Jim DiPeso

Politics had something to do with the draft Republican platform including an acknowledgment that human activities play a role in global climate change and not including a call for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The politicos decided it wouldn’t be politic to adopt a platform that contradicts their presidential candidate’s views favoring climate legislation and opposing Arctic drilling.

The muttering was palpable. One of the platform committee members, Jeff Grossman of Oregon, said that John McCain has some catching up to do with the rest of the party on drilling the refuge.

In John McCain’s Navy, that’s known as insubordination. An ensign who tells the admiral to get with the program will swiftly find himself reassigned to new quarters in the brig. Grossman, it’s you who needs to get with McCain’s program, not the other way around.

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I don’t know how many fireplaces Barack and Michelle Obama have in their home. I don’t know how many homes John and Cindy McCain own. Nor do I give a damn.

I do know that there are two houses that each American owns in addition to the ones he or she lives in. One is called the House of Representatives. The other is called the Senate. Those houses matter. Hold that thought.

Rather than counting fireplaces or real estate, let’s count megawatts. Eight hundred to be exact.

That’s how many megawatts of generating capacity will be added to California’s power grid from two mega solar projects planned for San Luis Obispo County. A week or so ago, Pacific Gas & Electric, one of California’s big utilities, signed contracts with two solar photovoltaic developers to build a 550-megawatt “solar farm” and a 250-megawatt “solar ranch.”

These won’t be penny-ante demonstration plants that produce more photo ops than power. Eight hundred megawatts is big. In capacity, 800 megawatts is about equal to a garden-variety coal plant and almost as big as your typical nuke. Together, the solar plants will produce enough carbon-free electricity to power an estimated 239,000 homes.

If they’re built, that is. Because if Congress doesn’t extend the solar investment tax credit, which expires Dec. 31, they may not get built. ...

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You need a scoreboard to keep track of the litigation vortex that has tied up conservation of national forest roadless areas for the better part of a decade.

The latest salvo was a ruling August 12 by U.S. District Judge Clarence Brimmer, who tossed out the Clinton roadless rule, which was reinstated in 2006 after Judge Elizabeth LaPorte tossed out the Bush roadless rule, which was adopted in 2005 after a 2003 Brimmer ruling tossed out the Clinton rule, which was adopted in 2001.

Got all that? In the national forests, all roads lead to the courthouse.

The good news is that the uncertainty created by the litigious interregnum has resulted in the Forest Service approving few new roads in the 58 million acres of roadless areas.

It’s good news because the national forest system has too many roads as it is. Roads cost money to build and maintain, they damage fish and wildlife habitat, and they degrade watersheds that supply clean drinking water for 60 million people. The Forest Service has better things to do with its limited funds than expand its too-large road network.

The bad news is that management by court edict is a bad way to run the forests. Rangers can’t manage land rationally when they’re on a lawsuit roller coaster.

Legislation might be the only way to fix the problem. Legislation offers the certainty and political buy-in that is not possible with administrative rules that can be erased by executive fiat or sued out of existence.

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The Antiquities Act, passed in 1906, is one of the lesser known gems of federal conservation law.

At four paragraphs, it is a model of statutory brevity. In execution, however, the Antiquities Act has been a powerful legal tool. Presidents from both parties have used the law’s authority to establish national monuments protecting America’s great heritage treasures – from the Statue of Liberty in the country’s biggest metropolis to the remotest wild lands of the West.

Off and on, presidential use of the Antiquities Act has driven conservation opponents and members of Congress to distraction. They have tried, and mostly failed, to curtail the president’s authority.

In 1950, a Democratic Congress revoked the president’s authority to apply the Antiquities Act in Wyoming, after a political firestorm over Franklin Roosevelt’s use of the law to protect an area that is now part of Grand Teton National Park.

Nearly five decades later, Bill Clinton drove congressional Republicans nuts when he took up Bruce Babbitt’s suggestion that he use the Antiquities Act to create a conservation legacy for his presidency. Riders to drain the ink from Clinton’s monument proclamation pen were attached repeatedly to appropriations bills, but none were enacted into law.

Now, along comes Senator Mary Landrieu, a Louisiana Democrat, for another go at weakening the Antiquities Act. ...

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Hollywood screenwriters could come up with a fictional scenario that makes Congress look worse than it did in real life last week.

But it’s hard to see how.

