In a draw-dropping example of the old saw that “correlation does not equate to causation” the administrator told America that the Clean Air Act has created a venerable cornucopia of riches:

“…as air pollution has dropped over the last 40 years, our national GDP has risen by 207 percent. The total benefits of the Clean Air Act amount to more than 40 times the costs of regulation. For every one dollar we have spent, we have received more than $40 of benefits in return, making the Clean Air Act one of the most cost-effective things the American people have done for themselves in the last half century.”

How does one calculate a whopping 4,000% return on Clean Air Act investments? If you’re the EPA, you point to increased productivity that you happily attribute to less lost time due to illness in the workplace, as well as avoided medical costs. Not that you actually have to prove that any of those results actually occur. All you need is a few pointy-headed academics with calculators who can punch the right numbers, attach a certain value to sick days and medical condition and – voila – you too can create trillions in phantom economic benefits.

That’s the method that has been used to justify just about every major piece of Clean Air regulation and Jackson’s EPA has shifted this technique into hyper-drive. If the numbers that she uses to justify the sweeping, radical environmental initiatives her Agency is pushing are to be believed, nobody will ever miss work again and the health care industry will have to close its doors for a lack of business. And yes, I’m exaggerating, but not by much.

The America that the rest of us have lived in over the last forty years since the first Clean Air Act was passed is quite a bit different than Jackson’s fantasyland. While the GDP has risen by 207 per cent in that time, it did so in spite of, not because of, the excesses of the Clean Air Act. That is not to say that clean air legislation was not needed in 1970, but the bureaucrats charged with achieving clean air goals long ago crossed the line from protecting human health and the environment into the land of protecting their jobs and radical environmentalist agendas.

Jackson acknowledges all of that progress and the massive improvements in air quality that have been made, but she concludes that it’s not nearly enough and, besides, just look at all the money we’ll make if we put the screws to industry one more time.

Did American productivity increase over two decades of the Clean Air Act? It did, but that was clearly because of new manufacturing techniques and the increased use of robotics. Productivity sure didn’t increase because workers put in more time. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average American worker put in 37.1 hours of work per week in 1970. By 2009, that number had dropped to 33.9 hours per week.

How about health care savings then? It’s ludicrous that anyone, much less a high-ranking government official like Jackson, could even try to claim that anything has reduced heath care costs, but let’s compare those numbers too. In 1970, per capita health care expenditures ran at about 7 per cent of GDP. Today, that number has risen to 17 per cent.

Jackson employs the kind of statistical sleight of hand that is the highlight of the green magic show throughout her post. She claims, for example, that Clean Air Act regulations have avoided “843,000 asthma attacks.” Yet, according to the Center for Disease Control, the number of Americans suffering from asthma has increased from 6.7 million in 1980 to over 20 million today. In this case, Jackson doesn’t even have correlation, much less causation.

But then the administrator’s goal here is to further the green jobs myth, not to accurately describe either the state of the environment or the economic effect of environmental regulations. The fact is that many sectors of the economy, like the iron and steel industry, the printing industries and many parts of the chemical production sector, suffered greatly as a direct result of the Clean Air Act and other regulations that started out well-intentioned but soon grew into counter-productive job killers.

The fact is that the bureaucratic monster that the EPA has become moves so slowly, so cautiously and distrusts industry so much that it stifles the kind of innovation and creativity that the President claims he longs to embrace. Hundreds of thousands of jobs have been lost because of regulatory excesses in the environmental arena, whether Lisa Jackson is smart enough to realize it or honest enough to admit it. And, with crippling regulation on the way unlike anything America has seen before thanks to her, this administrator is bound and determined to rip the very heart of our beleaguered and essential industrial sector.

Naturally the Times doesn’t quite see it that way, assuring readers that the Koch brothers are a dangerous part of sinister, right-wing forces who have aligned to kill California’s bright green future. The Times describes the provisions of AB-32 accurately, although they treat the fantastical goals contained in the bill as though they could be met with a wave of the hand:

The 2006 law, known as AB 32, is aimed at reducing California’s emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to 1990 levels by 2020 and by 80 percent at midcentury. To reach these targets, state agencies are drawing up regulations that would affect businesses and consumers across the board — requiring even cleaner cars, more energy-efficient buildings and appliances, and power plants that use alternative energy sources like wind instead of older fossil fuels.

