Category Archives: Environmentalism

A glimmer of common sense in City Hall.

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Just about every glimmer of common sense that we have seen in City Hall has come from Ald. Ric McIver so it is not that surprising that he is the lone voice speaking out against Druh Farrell’s idiotic notion of closing a major roadway in order to expand walking/biking space in an area that already has multiple walking/biking paths in place.

 McIver is pulling no punches and calling this initiative what it is; madness! 

  As predicted, fellow fool on council Brian Pincott has jumped in to support Druh on this tax-funded foray into lunacy. Pincott is the Alderman who proposed the inane notion that called for the city to spend $250,000 per year to retain an official city poet. Supporting idiotic waste of taxdollars is well within Pincott’s realm.

 From radio call-in shows, to commentary in the news to comments online, Calgarians are nearly universally condemning this crazy idea.

 Undaunted by the views of the people who pay her salary, Druh Farrell carries on. This issue has been an excellent display of the respect that Druh Farrell holds for the views of her constituents. She has none. Druh has even proposed that we move on and close downtown streets into Chinatown in the future as well. Wouldn’t the closure of Center street do wonders for traffic in addition to Memorial? Dull Druh has pointed out that traffic can take 16th avenue if they want to avoid the inevitable snarls that will occur on Memorial when we close it for non-existent pedestrian traffic.

 WHAT??? Has Druh ever ventured the 16 blocks North to 16th avenue? That disaster of a roadway has been nearly impassible on weekends since the 1970s.

 Is Druh Farrell truly this bereft of common sense? Are there perhaps a few marbles rattling around loose in her cranium? If that is not the case, we can only assume that Druh’s goal is to end all vehicular traffic in the city. There are all sorts of lunatic environmentalists with similar notions. Most of them have no power to act upon their notions thankfully. Farrell has managed to bypass all public opinion and get this venture in the works.

 Never since the late Darwin Award winner Tooker Gomberg proposed flooding the city streets of Edmonton in winter so that people can skate to work has such idiocy been seen in a city council.

skate

 There have been rumours that Ric McIver is considering a mayoral run. Lets hope that it is true and lets hope that he wins.

 We clearly need to replace twits such as Farrell and Pincott as well and I hope that happens. Having McIver in the mayors chair would do wonders for city hall.

More idiocy from city hall.

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 One has to laugh to keep themselves from crying when we see the stooges coming up with their idiotic notions at city hall. While city spending is out of control and municipal taxes are going through the roof, the priority initiative for Alderman Druh Farrell is to close a portion of Memorial Drive on Sundays for pedestrians and bicyclists.

 druh

 Brilliant Druh.

 For those who may be unfamiliar with the area in question, here are some facts. Paralleling Memorial Drive in the section in question is a beautiful and expensive pedestrian/bike-path as well as a large parkway that follows the river. There is no need for extra pedestrian space in this stretch. Why in the hell would somebody choose to walk down the hot pavement of a main road when there is a path in a treed park right next to them anyway?

 People have long bemoaned the lack of interest in Calgary’s downtown on weekends. The failed experiment of Eau Claire mall was an attempt to bring a Vancouver-like atmosphere into Calgary’s core and draw people there on weekends. Memorial Drive is a main route into downtown Calgary and is already chronically congested. How will weekend closures of portions of that drive effect weekend visits by people to downtown Calgary?

 Druh Farrell was also in support of those stupid $50 million dollar pedestrian bridges that would come right from that pathway that follows Memorial Drive. Now if people were walking down the street instead of on the bike-path, how will they be able to take advantage of those great bridges designed by a supposedly famous Spaniard? Perhaps Druh is trying to reduce access to those bridges in hopes that they do not wear out too soon.

 Druh has always been a sucker for “green” initiatives and is second only to Brian Pincott in the eco-flake department that resides in city council. Now think of this. With part of a main thoroughfare being closed on weekends, how much extra idling will occur as drivers languish in what will inevitably be a traffic jam stretching for miles? How many air conditioners will be on?

 We have about a year and a half to prepare to throw this crop of fools out of city hall in the next municipal election. The time to get some candidates with common-sense in place is now.

Myths are easier to spread than facts.

