RE: RE: RE: The Threat of Oil Drilling

Steve Brenneis responds to Behethland B. Clark:

The Sierra Club is an organization well respected by environmentalists. With everyone else, not so much. They are marginally better than their more radical brethren like Earth First, but only marginally. They, like any other organization dedicated to political action, have never been above embellishing reality to serve their cause.

Man has been changing his environment since he could stand upright and move about. I have never been able to figure out what it is about this that environmentalists seem to find so disturbing. Changing one's environment in more or less permanent ways is a fact of existence. You can't even avoid it by standing very still and closing your eyes. Every breath you take alters the chemistry of your environment. Every beat of your heart causes molecules to be altered, created, and destroyed. Forever.

Indeed we are not the only creatures on Earth, but we are the only ones who seem to care about preserving some abstract concept of beauty. Don't get me wrong, this isn't a we shouldn't care because nothing else cares argument, but preservation of beauty for the benefit of creatures with no concept of beauty seems a somewhat pointless exercise, don't you think? And remember, we haven't established that the totality of this wildlife refuge will be esthetically destroyed or even adversely affected by this activity. So far, we only have the Sierra Club's arguable word for it.

You asked, "You wouldn't let tourists in Hawaii be free to go anywhere in the volcanic region, would you?" Why yes, yes I would. Why not? As long as they are not trespassing on private property, what reason is there to suspect that they have malicious intent?

As to the cost of prehistoric events on a population. In all likelihood, the population would have been wiped out. The best evidence we have for the extinction of the dinosaurs is that some cataclysmic cosmic event occurred that resulted in the sun being occulted. Most likely a comet or asteroid hit the Earth and the resulting dust cloud changed the climate permanently. While I would accept this as the natural order of things, environmentalists would weep and moan that there had been no sandal-clad Sierra Club member extant to provide facts, figures, statistics, and social justice lectures to the asteroid on why it shouldn't have hit the Earth.

I was considering letting your comment about drilling being of no help pass, but it is so over the top, I can't do it. That is an utterly preposterous statement. It ranks right up there with environmentalists telling us in 1970 that the Earth's fossil fuels would be exhausted by the year 2000. Yep, they did. I was there. I remember it. Of course drilling in the refuge will help us. There is estimated to be more crude oil and natural gas in Alaska than in all of Saudi Arabia. I, for one, prefer not to be beholden to some Arab nutjob jihadist or some tinpot South American dictator for my next fill-up.

Finally, I agree wholeheartedly about finding alternatives to fossil fuels. So how about you and I figure out a way to get the environmentalist nut-popsicles to quit obstructing progress on nuclear energy? That way, we don't have so far to look.