More regulations, more government control of private industry, more unreliable, expensive wind power: what could possibly go wrong?

Sure the Times acknowledges that California might have a few economic problems, but AB-32 will fix everything if only those darn boys from Kansas would go away:

The Koch brothers have contributed about $1 million, partly because they worry about damage to the bottom line at Koch Industries, and also because they believe that climate change is a left-wing hoax. They have argued that the law will lead to higher energy costs and job losses, arguments that resonate with many voters in a state with a 12.4 percent unemployment rate. But this overlooks the enormous increase in investments in clean energy technologies — and the jobs associated with them — since the law was passed.

When you’ve got a 12.4 percent unemployment rate, it’s pretty easy to ignore “the jobs associated with” an “enormous increase in investments in clean energy technologies.” It should be readily apparent that the state wouldn’t have an unemployment rate thirty percent greater than the nation’s already dreadful unemployment rate if hyper-aggressive green energy programs like AB-32 actually created meaningful numbers of jobs.

What these sorts of statutes actually encourage is what those of us involved in the energy business generically call “pixie dust projects.” Pixie dust projects – miraculous energy solutions that usually violate at least two laws of thermodynamics – have always been around, but under this administration there has been an explosion of such efforts, with shady characters and snake-oil salesmen galore clawing to get to the front of the line to grab government cash so they can perfect their version of the flux capacitor. No state is more awash in pixie dust these days than California, and its horrific unemployment numbers reflect that fact.

Of course, though the Times dutifully parrots the Obama administration’s mantra that green energy will solve our economic woes, they can’t help but get a lick in to defend “global warming/climate change/climate disruption” (or whatever we’re calling greenhouse gas hysteria this week): “The Kochs and their allies are disastrously wrong about the science,” the Times sniffed, demonstrating once again that nobody on the Times is actually interested in understanding the science any more than they care about what’s actually happening in China.

On the latter point, the Times declares that if AB-32 is defeated: “…he biggest winners will be the Chinese, who are already moving briskly ahead in the clean technology race.” Really? The Chinese are only winning on if one defines “moving briskly ahead” as building a new coal-fired power plant each week, failing to operate the environmental controls installed in the power plants they’ve already built, damming up ever river they can find and producing mounds of solar panels to sell to gullible Americans.

If the Kochs and other free market defenders are not successful and AB-32 remains in place, California’s economy won’t look much like China’s, but you can be assured will look an awful lot like Spain’s.

CAIR had to be thrilled with the publication of such misleading propaganda in a once-great American newspaper. For the rest of us, and especially for the millions of abused Muslim women living abroad, this latest example of creeping-Sharia in the United States should be very disturbing.

Pensa’s story championed a book recently published by Muslim photographer Sadaf Syed entitled: “iCover: A Day in the Life of a Muslim-American COVERed Girl.” In it, Syed shows successful American Muslim women who enjoy happy and free lives while living in this country, and who also choose to wear the hijab. For Syed, the hijab isn’t a symbol of oppression at all, it’s rather a celebration of her religion, at least as far as she understands her religion (and she obviously doesn’t understand it very well).

That’s great – for Syed and the women she profiles – but nowhere in the Trib’s story does Pensa even hint at the possibility that Syed’s experience and her views about the hijab don’t come close to representing Islam’s official views about women in theory or in practice.

Nowhere does Pensa suggest that the reason a woman like Sadaf Syed can tailor make Islam to suit her own ends is because she lives in a nation that has thus far been successful in resisting Sharia law. Instead Syed’s naïve views on Islam and the role of Muslim women are summed up neatly in this quote:

“After 9/11, I noticed people were confused, not wanting to learn but just going on what they see in the media,” said Syed, 36. “The impression it leaves is … that Muslim women are being oppressed, suppressed, abused and forced on — everything that Islam does not stand for. Islam respects women. We are a love-thy-neighbor people just like the other Abrahamic religions.”

