Canada’s oil sands hold an estimated 170 billion barrels of oil that can be recovered with existing technology and as much as 1.7 trillion barrels — more than five times the size of Saudi Arabia’s reserves — that could be produced with the use of new methods that are being developed.
As the only non-OPEC source with the capability for large production growth during the next several years, oil sands have the potential to reduce the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries’ revenues, weakening the cartel and those members that often undertake policies hostile to U.S. interests.
By getting more of their oil from Canada, refineries in the Midwest are moving from being at the back of the crude oil supply line to the front. With these secure supplies, Midwest refineries are not as vulnerable to supply disruptions from overseas producers or hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico.
So who would object to Canadian oil sands?
Eenvironmental groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club are trying to shut down Canadian oil sands production and block the expansion of refineries here in the U.S.
If the environmental groups truly cared about achieving results in their battle against global warming, they would better focus their energy on the construction of scores of power plants in rapidly developing economies like China and India that account for most of the increase in the world’s carbon emissions. These developments pose the real global environmental danger, not the Canadian oil sands.
Those of them, that is, who have moved away from their Amish roots and taken up factory jobs:
SHIPSHEWANA, Ind. - Freeman Wingard is Amish, but he spent the last decade living quite differently than the popular characterization of the Amish as farmers, their plows hitched to enormous draft horses as they eschewed influences of the outside world.
Wingard took his family to restaurants every week, made trips to Chicago and vacationed in Florida. That was when, he says, he was earning $40 per hour working in a Northern Indiana recreational vehicle factory.
But as RV sales slowed in the economic downturn, Wingard and many of his Amish co-workers were laid off from the high-paying jobs.
Wingard, who has a wife and five daughters younger than 13, added jellies and jams to the quilts and other crafts he and his family sell from their farm. Despite the long hours - Wingard often rises at 3:30 a.m. and puts up 300 jars of jelly by noon - none of the new enterprises has come close to replacing the factory incomes.
Still, Wingard says, there is an upside. “The work is still hard, but it’s flexible, and I can be with my kids.”
The economy has taken some toll on most of the USA’s 400 Amish settlements, experts say, but none has seen such a widespread impact as the country’s third-largest Amish settlement in Northern Indiana.
“Nowhere in U.S. Amish history has a down economy affected the Amish so much,” said Steven Nolt, a professor at Goshen College who has written about the Northern Indiana Amish. “It’s a pivotal time for them.”
Northern Indiana - home to an estimated 20,000 Amish - is unusual because about half of the adult breadwinners worked “off the farm” in the RV industry, according to Nolt.
I wonder how much more money the good Amish man would have had now if he had taken his big family to restaurants less often than every week during the last decade.
An article about a proposed framework for a legal system and robot design rules that should prevent next-generation robots from harming humans. You know, their masters, hopefully.
I just hope they have a rule about not building any Skynets. Anything else, we can deal with.
We’re funny. Eight years ago Republicans had a bare majority in the House of Representatives, a threadbare majority in the Senate, and they barely won the White House. You could argue they possessed a five-out-of-nine majority in the Supreme Court.
What did we hear from the mountains, to the valley, all across the fruited plane?
ONE PARTY RULE!!! ZOMG WTF!!! BAD BAD BAD BAD BAD!!!
And now the democrats run everything, everywhere. Federal, state, municipal. Where are all the screeds against one-party rule?
Ford was the only major automaker to post a smaller-than-expected sales drop in June, and it continued to gain market share on its rivals whom the government was so generous to bail out with your hard-earned money.
John Feehery writes that with Al Franken giving them a supermajority in the Senate, Democrats will move even more to the left - resulting in the public turning away from them:
The arrival of the man from Minnesota will make the Democrats move even more to the left. He will not only be one more vote for the left, but one more loud voice for liberal policies. Because of his celebrity status, he will attract media attention, and because of his philosophy, he will use that attention to move Democrats further left.
When Franken first started in politics, he did so as the liberal answer to Rush Limbaugh. Imagine if Rush were the 60th vote for Republicans, with George Bush as president. Now, think how Franken will act as the 60th vote for President Obama.
Yes, Democrats will move left by more than a few kilometers, but they will do so at their own peril.
[A] pollshowed that while 40 percent of Americans identify themselves as conservative, only 21 percent think of themselves as liberal. The American people voted for change. They didn’t vote for a liberal orthodoxy that promises more government, higher taxes, slower growth, more pork and a liberal social agenda.
