Cousteau Focuses on Obama's Ocean Policy

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the presidents speech to students

it's good that president barack obama addressed students as free thinking responsible citizens of our educated country

ECO REALITY CHECK

Contrary to accepted wisdom, and notwithstanding Mr. Cousteau, the environment is not as fragile as the “professional doom and gloom fund raisers” would have the people believe. I’d like to point out a few examples that illustrate just how hardy the planet actually is.

During world War II more than 6500 ships were sunk. All carried thousands of gallons of fuel oil. More than 1,000 were fuel/oil carriers. Additionally, over 200 tankers were so badly damaged that they lost their cargoes of crude or fuel oil before making it back to port. Dozens of tank farms and refineries were blown up in harbors in Europe, the Pacific and Asia. Additionally, millions of tons of explosives were dropped into the sea. A case in point, 77 Japanese ships were sunk by thousands of bombs , bullets and torpedoes in Truk Lagoon in one day. One might think that would be a Superfund site, on the contrary, it is now a thriving dive resort with a diverse underwater ecosystem.

You won’t see any photos of oil covered seagulls in the world’s publications of the period. You will find no hysterical scientists screaming for a world wide clean up. The earth’s oceans survived and, as I am sure Mr. Cousteau knows, the hopane marker of ocean oil pollution reached it’s peak during World War II and has continued to decline ever since.

From 1946 through 1963 (France detonated more in 1998) there have been more than 100 nuclear tests above and below the surface of the Pacific Ocean. Atomic bombs were dropped on fleets of ships and those that weren’t sunk were later scuttled or sunk by naval gunfire. These ships apart from being radioactive were full of oil and fuel. This was an environmental insult beyond description and yet, again, the ocean survived. Of course there was that mutant Godzilla thing, but I digress.

In the mid-16th century Juan Cabrillo made note of an oil slick more than a hundred miles wide off southern California in his ship’s log. His crew wrote of mountains of tar and pitch on the beaches with which the local Indians sealed their canoes. Today we would have legions of environmentalists chasing those Indians for tooling around in their tar pitch canoes. But would it be p.c. to chase an Indian, I mean Native American?

I have photos of hills of tar on Santa Barbara beaches from the 1920’s and there are so many oil derricks the beach can’t be seen. Before Marina del Rey was built, it was full of oil wells and oozing pools of sludge. Ship’s logs of the 19th century speak of vast oil slicks off the Pacific coast. But, it appears there has been some progress made judging from the current real estate values.

Studies by National Academy of Sciences and confirmed by such left wing institutions as U.C.Santa Barbara confirm that oil platforms actually reduce the amount of oil seeping into the sea through “natural” fissures. As a matter of fact, underwater oil seeps from the earth’s strata introduce about 1,700 barrels of crude oil into U.S. ocean waters every day! This amount is 150 times the amount lost by the 3000 plus oil platforms operating in U.S. waters. And that 1,700 barrels of natural seepage would increase if we discontinued offshore drilling.

Speaking of drilling, why don’t we drill more sites in Alaska? We can drill diagonally and leave a small “foot print”. In the 1970’s environmentalists predicted the doom of the caribou herds and the destruction of the ecosystem if the Alaskan pipeline were built. The caribou herds have nearly doubled in number since the pipeline was completed and the ecosystem survived.

Global Warming is another a perfect example of distortion and half truth. There have been several periods of global glaciation over the past 50 million years. These periods of glaciation were followed by periods of “global warming” - during which even the polar ice caps melted. The last period of glaciation, the Pleistocene Epoch, ended just 3000 years ago and the general trend since has been “global warming” . However, during this most recent period of warming there have been at least two “little ice ages”, one lasting more than 100 years. The ice is the real killer - If I were in marketing for Ford or GM I’d run an ad for an SUV as a “future Ice Age preventer”.

The inventor of DDT won the Nobel Prize for Medicine. President Roosevelt said DDT saved millions of lives during World War II. The World Health organization admits that millions of people die every year of insect born disease because of costs, bans, lawsuits and restrictions on it’s use. The use of DDT was discontinued because of a “theory” that it causes thinning bird egg shells. DDT has never been shown to affect humans in any way. Incidentally, when West Nile Virus first appeared in just one county in New York state in 2001 if we had possessed the political will to use DDT we might have eradicated the disease and saved hundreds of human lives and millions of birds and mammals annually. Instead, we now have this plague in North America forever and the costs in life, medical care and mosquito abatement are staggering.

Let’s just forget about all the above stats and facts. For the moment let’s focus on storm drains and asphalt. There are hundreds of thousands of square miles of parking lots and roads in the U.S. These roads receive the drippings, brake lining dust and rubber tire wear of over 200 million automobiles and trucks everyday. When it rains all that oil, transmission fluid, dust and coolant emulsifies and courses down the nearest drain to the sea. The asphalt itself breaks down (that’s why road crews resurface every 5 or 6 years) and being a petroleum product the asphalt too, heads to the sea. And, what of all the sewage treated and otherwise flowing to the sea? Consider the millions of gallons of herbicides, pesticides, drain and oven cleaners, degreasers, detergents and solvents in our nations sewers, flowing toward the sea. How about the tens of millions of homes with asphalt roofing shingles that break down and make their way to neighborhood gutters? What of the tons of animals feces bobbing down the streams and storm drains as always, to the sea?

Perhaps Mr. Cousteau could tell me why is it that when people think of a harbor or marina they have visions of a pristine aquatic environment. Flipper and Free Willy frolicking among the coral reefs. A harbor or marina is a “parking lot “ for boats and ships. When folks visit Wall Mart to they hope to see Bambi and Thumper browsing the parking lot landscaping? When they fly out of LAX to they expect Smoky Bear to amble out on the tarmac? No, most folks understand that when you level out the land and pour 4 inches of bubbling asphalt over it you’ve pretty much destroyed the “ecosystem” and killed everything in it. But, that outcome is accepted as the cost of doing business. However, when it comes to a marina or the sea they seem to leave their common sense at home.

There are many battles worthy of environmentalist resources; gill nets, “factory fishing”, sanctions against countries pumping raw sewage and toxic waste into the sea, stricter “world wide” catch limits and nuclear and biological arms control.

In closing, I’d like to point out that unless the various “quasi-religious” environmental groups become less dogmatic, myopic, micro managers, who believe the only acceptable interaction between man and nature should be preservation, restoration and veneration. Who promote the philosophy of “close it down, fence ‘em out” and “Every sort of human endeavor is evil” they run the risk of becoming further marginalized on the extreme left.