Save The Whales, Kill The Economy

IBD Editorial ^ | April 20, 2009

[Kaslin]

Energy: With Ahab-like determination, environmentalists have once again blocked oil exploration in the American Arctic. They may just have succeeded in putting the American economy on ice.

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On Friday, a three-judge U.S. Court of Appeals Court panel in Washington, D.C., struck down the Bush administration's five-year plan for offshore oil and gas leasing off Alaska's northern coast.

The plan was vacated, the panel ruled, because of allegedly insufficient environmental review because its "environmental sensitivity rankings are irrational."

What is irrational is that despite a more than three-decade long record of environmental sensitivity at Prudhoe Bay and elsewhere, and despite booming polar bear, caribou and fish populations, the fiction that oil exploration and environmental protection are somehow incompatible and will decimate Arctic wildlife remains enshrined in law.

The Bush administration had started the process of auctioning off leases in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas, Cook Inlet and in the North Aleutian basin. Shell Oil, which spent more than $2 billion to acquire some of the leases, and its partner ConocoPhillips had planned to start drilling in the Chukchi Sea in 2010.

The stakes are enormous. Alaska's Outer Continental Shelf by itself may hold 27 billion barrels of oil and 132 trillion cubic feet of clean-burning natural gas.

That oil is important in its own right, but as Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin told Interior Secretary Ken Salazar when he visited Anchorage, without it the Alaskan pipeline may have to shut down due to reduced flow.

[Aglooka]

Recycle the Whales!

[ChoobacKY]

The environmentalists won’t be happy until we’re all living in caves grooming each other for lice. A lot of them are closer to that eventuality than I am since they already bark at the moon.

[Carry_Okie]

What is irrational is that despite a more than three-decade long record of environmental sensitivity at Prudhoe Bay and elsewhere, and despite booming polar bear, caribou and fish populations, the fiction that oil exploration and environmental protection are somehow incompatible and will decimate Arctic wildlife remains enshrined in law.

Irrational? Not hardly. There's very good reason so many tax-exempt "charitable" foundations belonging to the heirs of oil company fortunes donate all that lovely money to environmental groups. The resulting shortages are good for margins.

[combat_boots]

Kill the rich.

Eat grass.

/ ridicule.

[Salvation]

Save the whales.

Kill the baibies.

Something is wrong here!