The Other Judicial Decision

By Alan Caruba

As this is being written, it is the Wednesday prior to the announcement of the U.S. Supreme Court regarding the fate of Obamacare. If SCOTUS upholds it, it will condemn Americans to having bureaucrats deny medical care to some because of their age and others to die while waiting for it.

By any standard it is a horrendously bad law and one that initiated a huge political movement, the Tea Party, to oppose it. Mitt Romney is campaigning on the promise to repeal it. It was a law passed in the dark of night and it embodies all the worst aspects of Socialism.

There has been another judicial opinion, however, that promises to destroy many aspects of the nation’s economy, from the coal industry to the coal-fired plants that provide about 42% of the nation’s electrical power. It used to be 50%. An successful economy requires and thrives on energy. We are decreasing ours. China is building a new coal-fired plant every month.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia threw out a pro-industry petition that challenged the Environmental Protection Agency’s assertion that carbon dioxide (CO2) is a “pollutant” that endangers public health and is a factor in global warming.

It was an 81-page decision, based in part on a 2007 SCOTUS decision that ruled 5-4 that the 1970 Clean Air Act empowered the EPA to regulate C02, even though that was never the original intent of the Act.

It is a ruling that will permit the EPA to continue to wreak havoc on business and industry, large and small, based entirely on the greatest science hoax in history.

As one observer said, “with a sweep of the pen the elite of the American legal system affirms that the Earth’s atmosphere simulates the glass barrier of a greenhouse.” Only the Earth’s atmosphere is composed entirely of gases.

CO2 represents an infinitesimal 0.038% of the atmosphere.

The other atmospheric gases are nitrogen at 78.084%, oxygen at 20.94%, argon at 0.934%, carbon dioxide, and trace elements at 0.002%.

To suggest, as the EPA does, that CO2 poses a public health hazard is to ignore the fact that humans exhale about six pounds of it every day and that it is vital to all vegetation on Earth in the same fashion as oxygen is to all animal life. Does this sound like a hazard to you? Are humans dying because of 0.038% of CO2?

The decision opens the floodgates of EPA regulation to require all manner of technology to abate emissions from thousands of sources of CO2 whether they are a huge factory or a local bakery. Unless Congress asserts its right to properly interpret the Clean Air Act, the decision will further undermine job growth and economy recovery.

The decision is likely to become part of the political campaign leading to the elections. Mitt Romney has declared his opposition to it.

It is worth considering that, among the members of the Supreme Court, Justice Scalia just turned 78, Justice Kennedy will turn 76 later this year, Justice Breyer will be 76 in August, and Justice Ginsburg just turned 81. The next President is likely to choose at least one and possibly more justices to the court.

Suffice to say that the Court of Appeals arrived at their decision by relying on all the lies that buttressed the global warming hoax and made no effort to consider the vast body of scientific literature that demonstrates that CO2 plays no role in climate change and is, as noted, vital to all life on Earth. It was a very stupid decision as was the 2007 SCOTUS decision.

It was, however, a decision that will cause an untold amount of harm to the nation’s economy. Congress, already having failed to act in the years since 2007 to assert its role with regard to the Clean Air Act, must do so soon or the further destruction of the nation will follow as night the day.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Killing Coal in America

By Alan Caruba

When I was a teenager, I made a lot of money as a magician entertaining at birthday parties and other events. The essence of stage magic is diverting the audience’s attention from what one is actually doing while creating the “illusion” that produces an entertaining surprise.

While the media was focused on stories last week about the House committee decision to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt and the subsequent declaration of executive privilege by the White House to delay the provision of information the committee had been seeking about Operation Fast and Furious for over a year, Americans were being deprived of one of the most affordable and proven sources of electrical power, coal.

In the Senate, on June 20, a resolution to block the imposition of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Maximum Achievable Control Technology (MACT) standards for hazardous air pollutant emissions from power plants failed.

The vote was 46 ayes to 53 nays. Among the Republicans who sided with the Democrats to kill the measure were Sens. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, Scott Brown of Massachusetts, and the two Maine Senators, Susan Collins and Olympia Snow, neither of whom is a Republican in anything but name only. Their support of the EPA regulation will cost Americans dearly in jobs and the cost of electricity.

