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Obama Blocks Offshore Drilling In Atlantic, Arctic Areas (npr.org)
Before the new administration takes over next month, President Obama took new action Wednesday to place large sections of the Arctic and the Atlantic Oceans off limits to oil drilling. NPR reports: The Arctic protections are a joint partnership with Canada. "These actions, and Canada's parallel actions, protect a sensitive and unique ecosystem that is unlike any other region on earth," the White House said in a statement. "They reflect the scientific assessment that, even with the high safety standards that both our countries have put in place, the risks of an oil spill in this region are significant and our ability to clean up from a spill in the region's harsh conditions is limited," the White House added. "By contrast, it would take decades to fully develop the production infrastructure necessary for any large-scale oil and gas leasing production in the region -- at a time when we need to continue to move decisively away from fossil fuels." Obama's action designates 31 Atlantic canyons "off limits to oil and gas exploration and development activity," totaling 3.8 million acres, according to the administration. It provides the same protections to much of the Arctic's waters, covering the "vast majority of U.S. waters in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas," totaling 115 million acres. Canada is doing the same to "all Arctic Canadian waters," the joint statement adds. Obama took these actions by invoking a law called the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which gives the president the authority to withdraw lands from oil and gas leases.
outfits like Greenpeace are after China and other developing nations. As well as corporations that exploit those nations. The problem with 'Globalization' is that it is intended to strip away environmental, health, safety, and labor laws; which is why it must be stopped. BTW, do you have any citations for Russian and Chinese governments funding free activist organizations?
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Because it is a political stunt to get the Republicans to overturn it when Trump gets in
There is no political mechanism to reverse the decision. Congress could vote to reverse it, but that would be subjected to court challenges questioning the validity of the reversal. But even a congressional vote would be difficult, since it would need 60 votes in the Senate. Not even all Republican senators could be counted on. Why should a senator from Texas, Oklahoma, or North Dakota vote for more oil drilling in the arctic, to compete with oil from their own states? It is possible that there won't be much opposition from oil companies either, since big offshore projects don't compete well against shale oil. Shell recently cancelled a big offshore project in Alaska.
Deepwater Horizon showed that there is no guarantee of no spills, and an accident of that size would have devastating environmental effects in the Arctic Sea.
Because this isn't just an executive action: It's a power that was specifically granted to the president by act of congress. It'll take an act of congress to reverse, and that is going to be politically troublesome. It could be done, but it won't be fast.
how can the President pass an executive action that could not be reversed by another executive action ?
TFA explains that Obama is using the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act. Presidents from both parties have used the Act in the past.
Trump can't just take office and reverse it. In fact, it's not clear just how he could, because there is no legal precedent. The Act contains no prevision for reversals, so presumably Trump would have to go to court. And that could take years to play out.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Actually, Trump could reverse it, but if he does anti-oil groups will sue because the law does not specify that a President has the power to do so. It would then be up to the courts to decide if Congress has the authority to give the President the arbitrary authority to do this irreversibly (it is arbitrary because they specify no conditions the President needs to meet to exercise this power). If the courts decide that Congress does not have such power they can take two actions:
1)Revoke the law thus eliminating all such previous actions(and possibly opening up the government to lawsuits)
2)Rule that the law gives the President the implied authority to reverse such a decision.
If the courts decide that Congress did not have the constitutional authority to give the President they will probably choose option 2 (which is similar to a recent ruling concerning the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
No evidence for a scientific consensus on climate change? How about this? Or this? Or this? Or this? Or this? Or this? Or this? Or this?
As a PhD researcher who works with soft (research) money, I'd say you have no idea how grant funding and annual salaries work in the slightest.
As a PhD researcher who has worked under research funding for 25 years and continues to do so, I'd say I have a very good knowledge of how the system works.