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 Last week some time while listening to an afternoon radio show a caller called in and claimed that he had spent most of his life working in the oilsands of Fort McMurray. He then went on a tirade about how there are absolutely no environmental controls, no penalties for environmental offenses perpetuated by operators up there and no monitoring of environmental impact up there. The show then went to the news and this idiot’s clearly untrue ravings went completely unchecked.

 Now this is significant in a couple ways. People with an enviro-chip on their shoulders will not hesitate for a second to completely fabricate a case in pursuing their anti-industry goals. I have worked in the oilfield for most of my adult life. In all aspects from exploration to development, the industry is heavily monitored, regulated and punished if found to be in infraction. In five minutes of google work, anybody can find that surface mining of oilsands so far has disturbed .01% of the boreal forest (which will be reclaimed) and only .1% of the entire forest is even minable. Documentation of the reclamation efforts, the regulations and the monitoring are exceedingly easy to find. Despite that, the latte-lappers of urban areas who oppose the oilsands would rather continue to blather outright untruths. If these people will lie baldfaced to us, what indeed is their goal?

 Another point to be found is how easy it is for a myth to get out there and how little effort the media makes to disprove untruths. Hey, if it bleeds it leads. It is much more exciting to forecast the pending (though unproven) end of the planet than to show that the environment and wildlife are perfectly fine. A desicated deer dying on a roadside provides more voyeuristic pleasure to the readership than presenting the reality that deer have been wasting away due to overpopulation.

 A great example of this was the mythical two-jawed Goldeye caught in the Athabasca river last summer. Below is the headline that the Calgary Herald printed:

Two-jawed mutant fish fuels oilsands dissent!

Good heavens!!!!! A mutant!!! Lock up the children!! Call in the army!! The world is ending!!!!

Here is the picture of this clear environmental atrocity:

20090316-north20chip20goldeye

 Gotta admit he is an ugly little devil. Of course this prompted Greenpeace and the usual subjects to cry out that we must halt all oilsands development and offshoot gang of eco-nuts; “Keepers of the Water” displayed this horrific specimen at conferences around the province as visible proof that oilsands development is destroying the planet. The media eagerly lapped this up and our little fishy made headlines across the world.

 When the hype finally played out, the fish was released for actual study.

 Well,  a few weeks ago deeply buried in the odd newspaper we see this news item: Freakish fish is really a normal specimen.  

 Yup. After biologists at the University of Alberta finally got to view the fish, it was quickly determined that this was a perfectly normal Goldeye. Apparently, his kind of fish has a rough, toothed tongue which after death commonly protrudes below the jaw looking as if there is a second jaw. Nothing unusual, nothing new.

 This of course hardly made headlines. Were the people who were hysterical about this myth at least a little bit sheepish? This comment following the story says it all:  “Hmm.. sounds like another government cover up. They are trying to convince the public that there is nothing toxic about pulp mills or oil sands.”

 Yes, when the facts come against them the eco-nuts dismiss it as a government conspiracy (unchecked of course by the media). There is no reasoning with these people.

 Another fallacy that the eco-crowd loves to spread is the apparent cancer increase in residents of Fort Chipewyan who live downstream of the oilsands. This began when a lone doctor up there claimed that there is an unusual increase of certain kinds of cancer in the area. Alberta health rushed up there and studied the issue. No increase was found. This clearly being a conspiracy, another study was demanded. That study did indeed conclude that there was a higher rate of cancer in the area!! It was found that the cancers were completely unrelated to those that the original doctor claimed were occurring but there was indeed a higher incident. The headlines trumpeted this claim of a new plague decimating the region of course. What was not mentioned very much however is that almost all of the isolated first nations communities in Canada have elevated cancer rates. This has nothing to do with pollution and everything to do with those communities being in a socio-economic nightmare with the majority practicing some terrifically unhealthy lifestyles.

 If pollutants were leaking into that water supply, rest assured that the massive monitoring system would pick up on that. Of course, if a person is disconnected with reality and feels that it is a global conspiracy of heartless animals who want to kill our entire northern population, how can you reason with them?