“Love thy neighbor?” Somebody needs to read her Quran. Muslims are encouraged to love their neighbors so long as those neighbors are devout Muslim males or obedient Muslim females. Other than that, neighbors are strongly encouraged to watch their backs.

Sadaf Syed and Patty Pensa might get a little perspective about Islam if they spent a little time talking to someone like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the courageous ex-Muslim Somali native who endured genital mutilation as a child and who now lives under death threats for daring to speak about against the misogyny inherent to Islam.

Need we be reminded that Islamic nations that follow Sharia law allow and encourage husbands to beat disobedient wives, require four witnesses before rape can be proved and forbid women from appearing in public uncovered, from driving a car and from walking about without a suitable escort? Syed and Pensa might be able to meld feminism and Islam in America today, but only because this is still America. The Chicago Tribune owes more to its readers than this bit of hopeful fluff. They should have made it clear that when it comes to how Muslim women live, Sadaf Syed’s experience is the exception, not the rule.

U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan and has owned stock in a number of petroleum-related companies, sided with the plaintiffs.

Has owned stock in petroleum-related companies? Really? In a financial world full of 401Ks, IRAs and money market funds, how many people haven’t owned stock in “petroleum-related” companies? More to the point, what does the person who appointed him or what investments he made have to do with Feldman’s opinion, or with the many good arguments that suggest the moratorium is a very bad idea?

The AP does a great job of recounting the death toll from the initial explosion and the magnitude of the subsequent spill. I’m not quite sure why, since I doubt if there’s anyone left on the planet who doesn’t have a pretty good idea about how bad things are in the gulf, but if they want to repeat those stats, fine. How about some other statistics though? There are statistics one rarely sees in MSM coverage of the spill on the deep water drilling moratorium, statistics the administration doesn’t like to talk about:

• About 30 percent of the nation’s total domestic oil production and 13 percent of domestic natural gas production comes from the Gulf of Mexico

• Approximately 80 percent of the oil and 45 percent of the natural gas in the Gulf come from deep water exploration.

• According to the American Petroleum Institute (API), a moratorium on deep water drilling would result in the loss of up to 130,000 barrels of oil per day by 2011 and as much as 500,000 barrels per day between 2013 and 2017, making the United States more dependent on oil from other countries.

• API’s calculations also show the moratorium could put 46,200 jobs at risk in the short-term and as many as 120,000 jobs over the long-term.

And then there’s the most important point of all: no matter what Salazar or Obama says or does, deep water drilling will continue, in the gulf and around the world. It’s merely a question of whether we reap the benefits, or whether we’ll leave it to Russia, China, Brazil and other nations to collect those riches by themselves.

Every time you think that the left’s bizarre obsession with Sarah Palin’s personal life couldn’t get any weirder, they manage to step it up a notch. From fretting about the price of her wardrobe during the campaign through stalker Joe McGinniss decision to move in next door, the liberal press’ determination to intrude on Palin’s privacy makes the paparazzi seem tame by comparison.

But now that liberal blogger Wonkette has broken the “boobgate” story, we can officially abandon the use of the word “bizarre” to describe Palin Derangement Syndrome and move on to “ludicrous, ridiculous, embarrassing, unprofessional and outright insane.”

Yet, in the spirit of friendly competition, I couldn’t help but wonder: how difficult would it be to find pictures of Democrats of the fairer sex that also suggest breast-enhancement? It has been my humble experience that the apparent dimensions of most any gal’s – (ahem) “attributes” – can vary significantly depending on choices in clothing and undergarments. This is, I believe, the reason that Victoria’s Secret exists. But, what do I know? I’m a guy and, being a gal, Wonkette surely has more intimate (apparel) knowledge to draw upon here. Accordingly, I hope some gals will weigh in, but if we apply the left’s Palin test, the following famous libs appear to have had a little work done too.