The Utility MACT rule is so bogus, so based on illusionary computer models, so devoid of any real science that it constitutes a brazen act of criminality. It asserts that the health risks from mercury emissions is such that it is necessary to impose a rule that, by its own estimates, implementing it will cost $9.6 billion in 2016.

Marlo Lewis of the Competitive Enterprise Institute points out that “in the 22 years since Congress tasked the EPA to study the health risks of mercury, the agency has not identified a single child whose learning or other disabilities can be traced to prenatal mercury exposure.” EPA cited the mercury risk as the “trigger” for the MACT rule.

There is no public health hazard from burning coal to produce electricity, but there is a very real hazard when such plants close down and cease to provide it.

The American Energy Institute notes that “coal’s share of U.S. electricity is expected to fall to below 40 percent this year from 42 percent last year and produce the lowest share since data was collected in 1949. Just five or six years ago, its share of electricity generation was 50 percent.”

The war on coal waged by major environmental organizations, combined with Obama’s hostility to coal is depriving Americans of a cheap, abundant source of energy and, last week, Democrats with the aid of some Republican Senators, just drove the price of electricity to new heights. It will close down plants that can no longer afford the cost of emissions control technology and it will close down some mining operations.

As then-candidate Obama said in 2008, under his proposed cap-and-trade legislation “electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket” adding that “So, if somebody wants to build a coal plant, they can…it’s just that it will bankrupt them.”

When Cap-and-Trade legislation, based on the bogus EPA claim that carbon dioxide is a “pollutant” failed the far-Left Center for American Progress pressed Obama to bypass Congress and move the anti-coal, anti-energy agenda forward by manipulating regulatory and executive power.

If there was no other reason to defeat Obama in November and deprive Democrats of control of the Senate, it is what is occurred on Capitol Hill last week while Americans were distracted by efforts to thwart action regarding the “Operation Fast and Furious” scandal.

Distracted, too, by the mounting numbers of unemployed, by the stagnating economy, and by potential and negative news from the European Union and the Middle East, the attack on the nation’s ability to power homes, businesses and industries will only become news when the blackouts begin years down the road.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Earth Summit Babble

By Alan Caruba

Why anyone still believes anything the UN Environmental Program and its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has to say is one of those great imponderable questions. To prepare you for the flood of totally idiotic predictions to which you will be treated during the June 20-21 Earth Summit, here are just a few and I strongly advise you to ignore all of them.

A 550-page preparatory UN report, put together by “600 experts”, the Global Environmental Outlook—intended to soften up global suckers—predicts that Earth’s environmental systems are nearly at “their biophysical limits” thus subjecting the Earth to “irreversible and possibly cataclysmic world changes” and “If humanity does not urgently change its ways” it is doomed.

Notably, the Earth Summit will abandon “global warming” and “climate change” as its main theme and instead focus on “sustainability”, the utterly bogus notion that humans are using up all of the Earth’s resources.

The people most famous for really bad predictions these days are environmentalists. Rachel Carson kicked it off fifty years ago with her book, “Silent Spring”, assuring everyone that all the birds would fall dead out of the sky because of pesticide use. These days they are more likely to be chopped to shreds by wind turbines.

Ever since the early days of environmental hysteria just about every awful scenario cooked up in the fevered brains of the Greens has become front page news. There is method to their madness and it comes down to a simple equation: Scaring People Equals Money and Power.

Environmentalism is all about controlling you while picking your pocket. By any other name it is Socialism or its big brother Communism. It depends on lies backed up by a massive propaganda machine, funded by ultra-wealthy foundations, by governments who support Green programs of all sorts, and by the members of an endless succession of environmental organizations.

For example, you may recall that global warming, a massive heating of the Earth due to carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gas emissions” was predicted to occur twenty, thirty or fifty years hence when the hoax kicked off in the late 1980s. Keep that in mind when the Rio+20 United Nations Earth Summit is held in Rio de Janeiro, the site of the first conference.

Supported by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the so-called “scientists” backed up their claims with all manner of computer models, dubious graphs, and tons of “scientific” papers to convince governments and people that massive changes had to occur—primarily a huge reduction in the use of fossil fuels—or we were all doomed.