Both Republican and Democratic leaders in Congress have professed their undying love for renewable energy resources. Their affection, however, took a back seat to rock ‘em, sock ‘em partisan politics when the Senate failed to move legislation extending various tax incentives for renewable resources.

If the game of chicken goes on much longer, the tax incentives will expire at the end of the year, and billions of dollars in wind, solar, and other clean energy investment capital is likely to go elsewhere, where the politics are less toxic and the financial certainty more solid.

Rather than putting money where their energy mouths are, both parties are playing for political trophies.

Reckless and feckless, that’s what they are.

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Papa-hanau-moku-akea. Once you break the word down into syllables, you can get the hang of pronouncing it.

The Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument covers nearly 90 million acres in the northwestern Hawaiian Islands. As one of the largest marine reserves in the world, the monument is a stunning seascape featuring coral reefs, numerous tropical species, including sea turtles, and rich archaeological sites.

The 2006 proclamation establishing the monument is a shiny jewel in the Bush administration’s otherwise checkered environmental record.

More such oceanic monuments may be established before President Bush heads back to Crawford in six months. The word around DC is that Bush is considering use of the Antiquities Act to establish a few more really big monuments in the Pacific and Gulf of Mexico. Ocean advocates are whispering tempting legacy thoughts into Bush’s ear about being the “Teddy Roosevelt of the seas.”

If he follows through with the proposed monuments, he would deserve the flattering moniker.

Unfortunately, Bush’s marine conservation achievements are likely to be overshadowed by the administration’s flaky record on global warming, which was capped by Dick Cheney’s cack-handed squashing of the administration’s last chance to do something positive about the problem.

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The "drill here, drill now, pay less" crowd went into a tizzy when oil prices dropped this past week on word that oil demand is forecast to drop as a result of the shaky economy.

See, we told you so, the bloggers and bloviators crowed. Oil prices fell on a projected decrease in demand. Projected increases in supply tied to, say, lifting the ban on oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, would accomplish the same thing. So let's get to drilling everywhere and stop listening to the hippie-dippie greenies moan about their precious caribou.

The premise of the argument is that opening protected areas to drilling would influence oil market psychology favorably. Maybe, but there are no guarantees.

In April, Brazil announced that undersea formations off its coast may hold a monster oilfield, perhaps 33 billion barrels -- enough to supply all global demand for more than one year. Brazil is a stable, friendly country whose state-owned Petrobras oil company knows a thing or two about deepwater oil production. The news should have electrified the oil market. Yet prices barely budged.

Perhaps traders know that demand reductions can hit the market a lot faster than new supplies. Opening a new oilfield requires many steps, none of them trivial undertakings. You have to find oil by searching promising locations. Exploratory wells must be drilled, flow tested, and evaluated.

Not every promising location is guaranteed to become a profitable oilfield. For example, the costs of getting deepwater fields into production can hit 10 digits. Even with prices at $130 to $140 per barrel, oil companies will pick their spots in order to keep their service costs down.

Once oilmen decide to open a production field, financing must be arranged and logistical details sorted out. Production wells must be drilled and prepared. That requires rigs and skilled crews, which are stretched to the limit around the world. Shipyards that build deepwater drilling rigs are fully booked. If you want one, take a number and get on the waiting list. You may have to wait two to four years for your drill ship to come in. And it won't be cheap.

Even more time will be necessary for the "unconventional" resources that the drill here, drill now crowd says are hydrocarbon cornucopias just around the corner. Rigging and producing oil sands and shale fields in the central Rockies will be highly capital and energy-intensive.

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Southern delegates headed for next month’s Democratic National Convention can relax. They won’t have to sneak contraband buckets of fried chicken into their hotel rooms after all.

Thanks to sloppy reporting, word got out that convention planners had imposed highly prescriptive rules on foods to be served at the Denver jamboree. Half of each plate must be fruits and vegetables. At least 70 percent must be organic or locally produced. And no fried foods.

Leave it to PC Democrats to bring their nanny state proclivities to dinner menus, critics charged. “Where’s the beef?” meat lovers demanded, giving new meaning to Walter Mondale’s 1984 campaign slogan.

But the feeding frenzy was a tempest in an herbal teapot. The media got it wrong. The catering guidelines are voluntary. Delegates will be free to live on greasebomb hamburgers if that’s what they want.

But the belief that local and organic foods are always better for the environment bears closer examination.