Note to MMFA hacks and non-entities: what follows is called “satire,” which is a form of “humor,” which in turn is designed to elicit a kind of “human emotion” that is commonly known as “laughter.”

Exhibit #1: The Speaker of the House

If there was work done here as part of the stimulus package, I’m sorry: it ain’t working for me.

Exhibit #2: The Secretary of State

Having married a boob, this subject is probably near and dear to Hillary’s heart.

Exhibit #3: A Supreme Court Nominee

Well, Elena Kagan has been accused of trying to extend the reach of the judiciary…

Exhibit #4: A Liberal Pundit

No sacrifice, it would seem, is too great in the quest to increase your viewership. Sadly for Rachel, it doesn’t seem to be working.

It’s pretty obvious that Krosnick, a professor of communication, political science and psychology, doesn’t actually understand the subject matter or what the Murkowski resolution is about. He starts his Op-Ed by declaring:

On Thursday, the Senate will vote on a resolution proposed by Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, that would scuttle the Environmental Protection Agency’s plans to limit emissions of greenhouse gases by American businesses.

And he closes with this piece of advice:

When senators vote on emissions limits on Thursday, there is one other number they might want to keep in mind: 72 percent of Americans think that most business leaders do not want the federal government to take steps to stop global warming. A vote to eliminate greenhouse gas regulation is likely to be perceived by the nation as a vote for industry, and against the will of the people.

In between, he builds his dubious case using polling data that manages to disagree with just about every other poll on the subject taken in recent memory. But, it’s those opening and closing paragraphs that define the professor’s agenda, and which also serves to reveal the kind of ignorance of environmental science and regulation normally only seen among “senior fellows” at Media Matters.

The Murkowski resolution will hardly scuttle the EPA’s plans to limit emissions of greenhouse gases by American businesses. Between three regional cap and trade programs that are either in place or will soon go live (on the east coast, west coast and in the midwest) and state-level Renewable Portfolio Standards (which accomplish the same goals as cap and trade programs) thirty four states – covering over seventy five percent of the United States populace – are either already limiting emissions of greenhouse gases or will in the near future, with more to come. What the Murkowski resolution does is to stop the EPA’s foolish effort to use the Clean Air Act to accomplish what is already being accomplished.

This also speaks to Krosnick’s notions that senators will be voting on “emissions limits.” There’s nothing in the resolution that has anything to do with “emissions limits.” It’s a simple matter of whether Congress wants to delegate regulatory authority over greenhouse gas regulation to the EPA through a particular act of Congress – nothing more.

Polls over the past couple of years have consistently shown that Americans put a low-priority on addressing “climate change”. Krosnick claims that his polls demonstrate that three out of four Americans believe both that the planet is warming and that mankind is making that happen. Those results seem a little hard to believe, and more than a little convenient given the timing, but let’s give Krosnick the benefit of the doubt. So what? Science is not decided by a consensus of actual scientists – a “consensus” that doesn’t actually exist – and it shouldn’t be decided by public opinion surveys.

The truth is that the USEPA doesn’t want to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act and state-level agencies want it even less. USEPA Administrator Lisa Jackson didn’t issue the Endangerment Finding that declared greenhouse gases a pollutant because she – or anyone in the regulatory community – hopes to face the nightmare of regulating these gases under the Clean Air Act. Rather, that action was a poorly-concealed threat aimed directly at Congress: pass a cap and trade bill or things are going to get ugly.

If Jackson were a mafia don, the Endangerment Finding would have sounded something like this: “Nice industrial base you’ve got there – it would be a shame for anything to happen to it…”

The Murkowski resolution aims to take blackmail out of play and force Congress to do its job by thoroughly examining the need for and wisdom of regulating greenhouse gases on a national scale, rather than passing the buck to a horde of faceless bureaucrats. If “climate change” is really as important to Americans as Krosnick thinks it is, isn’t that ultimately an argument that Congress should address the issue head on, instead of hiding behind Lisa Jackson’s skirts?

Kind of makes you wonder whether liberals really care about “climate change” at all, or if there’s something else – redistribution of wealth perhaps? – at play here.

