If they’re not just stupid, are they traitors?
The Obama administration is doing everything in its power to block the development and use of low-cost coal and oil reserves in this country — and even in Canada.
Bad enough that the administration continues to block the Keystone pipeline from Canada to Texas, a job-intensive private project which would reduce our dependence on Mideast oil and which has already passed every environmental review with flying colors. Beyond that, “Each step the government took … showcases its defiance,” as the administration continued its deepwater drilling moratorium after the policy was struck down as illegal, U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman of New Orleans found last year, holding the Obama administration in contempt of court.
Against this background, if we are to avoid crippling the U.S. economy entirely, it’s more urgent than ever that known high-grade uranium deposits be developed to facilitate new nuclear power plants, responsibly but quickly.
So the Obama administration announced Monday it’s going to … ban new mining claims on a million acres “near” the Grand Canyon, an area known to be rich in high-grade uranium ore reserves … for 20 years!
Needless to say, spokesmen for the Center for Biological Diversity, the Sierra Club and The Wilderness Society were ecstatic.
“America’s treasured Grand Canyon and the watersheds that support it have won a major victory today,” the groups announced in a joint press release with the Grand Canyon Trust.
No great loss, they assure us: Mining would have created only a few hundred jobs, and “Worse, virtually all the uranium-mining corporations seeking to mine around Grand Canyon are foreign owned, including several based in Canada.”
Wow. Blame Canada? How “progressive.” I certainly hope the green extremists typed out their press release on an American-made computer and keyboard, not some dastardly device slapped together in Korea or Taiwan.
More to the point, have any of these folks looked at a map of the Grand Canyon National Park, lately? This sprawling preserve already creates a buffer zone at least four to 15 miles in depth around the river and its canyon. It’s not at all uncommon for tourists passing through a park gate to drive for another 20 minutes or more, the kids whining “Where’s the cannnn-yon?” before approaching any intensive park facilities.
Add the adjacent Hualapai, Havasupai and Navajo Indian reservations, and the belt of protected lands not generally open to new mining claims can be as much as 50 miles across, already.
It can’t be an accident that the phrasings of the proponents of all this “protection” create the impression that, absent this job-destroying new violation of existing federal mining law (which the eco-extremists routinely refer to as “antiquated,”) greedy polluters would be dredging and shoveling the walls and floor of the canyon, itself.
Yes, mining operations in earlier days could be careless — though naturally occurring, unrefined uranium ore is a very different thing from enriched fuel pellets. Besides being, you know … natural.
But what method of energy generation and transmission does the green extreme favor, other than hamsters on treadmills or elves in hollow trees? Let them reveal how much power we would have — and how much it would cost — if they could block every form of generation and transmission they currently oppose.
No one is proposing mining inside the park. But how big an additional buffer zone is implied by these wails and cries any time someone proposes to dig or mine or build something, anything, “near” a national park? As the answer is “anywhere within the watershed,” the “protectionists” might as well say “anywhere in Arizona, Nevada, Utah, western Colorado, and parts of California.” Though we somehow doubt they’d name any state where it’s actually “OK.”
If any mine anywhere would poison the canyon, why is it Republican members of Arizona’s congressional delegation lambasted the temporary mining bans imposed by Interior Secretary Salazar in 2009 and again last year, complaining a permanent ban on the filing of new mining claims would eliminate hundreds of Arizona jobs and unravel decades of agreements on responsible resource development?
Industrial economies need energy. Wind gave way to the far more efficient steam engine 200 years ago, for a reason. “Electric” cars get their electricity from generators that burn primarily diesel (a petroleum derivative) or fossil natural gas or coal. And aren’t coal and gas and oil just nature’s way of storing really, really old solar energy?
Finally, where, oh where in the Constitution do we find any delegated power for the central government to enrich their favorite crony capitalists (some of them Red Chinese) by looting our paychecks to subsidize certain of these technologies (the ones that tend to collapse of their own weight), while hamstringing the ones that actually work?
If someone sets out on a course of action that any reasonable person can see is bound to end by crippling our economy, leaving us shivering in the dark, and thus giving aid and comfort to our enemies — in part because they were raised at the knees of Communists who despised our free market and the wealth and prosperity it breeds — isn’t that treason?
January 19th, 2012 at 1:08 pm
There are very few (if any) permanent jobs associated with a pipeline, so I am quite skeptical of those who try to paint such a project as a job creator. Construction is, by definition, a temporary endeavor (with the possible exception of the Winchester Mansion). So let’s be precise and call them what they are — *temporary* jobs. Much like the annual frenzy of hiring in the retail industry the week before Thanksgiving, these jobs too will eventually disappear.
January 19th, 2012 at 11:41 pm
RE: Pipes –Those “temporary” jobs will be going strong five or ten years from now, and when they’re done, there’ll be a couple times more at the input and terminus points. They’ll also pay their OWN WAY for years as a provider of energy.
In contrast with the bogus “green” jobs, at $800K-1.2M EACH, these jobs are under the tutelage of the market, not some bullshit bureaucrats.
Try thinking beyond your own retail job level.
