Cause and Effect

By William L. Garvin

“Someone didn’t think through the consequences of their action.”
President Barack H. Obama

If you pronounce that “as of today the oceans will recede and the earth will begin to heal,” you stand to fall mightily when you can’t deliver. When a single volcanic eruption in Iceland negates all the worldwide effort of mankind to reduce “global warming” over the last five years, you should be humbled. When a single oil spill defies all the efforts of both public and private enterprise to correct and contain, all the underlying system failures should be examined. Will that be the case?

If history is any indication, probably not. In 1962, Rachel Carson wrote a book called Silent Spring in which she popularized the idea that DDT, a prevalent insecticide, was the primary cause of cancer in children. In fact, DDT had wiped out untold numbers of mosquitoes and the resultant malaria in major parts of the world and had probably saved millions of people. An EPA Administrative Law Judge named Edmund Sweeney held months of hearings and concluded: “DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man…DDT is not a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man…. The use of DDT under the regulations involved her do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds or other wildlife.” Nonetheless, EPA administrator William Ruckelshaus banned it anyway. From that point forward, 300 to 500 million people per year were infected with malaria, primarily in Africa. There it was the number one killer of children and resulted in millions of deaths. It was not until 2006 that the World Health Organization reversed its policy and again endorsed the use of DDT to combat outbreaks of malaria. Someone didn’t think through the consequences of their action.

When you insist that there is an economic crisis of such proportion that a trillion dollar Stimulus Bill must be passed or unemployment will reach 8%, then you stand to fall mightily when you can’t deliver. It’s a year later and you haven’t delivered. Unemployment in May is now at 9.7% and the only reason it isn’t higher is because 322,000 workers DROPPED OUT of the search for work and are no longer counted! The administration predicted 540,000 new jobs in May and only delivered 431,000. Not bad except for the fact that 411,000 of those jobs were temporary government jobs for the census. When the census is completed, all 411,000 of those folks will again be unemployed! To make matters worse, there are multiple reports of census workers being hired, fired, then rehired, two, three, and four times. You just can’t tally with a fork, blow smoke, and expect to get away with it. The Department of Labor also revised the number of jobs created in March DOWNWARD from 230,000 to 208,000. Now the President smiled and said that it was a great jobs report. The stock market plummeted 323 points. Someone didn’t understand the consequences of their action.

According to a U.S. Department of Interior, U.S. Geological Survey of 2008, there are somewhere between 3 and 4.32 BILLION barrels of oil available in the Baaken Formation in North Dakota and Montana. In a Wall Street Journal article last week, Governor Sean Parnell of Alaska commented on the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska: “Although familiar with ANWR, most Americans are less likely to know about NPR-A and how vital it is to our energy security. Given recent developments, it’s time to elevate the position this area holds in our national discourse.

NPR-A, a 23 million acre stretch of Alaska’s North Slope, was set aside by President Warren Harding in 1923 for the specific purpose of supplying our country and military with oil and gas. Since 1976 it has been administered by the Department of the Interior, and since 1980 it has been theoretically open for development. The most recent estimates indicate that it holds 12 billion barrels of oil and 73 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

In addition to containing enormous hydrocarbons, NPR-A is very close to the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, which means that there would be relatively little additional infrastructure needed to bring this new oil to our domestic market.

But even here, progress has been stalled.”

A single oil spill in Santa Barbara killed offshore drilling in California. The solitary Three Mile Island incident killed nuclear development in the United States. Environmentalists have stopped drilling in more accessible onshore areas where the United States and the States are the largest landholders. Consequently, oil production has been continually outsourced or pushed further and further off shore into deeper and deeper and riskier and riskier environments. Now we have an ecological catastrophe. Someone didn’t think through the consequences of their action.