Pick up the summer edition of Conservation magazine for a taste of how black-and-white assumptions about environmental stewardship sometimes collapse when muddy grey complexities intrude.

One article summarizes a startling study comparing the environmental impacts of organic and conventional milk ...

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As the old saying goes, a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged. A twist on that aphorism might be that a conservative is a liberal who paid $80 to fill up the Volvo.

Polls show that more Americans, even liberal Democrats, support expanded domestic oil production. What if the poll respondents learned that a vast pool of oil sits untapped? It’s three times the size of Saudi Arabia’s reserves and is emphatically within U.S. borders.

What are we waiting for? the poll respondents might exclaim.

Except that there’s a catch. Before the oil can be used, we have to wait 100 million years.

In an age when immediate gratification is considered a virtue, that simply won’t do. Shell is bringing technology to the rescue, to speed things up and tap the estimated 800 billion barrels of shale oil lying beneath the scrubby uplands of the central Rockies.

Shale oil is preemie oil. Strictly speaking, it’s a calcium carbonate rock containing a goopy hydrocarbon called kerogen. If we wait 100 million years, natural subterranean heat may turn the kerogen into crude oil. Since we can’t wait that long, Shell is experimenting with an audacious technology to heat the stuff artificially, and then bring it to the surface to quench our unquenchable oil thirst. More on Shell’s idea in a moment.

Instead of carrying begging bowls to Riyadh, why haven’t we tapped shale before? To answer that question, it’s important to know why crude oil is so valuable. ...

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The advertising slogan for the Hummer is: "Like Nothing Else."

Which is also an apt description for the fuel price surge that has crashed the market for extra-heavy consumer vehicles. The physics and economics are simple. Lugging around a lot of iron requires a lot of fuel. At $4 per gallon, the fuel bills start to pinch hard and household solvency trumps a cool image every day of the week.

The Hummer was the most extravagant manifestation of Detroit's most recent business model, which was to turn dowdy trucks into ultra-hip, must-have wheels. Car guys know that people don't buy cars, they buy image. Detroit's car guys ingeniously pushed a lot of emotional buttons when they marketed Hummers and other slick SUVs, which convey an aura of dominance and allow their owners to show the world who's the toughest and coolest of them all.

Throughout most of the 1990s and the first part of this decade, the model worked great. Sales of flashy SUVs and pickups returned handsome profits. Economy car product lines were largely a nuisance to the Big Three, which built them largely to keep the companies in compliance with CAFE standards.

Unfortunately for Detroit, its business model was based on a premise that cheap oil would be available indefinitely. Detroit was slow off the mark when warning signals began flashing yellow, then red, that the era of cheap oil was drawing to a close.

Reality has arrived in the Motor City. ...

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John McCain visited a wind technology plant in Portland Monday to tell the world that America wouldn’t fritter away another eight years before confronting global climate change.

It’s a message that the world needs to hear, from the halls of Congress in Washington to the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. At Republicans for Environmental Protection, we thought it was a good speech, so we sent out a press release calling attention to it.

That’s when the creatures from the Internet black lagoon emerged, dripping with scorn about “tree-hugging morons” and filling up our president’s in-box with scientifically illiterate swamp gas about the global warming “hoax.”

The following day, a Tuesday, I attended a forum about environmental issues that McCain held near Seattle with a panel of Washington State business leaders, political dignitaries, and an Eagle Scout. He talked about seeing firsthand the impacts of climate change in the polar regions, developing energy technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and his confidence that America has the smarts to solve the problem, no matter what the doom-and-gloom, it-can't-be-done hand-wringers on the political right say. ...

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My office phone rang and a chirpy 20-something calling from the 514 area code was on the line. A short time into the call, I knew what it was: an oil industry-sponsored opinion survey that smelled like a push poll.

With $4-per-gallon gasoline prices drawing near, what better time, in the industry's view, to make a renewed push to open up America’s coastal waters to drilling rigs. A poll designed to show that the voters support more drilling is a predictable part of the lobbying and PR strategy that is gathering steam.

The questioner tossed a lot of industry arguments my way – e.g. much of the oil that we use originates in North America, oil company profits are not out of line with other industries, scads of untapped oil lie beneath the coastal waters.

She asked me to rate the arguments' importance if they were verifiably true. For each one, I said, "not at all important." ...

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