Exposed in November 2009 by the “Climategate” release of thousands of emails between the perpetrators, I still find it astonishing that not one single member of this conspiracy has gone to jail. Indeed, in 2007 the IPCC and Al Gore shared a Nobel Peace Prize.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change has issued a formal request that all the “researchers” who contributed to the global warming hoax be granted immunity from prosecution. Unbelievable, eh?

Back in 1956, a geologist named M. King Hubbert released the findings of his calculations to let the world know that U.S. oil production would “peak” between 1965 and 1970. It didn’t. What has since slowed oil production in the U.S. has been the refusal of the Obama administration to issue the permits necessary to drill on federal lands and offshore. The world is afloat on an ocean of oil and, in addition, the U.S. is not running out of coal or natural gas.

Similarly, all the population predictions made by Prof. Paul R. Erhlich and his wife in 1968 have proven false as well. A colleague of his, Dr. John Holdren, is the science advisor to the President. One of the central themes of environmentalism is that humanity is to blame for harming the Earth and that there are too many people.

The other theme is that all these people are “consuming” too much of the Earth’s natural resources and should be penned up in cities and kept out of most places on Earth in order to protect its “endangered species”, etc. Meanwhile, as this is being written, huge sections of western states’ forests are going up in flames thanks to Mother Nature setting off fires off with lightning strikes.

Does it surprise anyone that the Earth Summit is calling for a “climate fund” and wants nations to kick in $100 billion? The proposal for the fund called “The Earth We Want” covers an extraordinary range of topics that includes gender equality, woman’s empowerment, and all the usual social justice and environmental clap-trap that is intended to ensnare everyone in a web of laws, regulations, and treaties aimed directly at eliminating the freedoms the West has and that many in other parts of the world want.

There is one good reason to not ignore the Earth Summit. They are telling you just what kind of an Orwellian and totalitarian world they have in mind for you.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

EPA Threatens to Wreck the Nation's Auto Fleet

By Alan Caruba

One can hardly get through the week without learning of yet another absurd new program by the Environmental Protection Agency. The latest is a five percent increase in the amount of ethanol that must be added to the nation’s supply of gasoline.

In 2010, even Al Gore told a business conference in Athens that his previous support for blending ethanol with gasoline as a Senator from Tennessee was a mistake and based on a political decision concerning the support of farmers in his home state. At the time he spoke, corn ethanol subsidies to farmers represented $7.7 billion.

Ethanol was touted as yet another way to offset “greenhouse gas” emissions and prevent “global warming.” In 2010, ethanol production consumed an estimated 41 percent of the U.S. corn crop and 15 percent of the global corn crop.

The obvious result has been to drive up the cost of all food products that include corn and its derivatives. And there neither was nor is any “global warming”!

Two years later there is still no “global warming”, but the EPA has never been deterred by real science such as the fact that the Earth has been cooling since 1998. E15 is a diabolical mandate that will do widespread damage to autos using it and to the pumping and storage facilities to distribute it. And it is occurring as the market for ethanol is stalling.

It is by any definition, a criminal act by a rogue federal agency.

The Science Committee of the House of Representatives is trying to prevent the implementation of the EPA E15 mandate. This comes after more than 30 years of blending ethanol at a ten percent rate into gasoline; three decades of a blend that actually produces less mileage at the same time the production of ethanol generates the same level of carbon in the atmosphere as burning gasoline without ethanol.

The E115 mandate should trouble anyone with an automobile, motorcycle, outdoor or any equipment that runs on gasoline. Last summer, Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WIS) sent the EPA administrator, Lisa Jackson, letters from car companies expressing their opposition.

“Ford does not support the introduction of E15 into the marketplace for the legacy fleet…Fuel not approved in the owner’s manual is considered misfueling and any damage resulting from misfueling is not covered by the warranty.” Both Chrysler and Honda sent comparable letters with the latter noting “There appears to be the potential for engine failure.”

E15 will be restricted to autos of the vehicle model year 2001 and later. The Obama administration set a goal “to help fueling station owners install 10,000 blender pumps over the next five years”, but the real question is why would any government even consider doing something that represents millions in damage to automobiles using it?