One of the most electrifying moments of the Heartland Institute’s Fourth International Climate Change Conference was when Professor Scott Denning of Colorado State University asked to speak to the crowd during the close of the conference. Listen to what Dr. Denning, a climatologist who doesn’t agree with skeptics, who believes that AGW is a problem, has to say and listen to the reaction from crowd of about 700 “skeptics.”

Heartland invites all the leading climate scientists to its conferences. Very few believers in AGW accept that invitation. Denning deserves our respect and admiration for not only showing up, not only listening to other views, but for calling out his colleagues:

It’s really too bad that more of my colleagues from the scientific community didn’t attend this.

And for acknowledging a basic truth:

We have much more in common than our differences.

You’ll note that Denning isn’t backing down on his position or about his research. But neither is he accusing the distinguished, accomplished, independent scientists who have another take of being shills for energy companies, or accusing them of doing shoddy work. You’ll also note that the crowd, including yours truly, gave Denning about as warm a reception as he could have ask for, both when he was complementing us and after he had criticized us.

At one time, this is just the sort of remarkable moment that the old media would have jumped on. Today? Not so much. But that’s why we’re here.

What are they so afraid of – that they might learn something? It’s not like everyone is singing in chorus. For example, on Sunday night Steve McIntyre told the fascinating story of how and why Michael Mann and his cohorts “hid the decline,” complete with the relevant e-mails and published charts that irrefutably show how Mann, Jones and the rest of the climategate gang consciously discarded relevant data and then tried to cover their actions up.

The mainstream media meme, with regards to hiding the decline, is that while that this revelation was regrettable, it does nothing to disprove the theory that mankind is responsible for global warming. Guess what? McIntyre agrees. In fact, he went out of his way to say that he’s not your “go to” guy with respect to carbon dioxide’s effect on the climate. There are others who have that particular expertise. But, anyone who listens to McIntyre recount this story of scientific malpractice could not help but be deeply troubled and wonder: what else have they been hiding?

Michael Jungbauer, a state senator from Minnesota, recounted his state’s short, but already painful experience with “green power.” In 2007, Minnesota instituted a Renewable Portfolio Standard, which is a government mandate that requires the state to ratchet up the amount of power it uses emanating from renewable sources each year. (About half of the states in the union currently have such standards and more are coming). In Minnesota’s case, the standard says that eighty per cent of the state’s power is supposed to come from renewable sources by 2050, which Jungbauer noted rather wryly, will effectively set the state back to 1905 in terms of fossil fuel use.

After almost three years of dealing with its Renewable Portfolio Standards, the price of electricity in Minnesota has risen by nearly ten per cent, the state is bleeding jobs and the poor are being hurt most of all. “This is the most regressive type of tax ever proposed,” Jungbauer said. Contrast that with Utah’s experience. Utah state representative Mike Noel happily noted that his state has among the lowest electricity rates in the nation and, not coincidentally, is also near the bottom in renewable energy production.

Many scientists at the conference have attempted to quantify how much mankind influences planetary temperatures. While no one agrees with the doomsday predictions made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, no one is willing to say that the net effect is zero either. But there’s no consensus about exactly how much mankind can affect the climate, except for the general view among these distinguished academics that it’s not enough to lose any sleep over.

It’s refreshing to write about climate change and note a lack of consensus. That’s science the way it’s supposed to be: researchers attacking a problem from different angles, finding different answers and learning from each other’s work. It’s one-hundred eighty degrees the opposite of the cheerleading competitions that the IPCC conferences, like the most recent one in Copenhagen, have become.

So why does the old media ignore the rich, diverse opinions and research that this conference offers? Not only is there no one here from the New York Times, the Washington Post, ABC, CBS, NBC or CNN, the Chicago Tribune didn’t even send a reporter (one of their columnists did show up however), even though the venue is within walking distance of Tribune Tower. Remarkable. Is the MSM drinking its own stale Kool-Aid, convinced that the science really is “settled” and that oil money just has to be behind any contrarian opinion? Or are they just so embarrassed now that the wheels are coming off of the global warming bus that they just can’t face the public? Probably a little of both.

