IN DEFENSE OF COMMON SENSE
By Hetty Gray
#142
April 8, 2013
“Underfoot”
I apologize for the long hiatus with the between column postings. It only took a millisecond to me to come to grips with the sobering statistic that heart disease is not solely a male problem. My problem is small in the wider scope of things and requires no immediate action. Monitoring will suffice until a decision is made to correct a faulty valve. Had it not been for a bout with pneumonia and the sharp intuition of a Michigan family physician, my problem would have gone undiagnosed. Thank goodness for his talent.
Scanning the web recently, I came across a map of the USA showing the counties from coast to coast that, over the past decade, have shown a marked increase in death rates over birth rates.
Speaking from personal experience, one section of the country encompassing two counties, young people continue to leave home to seek opportunities elsewhere — giving up everything and everyone they know in order to earn a living. As a result, communities and entire counties begin to mimic their mortality rates: they die.
We spend half the year in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, parts of which are identified as “Renaissance Zones”, so designated because of the demise of a number of industries. One large former employer is mining. You cannot imagine the excitement in the Western UP of Michigan as a result of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker signing a bill to authorize mining in the northern part of bordering Wisconsin.
Michigan’s adjoining Ontonagon and Gogebic counties are far different now than they were twenty years ago when we first came to the area. Copper Mining was king and a local mine employed between 1500 and 2000 people in three shifts. When the mine closed several years ago, countless families were set adrift financially.
I remember standing in a restaurant parking lot one evening in White Pine, Michigan. Men and women stood about embracing and saying their “good-byes” as a high number of miners pulled up roots and moved to Colorado for a viable job. The mine that closed was the largest in the nation, and the area itself has been known for copper for centuries.
Just two years ago, the last paper facility on the Great Lakes closed in Ontonagon, Michigan — the county in which we have our cabin. A small town lost 300 jobs. Local stores closed. A large chain store pulled out, leaving the remaining residents with a 75-mile-plus drive one way to a comparable retailer. Thankfully, some local concerns survived. The bank is holding on, as are a few restaurants and shops. The one blessing is a large IGA grocery that anchors the community.
You need to understand that this plant did not process pulp into paper. It manufactured shipping boxes — those familiar brown cardboard boxes we see unloaded from trucks and planes or find in our mailboxes or on our porches.
Located along beautiful Lake Superior, Ontonagon is a lovely town, and to see it suffer so badly, grieves all who know it well. Why did it close? Word has it that environmentalists pushed to see that no paper plant survived. The fact that the plant made cardboard boxes and did not process paper at all, but simply turned it into a marketable product, didn’t matter to the “greenies” pushing for its closure. Bottom line? Those jobs are no more. There has been talk of reviving the facility in some form, but the bleak choice may be that the buildings will be scrapped. How sad.
Logging still comprises a sector of the economy in the Northwoods, but not to the extent that it did when millions of board feet shipped on the Great Lakes and fueled widespread construction in many states during the earl 19th and 20th centuries. That resource towered overhead. It still does.
Yet another source goes ignored by those who ally with so-called “progressive” politicians hell bent on seeing us relegated to small cars and smaller lives. We are walking on it.
Many of the younger men in this area commute for hundreds of miles west to North Dakota to drive trucks in the fracking fields. They bunk together in rented homes or maintain long-term arrangements with motels and rooming houses. They commute every few weeks, sacrificing greatly to support their families. They didn’t sit home drawing unemployment. They recognized opportunity and sought it out.
I heard a statistic the other day that shocked me. I knew domestic energy held a lot of advantage over imported sources, but I didn’t realize that it was so large. We accrue 10% benefit of every dollar on imported sources, but 80-90% on domestic ones. Why, then, do we allow our leaders to limit us to imported fossil fuels? We have enough natural gas to power our trucks and cars without enriching countries that love our money but would like nothing more than to see us die as a nation.
Today America not only hosts “The Big Five oil companies” (BP, Chevron, Conoco Philips, ExxonMobil, and Shell), but also contributes mightily to their success.
Once, scores of small and large American oil companies dotted our landscape. Many of the smaller ones are gone, swallowed up in mergers and buy-outs, yet some survive. Chevron remains an American company, headquartered in San Ramon, California. Sunoco hails from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Exxon-Mobil — a direct descendant of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil) began in 1999 as a merger of Exxon and Mobil Oil companies — claims Texas as its home. Conoco Phillips maintains a Houston headquarters,
Yet, foreign nations reap tremendous profits from us. Replacing the once-healthy American companies is BP (British Petroleum). Add Citgo (Venezuela) — now there is a friend, folks — and we simply add to foreign coffers every time we visit a gas station and fill up our vehicles. Considering the hostility in the Middle East, this is not a good idea! This is not to say that we should penalize American ownership of those franchises, but the specter of enriching foreign companies should merit some thought.
And what of our domestic resources? Well, drilling bans hamper oil fields from Alaska to both coasts and the Gulf of Mexico. A postage stamp size piece of Alaskan real estate (ANWR) holds great promise. According to ANWR’s website, geologists agree that the Coastal Plain has the nation’s best geologic prospects for major new onshore oil discoveries. And its geographical footprint? ANWR constitutes 0.0506% of Alaska’s land mass. That’s less than half of one percent. Yet, the naysayers scream “NO!”
Animals thrive beneath the above ground pipeline traversing Alaska, much to the embarrassment of the “animals rights” people who told us that entire species would disappear if the pipeline were built. So much for that idea!
The Department of Interior’s 1987 resource evaluation of ANWR’s Coastal Plain states there is a 95% chance that a ‘super field’ with 500 million barrels would be discovered. DOW also estimates that there exists a mean of 3.5 billion barrels, and a 5% chance that a large Prudhoe Bay type discovery would be made. This is nothing to sneeze at, yet the persistent “environmentalists” continue the bantering. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to go back to my bicycle.
In an article by Kevin Doran and Adam Reed, the United States has won the lottery on natural gas. The most recent estimates (2012) by the Energy Information Administration, the U.S. has some 2,214 trillion cubic feet cubic feet of technically recoverable natural gas — enough to satisfy all of our natural gas demands for the next century at current consumption levels. The extraction of shale gas, enabled by technological advances such as hydrofracturing (this is what we know as “fracking”) and horizontal drilling, has led the way in creating this largely unforeseen cornucopia. Domestic natural gas is now a cheaper fuel for electricity generation than coal — long our go-to fuel for power around the clock — and emits roughly half the greenhouse gas emissions.
Of course, stumbling blocks will occur, but isn’t it better to use what we have than buy from a volatile Middle East that turns its back on terrorists who threaten to destroy us?
When threatened with progress and huge amounts of fossil fuels available here at home, the opposition turns from common sense to the courts. It is probable, given the liberal slant of many judges, fracking opponents will make some headway — but at the expense of the public.
Had our judiciary held such views at our founding, the population would be relegated to land east of the Appalachians. No railroad would have breached those mountains and eventually connected the east and west coasts. No highways would curve through the nation. Some species would have been threatened. It is all so inane.
Every time you hear the environmental groups predicting horrific outcomes if the nation undertakes a step to improve the lives of the public at large, remember the motive underlying their incessant push.
I believe, as do many others, that these groups view people as the enemy. They hold that animals have more rights than people. People should exist as best they can without the aid of fossil fuels. Perhaps those who press such a cause should consider how they would survive. If animals come first, then what happens to the food chain? Frankly, I can’t see them hunting or fishing for protein or farming — but their assault on farming is an entirely separate issue. Our future lurks, not simply in the soil, but beneath. Think about it.