 I can see how some of the shallow readership of papers will absorb this garbage without doing research on their own. These eco-activists know damn well what they are spreading is utter B.S. however. These people lie in the face of the public without batting an eye. Apparently the ends justify the means to these unprincipled fools. Of course, something that is often overlooked is that groups such as Greenpeace and the Sierra Club are large multi-national multi-million dollar organizations. There are plenty of six-figure incomes that would be at risk in the eco-industry if facts were suddenly addressed. Why would people donate if indeed the world were not ending.

 Patrick Moore was one of the original founders of Greenpeace. He left when the organization changed from an environmental group to essentially a self-serving, multi-million dollar corporation. They hate Moore as he has been saying it like it is.

 But hey! Why lets facts get in the way of a decent myth?

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Let’s talk bailouts.

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 OK, it looks like reality finally bit Special Ed Stelmach in the butt and he has realized what tax hikes and socialism do; they stunt and reduce business activity. The greedy “fair share” strategy and royalty hike that Stelmach and Knight pursued brought no increase to provincial revenues and simply managed to pluck the golden goose. On what is Stelmach’s 8th or so “tweaking”  of the royalty regime, the engines of misinformation are working overtime to demonize the oilpatch again.

 A Herald headline the other day demonstrates this rather well:

 Stelmach announces bailout for junior, mid-cap energy companies.

 Tax relief does not constitute a bailout!

 You would think that with all of the real examples of bailouts that we are seeing lately that people would understand the difference. The “stimulus packages” that Harper and Obama are flogging on the backs of our grandchildren are bailouts. The cheques being handed to the auto sectors are bailouts. The cash that the CBC is demanding would be a bailout. The money Air Canada gets every time they mismanage themselves to the brink of bankruptcy is a bailout.

 Where is the cheque coming to the big bad oil companies? Where has the oil industry even asked for a bailout? There are cheques going out, have no doubt of that. The cheques however are going from energy companies to the government.

 Will every tax reduction in the future (should we see any) be defined as a bailout? When Harper reduced the GST, was he offering a bailout to the entire population of Canada? Are we all welfare bums in that sense that we have been bailed out?

 Unsteady Eddie was already realizing that his new royalty scheme was idiocy even before oil prices and the market went into the toilet last fall. Land sale revenues (another cheque from energy companies to government) had plummeted in Alberta to the point that government was not gaining anything with their new “fair share” royalty program. Stelmach had made Alberta uncompetitive and it was very apparent as exploration and development boomed in Saskatchewan and BC while Alberta saw a reduction in activity despite $140 per barrel oil prices.

 In light of the world economic situation, clearly Alberta would be seeing tough times right now whether Stelmach messed with our economy or not. The pain Alberta will feel through this recession will be far more acute due to the market mistrust that the Progressive Conservative gang led by the idiots Ed Stelmach and Mel Knight.

 We are hearing of a credit crunch. Energy exploration and development are capital intensive ventures that require long-term planning and investment. When an energy company seeks credit, like everybody else it must demonstrate assets to the financial institution that may finance development. In energy that translates to proven reserves and speculation on their value when these reserves are developed. Now imagine how hard it is to get credit when the value of your reserves and cost of development changes by the month as Stelmach keeps trying to tinker with the rules. Would you like to invest in a jurisdiction known for tearing up agreements and increasing their take after the development dollars have been invested? Rest assured investors are asking these very questions.

 Stelmach can reduce royalties to even below the levels we had prior to his initial messing around. The market mistrust in Alberta will not go away. It will take a change of government or at least a decade of some true and steady leadership before we see business confidence in Alberta again.

 Some people claim that energy companies have not done enough to win over the hearts of the public thus they lack support at times like this. Just how far are they to go exactly? Have a look around. How many billions must these companies invest in communities before some appreciation is shown? How many more hundreds of millions in charitable initiatives and sponsorships must they invest?

 I don’t think anything will help. Too many people like to simplistically imagine that all of these companies are headed by Scrooge McDuck types who are swimming in money taken from the public. People don’t look at the millions employed, the billions paid in income-taxes and billions spread from the community level to the entire nation. Many do not realize how deeply their pensions are invested in these companies or how many government services are provided thanks to revenue generated from these companies. I don’t know if perception will ever be changed.

 One area that energy companies are working on in hopes of getting a better perception is pumping money at groups who have fully dedicated themselves to demonizing the entire industry and I have to admit I am stumped with this one.