January 20th, 2012 at 2:10 am
So, @Jerry, how is it I’ve known lifelong *temporary* construction workers, one particularly whom transitioned into the business side himself and had his own steelworker field erection crew? Nawww – a person can’t possibly make a full time profitable endeavor in *temporary* construction, can they? I guess that makes my line a *temporary* one too, since we fabricate structural steel assemblies that go into large construction projects. Same with the steel mills who supply us; just a bunch of slovenly *temporary* workers, there, too, huh? Not to mention the coal miners, truckers, lime miners, railroad workers, etc. that are involved in the extraction and smelting of the ore. Or the bean counters, janitors, paper pushers, engineers, grocery clerks, surveyors, diesel mechanics, dentists, lawyers, waiters middle managers, box makers, loggers, chemists, salesmen, secretaries and thousands more that facilitate the processes at each stage above, parallel and below. All you can apparently imagine are a bunch of grubby *temps* manhandling columns and trusses into position, not the complete interconnected web of economic actors. I bet your income was or is derived principally from the government. One can’t expect much when that’s the case.
January 20th, 2012 at 9:50 pm
I fear “R” is closer to the mark, here. The column was actually about uranium mining, not the Keystone pipeline, and mining jobs are by definition “temporary,” since the highest grade deposits are gradually depleted.
So the federal government should step in and block all mining?
There are people mining coal today whose great-grandfathers mined coal in the same county; should the government have stepped in and stopped private industry from producing and transporting coal because using coal to make the steel that turned America into a great industrial nation, raised standards of living across the board and won both the world wars “only discouraged the development of alternative energy technologies,” and “threatened the environment,” meaning it “wasn’t in the best interest of the nation”?
If 10,000 or 20,000 workers find jobs and are able to put food on the table for their families for “only” a couple of years building the pipeline, what Constitutional authorization does the central government have to tell them “Back on the dole! Back! Back!”? And how can the pipeline produce NO longer-term jobs? Once it arrives in Texas, the oil refines itself? No new hiring is needed to expand refineries and process the stuff and ship the distillates?
If we want to challenge the talking-point version of the pipeline, we might ask if the builders anticipate calling on government to use eminent domain to seize any of the right-of-way. (I’ve heard both “Yes” and “No.”) But all this ignores the gorilla in the room: Obama embraces the nihilist mythology and aims to buy the votes of “green” lunatics who believe the shale fracture technology that will be used to extract this oil will produce dreaded “greenhouse gases” (primarily carbon dioxide, necessary to life on earth) that will fry the planet, despite the facts that a) The globe has not substantially warmed since 1997; and b) mankind’s contribution to global warming is so minimal that nothing short of the eradication of our species is likely to affect global temperatures by as much as a single degree — even if the Indians and Chinese were on board with this green lunacy, which they’re not.
National Public Radio (or is it now “American Public Media”?) brings us endlessly repeated droning interviews with people who want to discuss whether Mitt Romney was an evil capitalist and whether he pays “enough” taxes, while their investigative teams pay no noticeable attention to the fact that the CURRENT president learned his econ0mics at the knee of Communist Party member Frank Marshal Davis, and started his political career in the living room of a Marxist college professor who used to promote the bombing of police stations (I believe he lost a perfectly good girlfriend that way.) This president has managed to keep his entire academic career under wraps, won his first elections not on the issues but by disqualifying his opponents on technicalities, and is now clearly intent on destroying America’s free-market economy. Do you realize oil production on the “public lands” which the federal government has no right to own or control in the first place is down 40 percent since this gang moved in, while new offshore drilling permits are essentially at zero? And this in the very decade when new oil, coal and gas fields adequate to keep us well supplied for CENTURIES have been newly discovered, ON THIS CONTINENT? Gasoline should be headed back down towards a buck a gallon!
Shall we applaud this administration for blocking the creation of any job that’s not “permanent”? What the heck is a “permanent” job? I work in the newspaper industry, which is currently shedding jobs like the buggy-whip industry in 1912. Other than in a government bureaucracy, where cops fired for shooting unarmed citizens can get reinstated by union contract arbitration boards, please explain to me what a “permanent” job looks like.
— V.S.
January 23rd, 2012 at 11:56 pm
Gasoline should be headed back down towards a buck a gallon!
Very true. However, it is Barack Obama’s primary duty, as figurehead puppet for the Kleptoplutocracy ruling over us, to keep those oil prices as sky high as possible, for as long as possible. After all, the key players of said reigning structure are heavily invested in the petroleum industry, the share values of which have to be kept at permanent highs. It can be debated whether or not the current Puppet-in-Chief realized before “running” for the Highest Office nearly four years ago that doing his part to manipulate global oil availability would be his primary duty. However, given his behavior since assuming the throne, it is obvious that this has since been made clear to him in no uncertain terms.
January 26th, 2012 at 12:55 am
Why would Control Freaks want to allow things to proceed when it will not be to their advantage? Obviously the president saw no advantage in allowing people to have independent sources of income when they can be dependent on government instead. Once must look to their own power structure first.
Besides, the more times a president starts a war unilaterally, or stops these crazy capitalistic ventures, or adds to the police/surveillance state, the more the public becomes acclimated to the new levels of control and is prepared to go along with the next control with nary a complaint.
Isn’t the Hegelian Dialectic Process amazing?
January 26th, 2012 at 6:26 am
Vin,
I have been touting the “treason” argument for quite some time regarding the ending of the XL pipeline project. Combined with the military build-up in the Persian Gulf to exercise US “diplomacy, oil prices are going to climb even more.
How can a sane man stand up before America and say things are better and America is back? These actions (to me) constitute an act of treason. He is deliberately destroying the US economy. It’s just that simple.
Vin, thank you for speaking out about this in a time when logical thought, sound economics and common sense are no longer recognized by mainstream America.