No matter though; the new media is here in droves, along with an amazing number of ordinary folks who are sick of being bullied by alarmist science and want to be a little better intellectually armed. I’ve had a chance to talk to many of the professionals and business people who came to the conference on their own dime, people like the owner of limo company in New York who wants to help spread the word, a free-lance Dutch writer who foresees the demise of global-warming programs in Europe and a orthodontist from Florida who paid for his own film crew, just so he could do his part to educate the public. A pity that the MSM couldn’t be bothered to notice what’s happening in Chicago this week, but then that’s exactly why fewer and fewer of us take notice of the MSM any longer.

…this denial-a-palooza fest is dripping with oil money and represents a blatant industry effort to greenwash oil and coal while simultaneously attacking the credibility of climate scientists.

The entire conference can therefore be dismissed out of hand. Nothing to see here except a bunch of posers on the take, right? Had he been blogging during the Renaissance, no doubt DeMelle would have advanced the same kind of argument to defend the accepted version of “settled science” back then:

Pay no attention of that fraud Galileo. You know he’s part of the Accademia dei Lincei, right? And you know that group is funded by that rich aristocrat Federico Cesi, right? How can you believe a guy with those connections? How can the Pope and all those Cardinals possibly be wrong?

As silly as it is to say that a scientific proposition is necessarily false based on who funds the underlying research, that particular argument doesn’t even apply in this case, as we shall soon see. Every year, Heartland brings together leading scientists and policy-makers to talk about global warming. Some are very skeptical, some are mildly skeptical and others have their doubts but aren’t quite sure yet. In terms of diverse scientific opinion, it’s a far more interesting conference than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s periodic hand-wringing exercises.

But Brendan DeMelle isn’t required to consider skeptical arguments – and encourages you to hide your intellectual curiosity underneath a bushel-basket alongside his – because Exxon-Mobil, the Koch Corporation and Richard Mellon Scaife are supposedly the puppet masters. According to Brendan:

… 19 of the 65 sponsors (including Heartland itself) have received a total of $40 million in funding since 1985 from Exxon-Mobil (funded 13 orgs), and/or Koch Industries family foundations (funded 10 orgs) and/or the Scaife family foundations (funded 10 orgs).

That’s an interesting, if meaningless, bit of research, for a couple of reasons. Were I a “Senior Fellow” at Media Matters (which presupposes that I would have had my sense of humor surgically removed) I would wonder: how much of that $40 million donated over the course of 25 years goes to pay for either: a) Heartland’s activities at all, or b) this conference in particular? The answer, in both cases, is the same: zero. Addressing the first question, Heartland’s President Joe Bast told me:

The Heartland Institute hasn’t received funding from Koch, Exxon, or Scaife for years – in the case of Koch and Scaife for more than a decade.

Bast’s reply to the second question is equally damning to DeMelle’s hypothesis:

Cosponsors do not pay a fee or contribute to the expense of the conference. In fact, they are subsidized by The Heartland Institute to attend.  (Emphasis added).

What’s truly troubling about guys like Brendan DeMelle and the many people like him who want to deny deniers like me our denials, is that they do a disservice to the public and to the scientific process, along with the many independent, courageous scientists who have dared to assert a basic principle that was ingrained into all of us who made a career in the sciences, from simple chemists like me to world-famous nuclear physicists: science is never settled.

There is a wide-variety of opinions among those scientists whom the MSM usually paints with the broad brushes of (at best) “skeptics,” or (at worst) “deniers.” I don’t think that guys like Brendan DeMelle will be able to comprehend this, but the Heartland conference does not require speakers to stick to an agenda-driven template, a la Copenhagen. I am certain, for example, that if global-warming researchers like Michael Mann or Phil Jones wanted to speak at a Heartland conference, they would be welcome and Bast would go out of his way to make sure they were treated with respect.