 The Pembina Institute is a leftist organization that is dedicated to misinformation and pretty much every effort possible to halt all energy development. In looking at their report, I am astounded and disgusted to see who is funding them:

There is only one donor listed over $50,000. That donor is ConocoPhilips. In the $10,000 to $20,000 category we find the Canadian Gas Association, Enmax, Nexen, The North American Oilsands Corporation, and Suncor Energy. Getting into the $1000 dollar range there is an even longer list of energy donors.

 Why are you guys paying this group to kick you in the nuts? Have these investments made the releases from the Pembina any more rational or fair? Do you really expect these people to suddenly embrace you?

 When we see anti-energy types howling that energy companies are being bailed out, I would suggest that the dollars wasted on the clowns at the Pembina would be much better spent on ads trying to inform the public on what a bailout actually is.

 Giving more cash to the Pembina is an exercise in masochism at best.

Why are we not dropping like flies?

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It seems every day I pick up the paper and read about how or why we are all reaching some kind of Armageddon due to our modern lifestyles. Whether it is somebody insisting that pesticides are killing us, to the idiotic and baseless anti-inoculation crowd, to the global warming kooks telling us that skin cancer will wipe us all out, to the anti-Genetically modified foods bunch, to the organic foods bunch, to the “alternative medicine” crowd and on and on and on.

Why do people feel this need to distrust technology? Why in light of the obvious fact that we in Canada are healthier than we ever have been do people feel compelled to jump on the fear bandwagon? People are afraid of modern medicine. People fear any chemical that they can’t pronounce. People are afraid of development and expansion.

One of the easiest stats to accurately trace is life expectancy in developed nations as we are prone to keeping good records of deaths. As of last January, the average life expectancy in Canada was 80.4 years.

I am having trouble finding the historical data for Canada, but the USA is similar. In 1900 life expectancy was 48.23 years. In 1950 life expectancy was 66.31 years.

 Is the trend clear enough for anti-development kooks yet? It appears not. Despite all the nasty pollutants and evil modern medicines, we are living vastly longer than we had only 100 years ago.

 When I hear some idiot telling me that their herbal remedy or whatnot is good as people have been using it for hundreds or thousands of years, I need only ask how long people expected to live only a hundred years ago. No need to go back thousands when the expectancy was about 30 years.

 The eco-nuts claim our lifestyles are unhealthy due to development. Well by that logic, undeveloped regions of Africa should enjoy blissful health should they not? Alas, in those parts of Africa they are struggling to live as long as 40.

 No we should not blindly accept any technological advancement and assume it is good. No we need not get rid of every old remedy that has been out there for a long time.

 We do need to end the fear-mongering though. The industrial revolution, capitalism and development have been the best thing to ever happen to mankind. One need only look at the life expectancies of undeveloped or non-capitalist societies in order to see that.

 Give me my chemical based medicines, pesticide laden foods, GM foods, vaccinations and modern pollution of the air. I want to see 100 years of age and with the direction life-expectancies are going I stand a reasonable chance of that.

It’s banning season again.

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Ahh despite so many unfounded assurances that we are all going to fry like bacon due to global warming, we have suffered under one of the most delayed springs in my recollection.

 Spring is now finally here though and along with it are the ravenous mosquitoes who have been delayed in their early feeding season.

 Not only do mosquitos ruin barbeques or long walks in the park, the nasty little fellas are responsible for millions of deaths worldwide. Malaria alone kills an estimated 1 million people per year.

 Back before the enviro-hysteria had DDT banned all over the place due to some rather shaky evidence, it had been found to be incredibly effective in reducing malaria infections in third-world locales. In India, DDT use reduced annual infections from 8 million cases to 50,000 (rather effective I would say). In Sri Lanka between 1934 and 1955 there were 1.5 million reported cases of malaria. When DDT was brought into use in Sri Lanka cases of malaria dropped to a reported 17 in 1963. When DDT use was halted, malaria cases in Sri Lanka rebounded to 600,000.

 Despite the fact that DDT was saving lives in the hundreds of thousands, people living in the comfort of the developed world where malaria is not a problem decided to go on an international rampage about this. 

