Democrats to task for blocking oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR):

Can someone please explain any rational basis for the Democrats' continued obstruction of drilling in ANWR?

There are an estimated 10 billion barrels of domestic oil waiting to be harvested in ANWR. ANWR comprises 19 million acres in Northeast Alaska, 17.5 million of which are totally off-limits to drilling or any other kind of economic activity.

In 1980 a Democrat controlled Congress, at the behest of President Jimmy Carter, set area 1002 aside for possible energy exploration. Since then, although there are active oil and gas wells in at least 36 U.S. wildlife refuges, we have been prevented from using this domestic source of oil.

The most recent attempt to authorize drilling in ANWR -- successfully filibustered by Senate Democrats in 2005 -- limited the surface disturbance to 2,000 acres, a very small portion of a very big coastal plain in a very big wildlife refuge in the biggest state in the Union.

The vast majority of ANWR will be completely unaffected by drilling. It would occur only on a small part of the coastal plain where there already is some human habitation. Alaska has 141 million acres of protected lands, an area equal to the size of California and New York combined.

The statute creating ANWR contemplated future oil production on the coastal plain, subject to congressional approval. It is worth noting that another wildlife refuge in Alaska, the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, has had drilling onsite for decades. The oil production there rarely makes the news because it has not caused any problems, even though Kenai has far more wildlife than ANWR.

In addition to Kenai, Prudhoe Bay, only 55 miles west of ANWR, has produced more than 10 billion barrels of oil since the 1970s. Decades of studies show this oil production has affected the environment negligibly. Environmental opponents of drilling cannot cite a single species driven toward extinction or even a decline in numbers attributable to Prudhoe Bay. That drilling also was done with decades-old technology and methods far less environmentally sensitive than ANWR would require.

Flowing at one million barrels a day -- equal to 20 percent of today's domestic oil production -- ANWR oil would almost equal America's daily imports from Saudi Arabia.

I just don't get it.

McCain Proposes Oil Independence By 2025

This week Senator McCain proposed a plan to free America from foreign oil suppliers by 2025. Its a plan Newsweek calls a "grown-up" energy plan.

McCain's plan for energy independence is called The Lexington Project --"named for the town where Americans asserted their independence once before." You can read the plan here.

The Lexington Project has left the Obama-ites sputtering. Some pundits thought Obama had the advantage so far in offering an energy "vision." But Newsweek is much more impressed with McCain's Lexington Project:

Frankly, however, no one really cares what Obama said last October. And there's no question that McCain's flurry of concrete proposals—including a call for 45 more nuclear power plants, a $300 million prize to the designer of a new electric car battery, overturning the 27-year ban on offshore drilling and a $5,000 tax credit for people who buy "zero-emissions" cars—prompted Obama to spend most of his own energy speech this week knocking those ideas down. That in turn generated a GOP Web video declaring that "Obama is Dr. No," complete with a Bond-like theme song.

In fairness, I note that FactCheck.org finds that the Dr. No video distorts Obama's positions on clean-energy innovation and nuclear power.

McCain: Government Must Lead Path To Green Energy

McCain wants the federal government to start buying flex-fuel and hybrid vehicles and leasing and building energy-efficient office space:

The Republican presidential nominee said Tuesday the federal government has 3.3 billion square feet of office space nationwide and buys 60,000 automobiles a year, and if elected in November he would encourage "green technologies."

Watch the following Associated Press video report:

McCain Pushes Lower Auto Emissions

Senator John McCain proposes incentives to move American vehicles away from oil.

McCain's proposals include a $300 million prize to encourage the development of an automobile battery that delivers power at 30 percent of current costs and has "the size, capacity, cost and power to leapfrog the commercially available plug-in hybrids or electric cars."

McCain is also proposing stiffer fines for automakers who skirt existing fuel-efficiency standards, as well as incentives to increase use of domestic and foreign alcohol-based fuels such as ethanol:

According to excerpts of his speech obtained by Reuters, the Republican presidential candidate will call for auto manufacturers to speed the process of making engines that can use alcohol-based fuels.

[. . .]

"For every automaker who can sell a zero-emissions car, we will commit a $5,000 tax credit for each and every customer who buys that car," he will say.

"For other vehicles, whatever type they may be, the lower the carbon emissions, the higher the tax credit."

Car makers have argued in the past that consumers do not always favor fuel-efficient cars and that government incentives would help encourage people to buy them.

All good ideas. With gas prices passing $4 per gallon, consumers will favor fuel-efficient cars now.

Happy Earth Day

Despite all the attention Al Gore and his global warming awareness campaign the past several years, the average American is no more worried about global warming than they were years ago.

Gallup reports the percentage of Americans who worry a great deal about global warming is no higher now than it was 19 years ago.

Americans have reacted to the ever growing emphasis on global warming in the media:

Americans now are more likely than they have been in the past to claim understanding of global warming, to recognize that global warming could be a threat in their lifetimes, and to say the effects of global warming have already begun.