The Heartland conference features guys like Dr. Roy Spencer, a former climatologist for NASA who believes that the planet is getting warmer and that mankind has something to do with that, but that our contribution is too small to worry about. There’s Climate Audit’s Steve McIntyre, a retired mining engineer and statistician who tries to make sense of the historical climate record on his own time and who – though he doesn’t agree with Michael Mann – recently leapt to Mann’s defense when he felt “Dr. Hockey Stick” was being unjustly harassed. There’s Anthony Watts, the meteorologist who lives his personal life as green as anyone from the Sierra Club could wish, but who has found (and is trying to correct) severe problems with the way that we measure and record temperatures. These researchers and their colleagues are honorable, exceptional people who have been true to themselves and to science.

The thing that motivates people like Spencer, McIntyre, Watts and thousands of their colleagues in the sciences (including yours truly) is not non-existent oil money, nor is it a belief that those scientists with whom we disagree are part of vast global conspiracy. Rather, it’s a simple question of to what conclusion does the science actually lead? If bloggers like Brendan DeMelle would like to get a handle on the answer to that question, reading the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report, along with a review of the skeptical report “Climate Change Reconsidered” might be in order.

For anyone with an open-mind, the contrast between the two is rather striking and makes it clear why the Heartland Institute’s International Conference on Climate Change is so important: not only for the good of the people who inhabit this planet, but for the future of the scientific method that has served us so well.

For example, a May 6 AP story entitled “Feds let BP avoid filing blowout plan for Gulf rig” featured this lede:

Petrochemical giant BP didn’t file a plan to specifically handle a major oil spill from an uncontrolled blowout at its Deepwater Horizon project because the federal agency that regulates offshore rigs changed its rules two years ago to exempt certain projects in the central Gulf region, according to an Associated Press review of official records.

Sounds ominous, and while those carefully chosen words are perhaps technically true, they are also meaningless.

Did BP file a plan that “specifically” imagined an unprecedented, uncontrolled blowout from Deepwater Horizon of exactly the kind we have seen? Any answer would be a pointless splitting of hairs. Did BP, like everyone drilling in the Gulf, have plans in place to respond to a major oil release in the Gulf? Of course they did. They have to, it’s in their best interest to do so and the proof in the pudding is the speed at which BP responded as the disaster unfolded.

Don’t take my word for it, consider instead what Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Thad Allen, who’s in charge of the federal response to the disaster, told the Houston Chronicle on May 5, the day before the AP story ran:

Allen said BP has gone beyond the spill response plan it filed with the Minerals Management Service prior to beginning drilling, mobilizing large numbers of ships and people.

Aside from all the finger pointing, an important point about the Deepwater Horizon tragedy has largely been lost among all of the justifiable concern expressed in the media: deep ocean, off-shore drilling is going to continue around the world, whether we like it or not, and it’s going to continue in the Gulf of Mexico. Russia and China have signed deals with Cuba to tap the Gulf’s riches and, since we don’t actually own the Gulf there’s nothing we can do to prevent that outside of our Exclusive Economic Zone which extends 200 miles into the Gulf in most places (less off of parts of Florida).

It should also be noted that oil seepage is a natural phenomenon, one which plays havoc with the environment in many places around the world. According to the National Research Council, natural seepage accounts for about half of all oil discharges into the oceans, while oil exploration and extraction contributes about three per cent of the total. All told, the NRC’s best estimate is that natural seepage releases over 350 million gallons of petroleum into the environment per year. That’s not to minimize the environmental damage that the spill in the Gulf has caused, but it does put it in a bit of perspective.

Deep ocean drilling is a relatively new technology, one that has been developed for a variety of factors, including the moratorium on off-shore drilling, improvements in exploration techniques and, quite simply, because that’s where the oil is. In the wake of Deepwater Horizon, pundits and policy-makers are going to continue to debate the wisdom of going after this invaluable source of energy, but that’s not really the point.

Somebody is going to get that oil, it’s only a question of whom. The question that should occupy our time is not whether we should “drill, baby, drill,” but what can we to drill even better and safer in the wake of this terrible accident.