 The egg thinning theory regarding some pretty birds was the main culprit behind the screeching for bans of this marvelous chemical. Who cares if hundreds of thousands of rather disheveled looking third-world people die? Apparently these people are worthy of sacrifice if we can increase the breeding levels of some carnivorous birds. While the evidence that DDT saves countless people is pretty clear, the evidence of DDT causing harm to birds is not quite so well documented.

 The eco-movement knows a good myth to perpetuate when they see one though. Just as they latch on to fuzzy seals and polar bears as figures to promote (despite neither being threatened), they have found that many donors to the cause are moved by the potential plight majestic birdies.  No sense letting facts get in the way when the contributions are rolling in eh?

If nothing else, the anti-human eco-kooks are good with marketing. I can see them vetting poster and flyer covers in some studio apartment.

Perfect, big eyes and clean and fuzzy. Disney could not have drawn something so cute. Who cares if the babies are no longer hunted, we need to put people out work in Labrador.

 Ahh look at that. It could have been one of the stuffed toys in a child’s bedroom. Who cares if their population is exploding, lets put some Inuit out of work and call them threatened.

 Ahh. majestic and a national symbol for many. We must imply that these birdies are at risk.

 Eeeeek. Too much reality. Get that picture out of there and keep encouraging use of food crops for biofuel. The mosquitoes will take care of those that don’t starve. It takes actual groundwork to help those people anyway, it is much easier to lobby for baseless bannings!

 Most of the myth came from the book “Silent Spring” where some info was erroneously written.

“Rachel Carson sounded the initial alarm against DDT, but represented the science of DDT erroneously in her 1962 book Silent Spring.Carson wrote “Dr. DeWitt’s now classic experiments [on quail and pheasants] have now established the fact that exposure to DDT, even when doing no observable harm to the birds, may seriously affect reproduction. Quail into whose diet DDT was introduced throughout the breeding season survived and even produced normal numbers of fertile eggs. But few of the eggs hatched.” DeWitt’s 1956 article (in Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry) actually yielded a very different conclusion. Quail were fed 200 parts per million of DDT in all of their food throughout the breeding season. DeWitt reports that 80% of their eggs hatched, compared with the “control”” birds which hatched 83.9% of their eggs. Carson also omitted mention of DeWitt’s report that “control” pheasants hatched only 57 percent of their eggs, while those that were fed high levels of DDT in all of their food for an entire year hatched more than 80% of their eggs. “

One rather uglier reason that some supported the ban on DDT is that they were aware that DDT saves lives but were worked up by the cause of the day trumped up in the book “The population time bomb” that predicted a virtual Armageddon due to increasing world population. Now that nearly 40 years have passed, it can pretty much be safely said that the author of the aforementioned book was full of crap. Despite his being full of crap, many people felt that the world could be saved if enough disease ravaged the third-world and held off that nasty population spike. Of course the supporters of such ideas are usually Volvo driving latte-lappers who have no concept of what suffering is actually occurring in undeveloped countries. They just want to feel better about saving the birdies and seals. People are secondary.

 DDT if taken in massive doses can indeed cause trouble to people and critters. Of course, were you to ingest a gallon of the mosquito repellent that you smear on your kids every day, you likely would have some health issues as well. DDT when properly used has far far more benefit than harm.

Aside from malaria, mosquitoes carry and spread all sorts of other nasty bugs. Typhus, St. Louis encephalitis, eastern equine encephalitis, highlands J virus and of course the one that is spreading to us here and now, West Nile virus.

  As usual though, environmentalists are still trying to save the world on the backs of innocent humans. Alderman Brian Pincott in Calgary (predictably) is lobbying for a ban on pesticides in Calgary.

 I doubt that Mr. Pincott and his ilk are willing to come over to my place and swat the mosquitoes off my kids in the yard. I doubt that they will come and pull the masses of dandelions that will sprout in my yard or sweep the ants from my kitchen (they will support the cash cow if I get fined for having my weeds out of control).

 Look folks, there are all sorts of nasty chemicals out there. Those chemicals have profound benefits though when properly applied and idiotic bannings solve nothing (aside from making the coffee shop crowd feel good). I can see reason for studies on specific chemicals and restrictions on specific usages. Blanket bannings however are idiocy and do much much more harm than good. Calling for blanket bannings is simply laziness and people being indifferent to benefits of chemical usages.