Gallup Poll Editor in Chief, Frank Newport, summarizes the recent findings in the following video report:

In recognition of Earth Day, the BBC reveals the real agenda behind the global warming movement -- abolishment of capitalism.

Speaking as the keynote speaker at the UN meeting on the rights of indigenous people, the socialist president of Bolivia, Evo Morales said capitalism should be scrapped:

"If we want to save our planet earth, we have a duty to put an end to the capitalist system," he said.

Morales has it all wrong. Two years ago the Heartland Institute issued a report stating that the nations that have the best track records on environmental protection and improvement are those with the highest amount of free-market capitalism:

Nations with the freest economic systems are the ones whose citizens can afford the luxury of protecting their environments. Conversely, persons living in command-and-control economies barely surviving on life's necessities of food, clothing, and shelter use their natural resources to the absolute limit. They have no other choice in providing for themselves and their families.

As family incomes rise, the improving quality of life allows people to devote more resources to solving environmental problems. Thus, with expanding societal wealth under free-market economies, environmental degradation is first arrested and then reversed. Society goes through a form of "environmental transition." After the transition, greater wealth and technology improve environmental quality instead of worsening it.

Glenn Reynolds, better known as Instatpundit, has a column in the New York Post today on global warming, the environment, and what to do about it. Reynolds says we should focus on nanotechnology and solar energy:

But nuclear power is just a stopgap - as more advanced technologies like nanotechnology offer much greater prospects via solar energy and reduced energy consumption.

MIT's Vladimir Bulovic calls nanotech a potentially "disruptive technology" in the solar-energy field, offering a complete shift from today's fossil-fuel environment. And famed inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil projects the current rate of progress in solar power forward and argues, "The power we are generating from solar is doubling every two years; at that rate, it will be able to meet all our energy needs within 20 years."

Solar research is progressing rapidly, and recent research suggests that "quantum nanodots" may offer dramatic improvements, perhaps on the order that Kurzweil predicts.

Nanotech offers dramatic improvements on the side of energy consumption, too: As computing and other devices become smaller, they become more efficient - and nanotech will allow drastic improvements in both size and efficiency.

Nanotech is starting to yield super-strong, super-light materials, too. Imagine how much more efficient a family car could be if you cut the weight in half, even if you kept burning gas. But nanotech is also likely to produce better batteries and better motors, meaning that your lighter car may also be electric, powered ultimately by those nanodot solar panels.

All of these things are in the works now to greater and lesser degrees, but they could happen faster if there were more research and development support.

Ultimately, we're probably better off putting our energies into promoting cleaner, more advanced technologies like these than in trying to get people to reduce the scope of their lives through "hair-shirt environmentalism."

As Glen is fond of saying, read the whole thing.

In the meantime, we should practice the "conservative" approach to global climate change by using free market principles and property rights to develop the technologies which will enable us to become green and smart.

Response To Gore's "We" Campaign Climate Ad

The following video shows a sharp partisan divide over Gore's new climate ad:

According to Rasmussen Reports, The data was prepared by MediaCurves.com and is based upon the responses of 611 participants including 203 Democrats, 203 Republicans, and 205 independent or unaffiliated voters.

There is also a divergence based upon age. The youngsters, 18-25 years old, have a much more positive reaction:

Recycle Or Go To Hell

The Vatican has extended its list of mortal sins to include 21st century transgressions:

The new seven deadly sins are those of drug abuse, genetic manipulation, morally dubious experimentation, environmental pollution, social inequalities and social injustice, causing poverty and accumulating excessive wealth at the expense of the common good of society.

Traditionally, mortal sins are acts which breach the Ten Commandments from which the Roman Catholic Church deduced that there were seven deadly sins - pride, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed and sloth.

Not to be outdone, leaders of the Southern Baptists have "declared" their denomination has been "too timid" on environmental issues and has a biblical duty to stop global warming.

As one who recognizes global climate change, but remains skeptical as to whether it is all the result of human activity, I continue to wonder if climate change is not part of God's plan.

Journalists have warned of climate change for 100 years. The trouble is, they can't make up their minds whether we face global warming or global cooling.

Cartoon courtesy of Michael Van Winkle.

Pollution Turns Chinese River Red

Pollution has turned branches of at least three tributaries of the Han river -- a branch of the Yangtz -- red:

The Xinglong, Tianguan and Dongjing rivers were all affected by the pollution, according to the state news agency Xinhua.

A chemical spill is thought be the cause, but the source has not yet been identified and an investigation has been launched.

Gao Qijin, a water company official in Xinguo, Jianli County, told Xinhua that the water in the Dongjing river had become red with large amounts of bubbles.

The pollution has also contaminated water supplies for about 200,000 people in central China.

Meanwhile, Beijing is diverting water north for the Olympics, which means that in China's arid north, provinces already experiencing water shortages could be pushed deeper into crisis threatening the livelihoods of millions of people.