In 1975, the newly dominant Democratic Congress sent President Gerald Ford a bill that declared that America was going to be metric, which he signed. When Jimmy Carter became president two years later, he signed a law that told Americans that they couldn’t drive faster than 55 mph.
These measures made perfect sense to the liberal sensibilities of the time. But they didn’t make sense to the American people, and are symbols of a philosophy that was out of touch with the people in the 1970s and is still out of touch with the lives of most Americans today.
Most Americans still don’t use the metric system, and most certainly don’t stick to the 55 mile an hour speed limit on the highways of America. And while they may still like Barack Obama and still laugh at jokes written by Al Franken, they will eventually grow weary of the newly dominant liberals who now run Washington.
The government of Hungary voted to cut income taxes Monday to pull itself out of recession, and America’s media for the most part ignored it.
At the same time, German chancellor Angela Merkel is pushing for lower taxes to help her nation’s economy, and our press have similarly been less than enthusiastic about sharing the news.
The news the media suppress tell even more about their agenda than the news they report.
Seven states cross the 50% mark overall as of our current estimates, but the generation gap is huge. If policy were set by state-by-state majorities of those 65 or older, none would allow same-sex marriage. If policy were set by those under 30, only 12 states would not allow-same-sex marriage.
Over the coming days a curiously revealing event will be taking place in Copenhagen. Top of the agenda at a meeting of the Polar Bear Specialist Group (set up under the International Union for the Conservation of Nature/Species Survival Commission) will be the need to produce a suitably scary report on how polar bears are being threatened with extinction by man-made global warming.
This is one of a steady drizzle of events planned to stoke up alarm in the run-up to the UN’s major conference on climate change in Copenhagen next December. But one of the world’s leading experts on polar bears has been told to stay away from this week’s meeting, specifically because his views on global warming do not accord with those of the rest of the group.
Dr Mitchell Taylor has been researching the status and management of polar bears in Canada and around the Arctic Circle for 30 years, as both an academic and a government employee. More than once since 2006 he has made headlines by insisting that polar bear numbers, far from decreasing, are much higher than they were 30 years ago. Of the 19 different bear populations, almost all are increasing or at optimum levels, only two have for local reasons modestly declined.
Dr Taylor agrees that the Arctic has been warming over the last 30 years. But he ascribes this not to rising levels of CO2 – as is dictated by the computer models of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and believed by his PBSG colleagues – but to currents bringing warm water into the Arctic from the Pacific and the effect of winds blowing in from the Bering Sea.
Dr Taylor had obtained funding to attend this week’s meeting of the PBSG, but this was voted down by its members because of his views on global warming. The chairman, Dr Andy Derocher, a former university pupil of Dr Taylor’s, frankly explained in an email (which I was not sent by Dr Taylor) that his rejection had nothing to do with his undoubted expertise on polar bears: “it was the position you’ve taken on global warming that brought opposition”.
Dr Taylor was told that his views running “counter to human-induced climate change are extremely unhelpful”. His signing of the Manhattan Declaration – a statement by 500 scientists that the causes of climate change are not CO2 but natural, such as changes in the radiation of the sun and ocean currents – was “inconsistent with the position taken by the PBSG”.
Perhaps the most worrying set of statistics for the Church of England is the decline in baptisms. Out of every 1,000 live births in England in 2006/7 only 128 were baptised as Anglicans.
The figure rises by a small amount if adult baptism and thanksgiving services are included but it is hard to see the Church of England being able to justify its position as the established church on the basis of these numbers.
By way of contrast, out of every 1,000 live births in England in 1900, 609 were baptised in the Church of England. Figures for church marriages show an equally catastrophic decline.
His bizarre vision for the future shows how desperate things are:
We are going to have to invent a new civil religion. Already the process has begun with the observance of Holocaust Day and increasing focus on Human Rights as providing a shared basis for morality.
An “increasing focus on Human Rights” is a convenient thing: it takes the focus away from the government trampling on the people’s real rights - to own firearms, to defend themselves and their homes from criminals, to exercise free speech, and now, it seems, to be judged by a jury of peers, too. If the U.K.’s established church sees potential for a new religion in this, then it’s no wonder that Brits are turning away from it.
This video was put together for people to watch while riding the elevators in a New York City hotel, and it uses more than 400 existing video clips. You’ll recognize Arnold Schwarzenegger.