 Rest assured, they can ban all they like. I don’t have time to hand-weed my lawn or try to kill ants with soap and water mixes (if even that would be allowed). I will carry on as before though I may have to wait until sundown to do it.

Environmental knee-jerk reactions.

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 Ahh I see that the United States has leaped out and declared polar bears to be a threatened species. This is despite estimated polar bear populations having doubled in the last 40 years.

 I wonder how much the speed of growth must increase before populations are considered stable?

 Now this declaration will have some impacts of that there is no doubt.

 The push to ban aboriginal guided polar bear hunts will now have more strength to it. Sure that industry is only worth a few million a year, but in considering how few people actually live up there this is a strong economic hit to them. But hey, why not put a few more native people on welfare in order for latte-lappers in urban areas to feel better about protecting them cute fuzzy critters eh?

 The next impact will be an increased push against Arctic oil exploration.  Ironically, those opposed to Arctic oil production are often those who are howling about high energy costs. You cant have it both ways guys.

 This is an area where I have some knowledge. I just got back from spending a few months on the Beaufort Sea a little while ago. That was my third winter spent in the Arctic working on oil exploration projects. My company builds maps and measures ice-thicknesses to assure the safety of workers up there.

 I love working in the Arctic. I have had the rare privilege of seeing a wild polar bear among other animals and they are beautiful. I would never want to see these animals threatened with extinction.

 What I am stumped on though is how people think oil exploration is going to harm polar bears? So far in three years up there, the worst incident that I have seen due to our operations has been a ptarmigan that got hit by a truck on an ice-road. No polar bears have even come close to being harmed yet.

 When working on the sea, our prime form of transportation is shown below.

 While those nodwells are pretty handy on the ice, rest assured they do not move quickly enough to run down a polar bear. Anti-freeze is specially contained and we have pans under all vehicles in order to avoid leaving so much as a drip of motor oil on the ice.

 Oh and Paul there who is pictured above will likely end up on welfare as will his kids if the environmentalists have their way. I keep saying the welfare thing simply as it is true. There are not many ways to make a living in the Arctic. The oil and gas industry offers generations worth of prosperity for native populations in the North. While the latte-lappers like to envision noble Eskimos living in igloos in tune with nature, they seem to always forget to ask the aforementioned natives if indeed that is what they want. Rest assured, while most northern aboriginals proudly embrace many traditional aspects of their culture, they are not eager to return to the harsh days of living on the land with a life expectancy under 30 years.

 For our accomodations we stay in barge camps that are towed out in summer and frozen in for the season. We only work winters as transportation is easier and our environmental impact is nil. All waste is trucked out and taken to approved disposal facilities.

 Part of my posting pics is simply to show where I disappear to every winter, the other part is to point out that I do have some idea what the hell I am talking about regarding Arctic issues. The usual (urban dwelling) environmentalist reaction to criticism is that the critic has no knowledge of such issues.

 We have repeatedly dedicated space in our camps to university groups and such who are doing arctic studies and are on limited budgets. Yes those evil oil companies are actually encouraging impartial impact studies. I am happy to announce that a group studying seals who resided briefly with us a few years ago found that seal populations in active oil areas were far higher than they had anticipated. They seemed almost disappointed to discover that we had not been having a negative impact.

 That is the reality. Modern oil development in the Arctic has virtually no negative environmental impact.

 Environmental controls have a role and it is an important one. Blind opposition to development and kneejerk reactions to issues do not help anybody however.

 The world is suffering under high energy prices. There is tremendous amount of oil and gas in Canada’s Arctic. Rest assured if this is ever brought onstream we can see some easing on the cost of living for many Canadians. We also will see the employment of countless Inuit, Dene and Inuvialuit people up there who currently have nothing but dependency to look forward to. So far though, not a drop of Arctic oil or gas has been brought to market as the pipeline application has been mired by environmental challenges for decades.

 The energy companies and their contractors do not want to harm the environment believe it or not.

 Everybody involved will be better off if we keep our environmental concerns based within reality. The listing of polar bears by Americans as threatened was baseless and will have negative impacts on us all.