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.<\/p>\n
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, \u201cEach step the government took … showcases its defiance,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
Against this background, if we are to avoid crippling the U.S. economy entirely, it\u2019s more urgent than ever that known high-grade uranium deposits be developed to facilitate new nuclear power plants, responsibly but quickly.<\/p>\n
So the Obama administration announced Monday it\u2019s going to … ban new mining claims on a million acres \u201cnear\u201d the Grand Canyon, an area known to be rich in high-grade uranium ore reserves … for 20 years!<\/p>\n
Needless to say, spokesmen for the Center for Biological Diversity, the Sierra Club and The Wilderness Society were ecstatic.<\/p>\n
\u201cAmerica\u2019s treasured Grand Canyon and the watersheds that support it have won a major victory today,\u201d the groups announced in a joint press release with the Grand Canyon Trust.<\/p>\n
No great loss, they assure us: Mining would have created only a few hundred jobs, and \u201cWorse, virtually all the uranium-mining corporations seeking to mine around Grand Canyon are foreign owned, including several based in Canada.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wow. Blame Canada? How \u201cprogressive.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s not at all uncommon for tourists passing through a park gate to drive for another 20 minutes or more, the kids whining \u201cWhere\u2019s the cannnn-yon?\u201d before approaching any intensive park facilities.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
It can\u2019t be an accident that the phrasings of the proponents of all this \u201cprotection\u201d create the impression that, absent this job-destroying new violation of existing federal mining law (which the eco-extremists routinely refer to as \u201cantiquated,\u201d) greedy polluters would be dredging and shoveling the walls and floor of the canyon, itself.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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, \u201cnear\u201d a national park? As the answer is \u201canywhere within the watershed,\u201d the \u201cprotectionists\u201d might as well say \u201canywhere in Arizona, Nevada, Utah, western Colorado, and parts of California.\u201d Though we somehow doubt they\u2019d name any state where it\u2019s actually \u201cOK.\u201d<\/p>\n
If any mine anywhere would poison the canyon, why is it Republican members of Arizona\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n
Industrial economies need energy. Wind gave way to the far more efficient steam engine 200 years ago, for a reason. \u201cElectric\u201d cars get their electricity from generators that burn primarily diesel (a petroleum derivative) or fossil natural gas or coal. And aren\u2019t coal and gas and oil just nature\u2019s way of storing really, really old solar energy?<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
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\u2019t that treason?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[35,24,27,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-earth-stewardship","category-energy","category-extreme-green","category-public-land"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pWqFl-fh","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=947"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/947\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":948,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/947\/revisions\/948"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}