Additionally, why should Congress continue to provide ethanol subsidies to its producers when the evidence of the passed thirty years use has not only demonstrated that it reduces the mileage that pure gasoline would provide and, more importantly, serves no purpose whatever regarding the non-existent “global warming” that is the sole justification for the blend?

The answer is that the EPA does not care that as many as five million cars in the current fleet could suffer damage and total engine failure which is not covered by their warranties.

The EPA is the Obama administration’s tip of the sword in its war on the use of all fossil fuels for any reason. It has nothing to do with science. It portends to wreak further havoc on drivers and the economy.

What is desperately needed is the complete reform of the EPA before it further threatens the safely, health, and lives of Americans.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

The 50th Anniversay of "Silent Spring": A Lethal Legacy

By Alan Caruba

There are books that have doomed millions to death. “Das Capital” by Karl Marx kicked off the worst economic system of the modern era, claiming the lives of millions of Russians and Chinese, along with others in the process.

Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” mobilized Nazi Germany, led to World War Two in Europe, and was responsible for the deliberate killing of six million Jews and another five million Christians in its concentration camps, not counting the millions more in war dead. The Nazi leaders were ardent environmentalists.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson; a book that is credited with giving rise to the environmental movement in general and, in particular, America’s unfounded fears of pesticides, especially DDT.

Eight years would pass between its publication and the first Earth Day in 1970 that mobilized the beginning of the environmental movement by putting government muscle behind it with the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.

“Silent Spring at 50: The False Crises of Rachel Carson” ($25.95, Cato Institute) has a publication date in September, but given the June 20-12 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, it is particularly timely. Its chapters had titles like “Elixirs of Death”, “Needless Havoc”, and “Rivers of Death.” What their content lacked was real science and real facts.

DDT was already famous for protecting human health along with a whole range of agricultural chemicals that protected crops against the depredation of insects, rodents and weeds. The book has rightly been condemned for the deaths—literally millions—that have resulted since the 1972 U.S. ban of DDT by the Environmental Protection Agency. It “was firmly and repeatedly warned by public health officials of the United States, the World Health Organization, and the Pan American Health Organization of disastrous consequences of a DDT ban.”

Even today, the EPA either manufactures or ignores evidence to justify its regulations.

Its inventor, Dr. Paul Muller, received a Nobel Prize in 1948 in recognition of the role DDT played in saving hundreds of thousands of lives of troops fighting the Axis in World War Two and the survivors of the Nazi death camps. It killed the insects that spread Typhus and other diseases. It did so without any evidence of the bogus threat of cancer that Carson advanced.

Nine contributors to “Silent Spring at 50” make a powerful case for the harm Carson’s obsessive fear of what were widely known to be beneficial chemicals. The book is a classic example of bogus science combined with deliberate lies to frighten people. That has always been the modus operendi of the environmental movement.

“Carson would have known of the great public health achievements of DDT and that it was saving lives,” writes Donald R. Roberts and Richard Tren, the authors of one chapter. “Indeed she describes some of the programs in “Silent Spring.” But the bulk of the book is a singular attack on DDT and other insecticides with scarcely any recognition of their actual and potential benefits.”

In the first chapter of “Silent Spring”, titled “A Fable for Tomorrow”, Carson invents a town so poisoned by insecticides that no birds sing there, having all been wiped out. It is pure fiction. Subsequent studies have demonstrated that the die-off she described has never happened. Years of bird counts refute that charge. Indeed, agricultural pesticides had initially been regulated by Congress in 1910 and generations of farmers took care to avoid contaminating their crops for obvious reasons.

The anniversary of the book’s publication is relevant to everyone today, even those born since the DDT ban. The coast-to-coast plague of bedbugs that has occurred in the past decade and continues today could have been eliminated if DDT was still in use. The mainstream media reported the plague, but never mentioned this salient fact, nor the fact that the EPA has just one pesticide registered for use against bedbugs and routinely refused to allow licensed pest control professionals to use it.

Carson kicked off “the precautionary principle” cited by environmental groups and government agencies that, in effect, leaves the public defenseless against the health threats that Mother Nature provides in the form of insects and rodents known to spread disease, or mold-contaminants such as aflatoxin, many times more toxic than the fumigant that was banned to control it.

