Tuesday, March 11, 2014

THE LESSER PRAIRIE CHICKEN

Sometime you just have to get of your comfort zone.  Today is one of those days because I read a piece so bazaar that one just has to comment.

The subject of energy independence, always popular, has become even more so in the past couple of weeks what with the situation in the Ukraine and the strangle-hold that Russia has on western Europe's energy supplies.  Bully for us cry the pundits for with the advances in energy extraction the U.S. will soon be energy independent…or so we thought.

The U.S. government has some agency called the Bureau of Land Management, whose duties are not fully understood by anyone but I think it comes under the Dept. of the Interior which, among other things, is the oversight and enforcer for the Endangered Species Act, the greatest act of Congress ever passed according to the enviormental left.  Now despite what you might hear from The Leader and his mob, the growth of energy production in the U.S. has nothing whatsoever to do with the genius of the Obama administration.  Not 1% of the growth comes from Federal land.  All of the drilling and fracking is on private land which can only be regulated as to safety by Washington.  Enter the Lesser Prairie Chicken and its cousin, the Sage Grouse.

These noble birds, each of similar size which is slightly smaller than a Rhode Island Red, inhabits broad areas in the western and north western United States…like about 100,000,000 acres.  It's a big country, gang.  It appears, that under intense pressure from enviormental groups--an absolute core Obama constituency--the Interior Department is wrestling with the idea of designating these two clucks as "endangered species," which means that before anyone does anything, anywhere these birds breed, on public or private land, the permission must first come from the Interior Dept. by way of a request fulfillment, after exhaustive enviormental studies and law suits guaranteed to take a minimum of 10 years.  Like, never man.  Among those sacrosanct breeding areas?  The Permian Basin in west Texas and the Bakken in North Dakota, among a few others.

Now there is stupidity and then there is stupidity.  You pick what this is.  To be honest, I haven't a clue whether all the gas and oil we talk about is really there, but a lot of smart people say it is (although my classmate, Mike says it's a Ponzi scheme and his family has been in the oil "bidness" in Texas for so long that except for the brief time he served his country I don't think he ever filed a W-2 in his life…uh-huh).

If the Ukraine is any guide, maybe it's not a bad idea to find all the energy we can and if there is enough, we might even be able to help out our buds Over There.  I mean, we're talkin' survival here. And, in that vein another thing I'm try to figure out is way the enviormental left is always accusing those who are not absolutely in lock step with them of not believing in science.  Like Man, you tellin' me that that Dude Darwin was whacked with that Survival of the Fittest gig?  You tellin' me that it's me against the Lesser Prairie Chicken and let's see who wins and it's gonna be the bird?  Radical, dude, radical.

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