In addition, if we were to show conclusively tomorrow that human beings have absolutely zero effect on climate, the only people who might be out of work
When did I say people would be out of work? Do you understand what tenure is? Or how research faculty can transition to teaching faculty when their grants don't get funded? I think I already pointed out that research scientists who lose grants will have to transition, which is a very different job with very different peer recognition. You don't write papers anymore, you don't have grad students to do research because you can't pay them. I said all of this already.
Real researchers with the math and physics and model expertise to work on climate can work on a wide variety of subjects.
Yes, they can. They can teach, or if they can find another topic that is as well funded they have a reasonable chance of getting a grant in a new area of research approved. If they are suddenly writing grants for topics in which they have little expertise or status they will likely find their grants don't get funded, and then they become teachers. The stories about huge grants to study trivial things like the mating habits of grubs are mostly apocryphal, even though they were the fodder for Proxmire's Golden Fleece awards. Money is getting tighter unless you are trying to solve a crisis; global climate change is one such. When it stops being a crisis, or someone wants to prove it is not one, money dries up. You can't keep the same number of people researching climate change when the money is cut in half and allocated to another more critical area of research. Even a grade school student should be able to understand that.
I do not know what the percentage is, and neither do you, because no one has done a study that would give the answer (which is what it would take). I do know that the study which is used for the basis for saying that 97% of climatologists support AGW was utter garbage. Furthermore, how many scientists believe a theory is not the test of whether it is a good theory. The test is how accurately it predicts the results of experiments. So far, most of the predictions made based on AGW have proven wrong.
Ehhhh.
The model(s) are certainly piles of horse shit. But really- how could anyone expect otherwise? The systems being modeled are more complicated than our understanding of all of astrophysics.
Trying to model local effects when dealing with something that's planetary scale is a fucking daunting task. Maybe they're silly for even trying. Don't know. But the the warming of the earth is a fact. Period. The fact that it is anthropogenic is also a fact, based simply upon core principals. Whether they can measure how the hell it affects the weather of Seattle, WA or not, our alteration of the carbon cycle can only lead to this planet warming. I'm not on either side of the debate regarding what should be done about it, but saying the "theory" (seriously, what the fuck are you talking about) of AGW is bupkis because their models suck is a bunch of bologna.
There is one core prediction of "Teh Theory of AGW" (whatever the fuck that is), and that is: if you continue to add carbon to the gaseous stage of the Earth's extant carbon cycle, the motherfucker will get warmer. Because thermodynamics. Because QED. Because fucking reality.
Why didn't he bother doing this before now?
He did.
if you had been paying attention mr ac, you'd have noticed he's been steadily protecting many areas over the past 8 years, typically naming a new one every 4-6 months or so. he has now protected more natural areas than any president ever before.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
For me, the main problem with the church of AGW is not that the science is questionable, although there is always a responsibility to be rationally skeptical of any claims, but that the solutions are not scientific. Rather, the "solutions" are always cached in socialist propaganda. It has stopped being about the environment, stopping pollution, providing clean energy, etc. It is generally far more of a watermelon (green on the outside, red on the inside)--control of money, punishing the wealthy, redistribution of wealth. Without a doubt there are many above-board climatologists and environmentalists for whom the science is key, and finding real solutions (e.g., fusion power) are the most important thing. But they have let their science be co-opted for political purposes.
Ottmar Edenhofer, a co-chair of the IPCC : “The climate summit in Cancun at the end of the month [back in 2010 actually] is not a climate conference, but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War. First of all, developed countries have basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community. But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy. Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole.”
"I’m Camille Risler. I’m from France but I’m living in Thailand. I’m working for a feminist network that is called Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development and I’m working for the Climate Justice Program...So what we want to highlight here is that Climate Change is a clear symptom of an unequal and unjust world...So if we are to address the Climate crisis we need to challenge the structural causes of the crisis which lies on unequal distribution of wealth, of carbon, and of power. Whether it’s political power, economic power, or even military power."
Christiana Figueres, who serves as the Executive Secretary of the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change: “This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.”