Carbon Sequestration-An Expensive Boondoggle

Mark Udall has introduced a very expensive bill directing the Secretary of Energy to conduct research on the long term "burial" of carbon dioxide. The cost of the bill, $420 million a year over four years suggests that even after the research is done, using the technology would be both expensive and dangerous. Insurance companies want no part of this project, so the cost of the bill is under stated.

If the amount being considered for this research were reasonable, which it is not, this might be an appropriate use of federal funds and research facilities like Los Alamos.

We can't help but note that nature already provides a natural mechanism for long term sequestration of carbon. It is called "trees." Of course, they only store carbon while they are alive. Of late, there hasn't been a lot of interest from either Mark Udall or the environmental community in keeping our forests either alive or healthy.

One wonders how many nuclear power plants could be sited and started for the same $1.7 billion that Udall wants to spend on this boondoggle. The last we heard, nuclear power plants put out no CO2. Does Udall consider nuclear power a solution? Not at all.

Not long ago, Udall was hyping his bill to thin forests around Colorado mountain towns. The piker could only allocate $22 million a year for that project. It is becoming more and more clear that Mark Udall's priorities are driven by Washington based lobbies and not the needs of Colorado.

The Left's Visible Carbon Footprint

Today, the Denver Post published a photograph under the heading "Cloudy and sunny at the same time." The "cloud" was, of course, smoke in the Denver area from the California fires.

At some point, Colorado voters will come to the conclusion that environmentalists like would-be Senator Mark Udall are very bad for the environment. We just hope it is not too late.

Gazette's Comments on the Fires

With luck, the California fires may lead to more rational land management than Mark Udall and his "environmentalist" allies are currently willing to tolerate. The Gazette devoted an editorial to the subject this morning. Here is only a part of what it had to say:

Markets have less influence over government-owned land, however, which is managed based on political considerations, mostly under the influence of special interest groups. Fire risks seem higher in areas of high public (meaning, government) land ownership; lower (with a few exceptions) in places where much of the land is privately owned, mostly due to the strong incentives people have to maintain and protect their property.

When property is owned collectively, there’s less incentive to manage it wisely. Environmental rules and restrictions have leaned in recent times toward non-management, or a policy of benign neglect, under pressure from those who think human meddling in these landscapes is unnatural and wrong. That’s left more fuel to burn when lightning, a fallen power line or an arsonist ignites a fire.

We’d argue for a land management approach that puts humans and human habitats first, whenever practical, and embraces the idea that we can manage these landscapes not just for economic, aesthetic and ecological benefits, but with an eye toward safeguarding public safety as well. We shouldn’t allow the real and rhetorical smoke generated by California’s wildfires to cloud our judgements about the nature of the problem.

Beauty in the eye of the beholder.

At least some of the fires near San Diego and Los Angeles appear to have been set. As this is being written, the burned area almost certainly exceeds a half million acres.

Barbra Boxer claims that the problem is global warming, presumably caused by man.

The left is stunningly silent on the contribution of these mega forest fires to the CO2 in the atmosphere. It also conveniently ignores its part in creating the conditions that cause these fires.

Let's assume that Boxer is correct. Wouldn't it be more sane to require the forest service to clear cut enough fire breaks that the fires would be limited in size to, say 10,000 acres?

Make no mistake, a 10,000 acre fire is still huge, more than 15 square miles.

Clear cuts aren't pretty, but they do grow back far more quickly than areas burned over by the hot fires we see today. If that regrowth were managed in a way that minimized the fire danger, it might even be possible to have both a heavily forested area and a safe forest at the same time.

Mark Udall's brand of environmentalism would consider this suggestion to be heresy. He seems to prefer the natural brown "beauty" of these mega burn moonscapes where nothing in nature survives to the "ugly" scars that clear cutting leaves, even if they protect the adjacent green forests and their inhabitants from mega fires. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Why are Liberals Such Wet Blankets?

Wouldn't it be wonderful if Mark Udall shared our enthusiasm for the Colorado Rockies? It wouldn't take all that much to let the folks back in Colorado know that he cared. Just a press release posted on one of his two web sites would be enough to avoid criticism.

Perhaps Mark Udall has a hatred for baseball night games. Think of the carbon footprint that one creates, what with the travel, the illumination, the high usage of water for urinals and toilets, and so on. Heck, it likely doesn't rival one of Al Gore's global warming rallies by the time one includes the stretch limos and the business jets. What Al Gore does is politically correct while baseball probably isn't.

Anyone ever think about what wet blankets liberals are about life in general and baseball in particular?

Fire on Pikes Peak

It looks like Mark Udall can claim his own carbon footprint in El Paso County. We have a fire on Pikes Peak today. He needs to hope that it gets put out before it gets really ugly.