Malaria, once on the brink of being eliminated, has long since made resurgence since the ban of DDT, although some nations most affected by the disease have received permission to use it.

That is Rachel Carson’s true and lethal legacy.

It is why so much of what the environmental movement advocates, from the United Nations to non-governmental-organizations like Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, the World Wildlife Fund, and dozens of others always seems to end up killing people in the name of saving the Earth.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Only if the Wind is Blowing

By Alan Caruba

I’ll bet you didn’t know that June 15th is Global Wind Day. Wind is part of the Earth’s atmosphere and, depending on whether it is blowing gently or strongly, there isn’t a darn thing anyone can do about it. Except for measuring its velocity and direction, wind like clouds remains largely a mystery to meteorologists.

Not so for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Control, the people who brought you the global warming hoax, asserting that carbon dioxide, a gas on which all vegetation depends, was raising the global temperature—largely as the result of burning coal and oil as sources of energy.

The Earth, however, has been in a natural cooling cycle since 1998 and the advocates of “green energy” have been in a tailspin, a death spiral of an inadequate capacity to deliver electricity and the inability to compete with more reliable, affordable, and traditional energy sources.

Simply put, wind and solar energy is a fool’s dream and one that must be backed up by traditional energy sources at all times in the event the wind isn’t blowing or during the nighttime or if clouds obscure the sun, causing solar energy to cease producing electricity. Only an idiot would want to be dependent on wind or solar to provide a reliable source of electricity.

The Renewable Energy Industrial Index (RENIXX) tracks the stock value of wind and solar companies. In May—though you did not read about it in the mainstream media—it announced that thirty of the largest renewable energy companies were trading at “an all- time low” and the index “had lost over 90% of its value since 2008.”

So, naturally, the Sierra Club was eager to tell me about Global Wind Day and that my home state of New Jersey had the “potential to replace all the dirty coal and gas plants in the state.” The distance between “potential” and reality is roughly the distance between New Jersey and the planet Neptune.

The Sierra Club (along with a rogue’s gallery of environmental organizations) wages war on all forms of energy production and use. They urged me to join others “at a beach near you for a kite-flying rally and celebration of New Jersey’s offshore wind potential.” Not only does it oppose the use of America’s vast reserves of coal, but it also has a “Beyond Natural Gas” program as well; another huge source of power for the nation.

I won’t bore you with the list of RENIXX companies that have filed bankruptcy, but they include the ill-famed Solyndra, Beacon Power, Ener1, and others in which the Obama administration has “invested” and lost billions in taxpayer funds that could have been devoted to highway and bridge repair or restoring our ailing military power. Another fourteen companies were listed as “teetering on the brink” of bankruptcy.

In May 2011, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie pulled the state from membership in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), the only mandatory cap-and-trade program in the U.S. The RGGI would have required New Jersey to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (the vital carbon dioxide plants need). Maine and New Hampshire had previously bowed out of the former ten-state coalition that would have reduced their capacity to provide electrical power. In doing so, Governor Christie diverted $65 million from RGGI and helped balance the state budget.

It is worth mentioning that New Jersey derives 50% of its electrical power from nuclear facilities. For reasons beyond my understanding, Governor Christie signed off on a project to build a grid of a wind farm of 96 turbines 16 to 20 miles off our shoreline. If the permitting process can be stopped, New Jersey’s shoreline will not be saddled with this awful project and the miles of cable it will require to deliver the few megawatts its “potential” promises.

Europe which led the charge to build wind and solar power projects as the result of its obsession with carbon dioxide emissions has since discovered that neither can compete with fossil fuel and nuclear power. France is the exception, getting most of its power from nuclear facilities. In England, its citizens are increasingly suffering from “fuel poverty” as the cost of electricity continues to soar thanks to its reliance on wind and solar projects.

Not only is the European continent suffering a financial crisis thanks to the failure of the European Union’s effort to get 27 sovereign, member nations to act in concert with one another, it is facing a shortage of energy to maintain its industrial base and service the needs of its population.

So, on Global Wind Day, feel free to go to the beach, but remember that it is an extraordinary bad way to generate energy.

It will no doubt be on the agenda for the forthcoming June Rio+20 Earth Summit that is self-described as “the 'institutional framework for sustainable development'; a system of global governance” aimed at achieving the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel’s plan to control the world’s “social, environmental, and economic” policies.

And you thought wind and solar power was just about electricity.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Canada Leads the Way on the Pipeline No-Brainer

By Alan Caruba

“Their goal is to stop any major project no matter what the cost to Canadian families in lost jobs and economic growth. No forestry. No Mining. No oil. No gas. No more hydro-electric dams.”

That was Canada’s Natural Resources Minister, Joe Oliver, speaking on January 9, 2012 and he might have been saying the same thing about special interests and the Obama administration in America. With refreshingly plain speech, Oliver criticized environmental organizations, both in Canada and in the U.S., saying they “threaten to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda.”

Canada is bringing common sense back into style. A June 3rd Washington Post article reported that “The government of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper is rewriting the nation’s environmental laws to speed the extraction and export of oil, minerals and other materials to a global market clamoring for Canada’s natural resources.” Moreover, it has “added provisions to an omnibus budget bill that would revamp the way the government reviews the environmental impact of major projects, regulates threats to fisheries, and scrutinizes the political activities of nonprofit groups.”

What is instructive is the way Canada is now leading the way against the obstacles that the environmental organizations on both sides of the border have imposed on the development of energy and other sectors of the nation’s economy. The centerpiece of this development for the moment is the Keystone XL oil pipeline.

The Harper government has also proposed the repeal of the Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act, part of the global warming hoax that would require huge reductions in so-called greenhouse gas emissions. It is seeking changes to other federal laws such as the Fisheries Act, the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, and Species at Risk Act.

Also under scrutiny is the proper role of non-profit organizations and “charities” that engage in blatant political activities. In typical fashion, the Sierra Club website on Monday claimed that Harper is trying to “steal tax-exempt status from charities that stand up to Big Oil.” Another environmental organization, Friends of the Earth, devotes its website to efforts to block the construction of “the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline from Oklahoma through Texas to the Gulf Coast.”

Every effort in the United States to ensure the provision of energy, whether from coal, oil, natural gas or nuclear power, continues to be assaulted by the huge environmental propaganda machine that currently sees the defeat of the pipeline as crucial to its anti-energy agenda.

On January 18, Americans were astonished to learn that President Obama had formally rejected a bid by Canadian energy company, TransCanada, to build a $7 billion oil pipeline that would link the tar sands of Alberta to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico. In a time when the U.S. economy is suffering loss of jobs, the project would normally be a no-brainer.

However, opponents of the pipeline are a virtual who’s who of environmental organizations and a torrent of lies has poured forth from them regarding the project. The American Petroleum Institute estimates it will create 10,000 U.S. jobs next year with an anticipated 45,000 jobs by 2015 and close to 85,000 by 2020.

Among the lies put forth by militant environmentalists is that the environmental impact studies and securing the permits necessary for the pipeline were “rushed.” In truth, it took three years, four months, and five days up to the day TransCanada first filed the permit request to begin construction.

Obama repeated this lie, blaming Republicans for preventing “a full assessment of the pipeline’s impact, especially the health and safety of the American people, as well as our environment.” The Obama administration had, in fact, reviewed more than 10,000 pages of environmental studies and the State Department had twice concluded that all requirements had been met!

By contrast, in 1974, the TransAlaskan Pipeline was approved by Congress in just about a year and it was built in less than three years despite being more environmentally and technically challenging.

Congressional Democrats and Republicans have been so angered by the president’s decision against the pipeline that in mid-April the House passed a short-term transportation bill that would facilitate the next stage of the oil pipeline. The bill passed 293 to 127, with 69 Democrats supporting it. It was the fourth time the House had passed a measure to expedite the stalled project, one of which failed in the Senate by a narrow vote when the president personally lobbied some Democrats to vote against it.

Let’s tip our hat to the Canadians who have concluded that environmental lobbies, think tanks, and charities are doing more to harm Canada’s interests by means of the environmental treaties and laws they have worked so hard to impose on that nation and ours. We Americans could learn a valuable lesson from our neighbors to the north.

© Alan Caruba, 2012