WASHINGTON -- Despite talk of an energy crisis and the need for independence from foreign oil, Congress seems to be in no mood to open more of the country's coastal waters to energy development.

The House late Thursday rejected an attempt to end the quarter-century ban on oil and natural gas drilling that has been in effect for 85 percent of the country's coastal waters from Alaska to New England despite arguments that new supplies are needed to lower energy costs.

Lawmakers from Florida and California, who led the fight to continue the drilling moratorium, said they feared energy projects as close as three miles from shore could jeopardize multibillion-dollar tourism industries in their states.

"People don't go to visit the coasts of Florida or the coast of California to watch oil wells," Rep. Sam Farr, D-Calif., said. The issue, which dominated debate on a $25.9 billion Interior Department spending bill, saw the sides split largely along geographic, not partisan lines. Republicans and Democrats from coastal states opposed lifting the drilling restrictions.

The fight to open the waters off both coasts and the eastern Gulf of Mexico to energy companies - at least for natural gas - was led by Rep. John Peterson, R-Pa.

He called natural gas "the mother's milk" of an array of industries from chemical and fertilizer companies to the makers of bricks, and said if there isn't more gas found domestically, prices will remain high and industries will be forced overseas where the fuel is cheaper.

"This is about the economy of America," said Peterson, pleading with fellow lawmakers to end the offshore drilling moratorium that Congress first imposed in 1981 and which it has been extended every year since. It covers virtually all outer continental shelf waters outside of the western Gulf of Mexico where U.S. offshore oil and gas wells are concentrated. "Natural gas beyond three miles belongs to all Americans and we are entitled to use it," argued Rep. Charles Regula, R-Ohio, whose district, like Peterson's, lies far from the ocean waters that were at the heart of the House debate.

Most lawmakers made clear they felt otherwise.

First, the House rejected by a lopsided 279-141 vote an attempt by Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, to lift the long-standing moratorium as it applies to oil drilling.

Then the House voted 217-203 to put back into the Interior bill the language - stricken last week by a committee at Peterson's request - that also continues the ban on natural gas drilling in those same waters.

The overall bill was approved 293-128 and sent to the Senate.

"Drilling for natural gas means drilling for oil," argued Rep. Lois Capps, D-Calif., citing industry pronouncements that where there is gas, often oil is found and probably would be developed. "Drilling three miles off our coast will not lower gas prices today or anytime in the near future."

Peterson sought to ease the coastal-state lawmakers' concerns.

Lifting the moratorium wouldn't mean drilling right away, he said. The presidential moratorium would not be affected by the congressional action, he said. And President Bush has said he has no intention of tinkering with the moratorium, which also had been the policy of his two predecessors.

But Capps said if Congress lifts its ban, there would be growing pressure on the White House to do the same.

Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., was more blunt. "Our coasts are simply too valuable to risk this. I can't depend on the president. The president is an oil man."

Separately, by a 252-165 vote, the House, directed the Interior Department to renegotiate contracts on oil leases that allowed companies to avoid federal royalty payments even when oil prices soared. To get companies to renegotiate the contracts - which date back to the 1990s but involve leases still producing - it barred companies from receiving new leases unless they renegotiate the earlier ones.

In other action on the Interior bill, the House:

- Approved a restriction on road-building in the Tongass National Forest in Alaska.

- Barred the Interior Department from selling wild horses for slaughter as part of its wild horse and burro adoption program.

- Told the Environmental Protection Agency not to implement a 2003 directive that environmentalists contend reduces wetlands protection.

Separately, an attempt to debate climate change - and for the first time bring up for a vote the idea of mandatory caps on greenhouse gases - was blocked. A "sense of Congress" resolution on the subject was ruled out of order.

The climate provision offered by Rep. Norman Dicks, D-Wash., would have put lawmakers on record as agreeing that human actions were contributing to global warming and that carbon emissions into the atmosphere should be limited.

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The bill is H.R. 5386

 

A hurricane with only moderate intensity could wreak havoc in New York City because it has been years since the nation's financial center faced severe weather, government forecasters warned on Tuesday.

"The first time we get hit here with a Category 2, it's going to be disastrous," said meteorologist Michael Wyllie of the National Weather Service, referring to the scale used to rate hurricane strength.

Wyllie said powerful storms have missed New York in recent years, unlike parts of the Gulf Coast, where periodic storms "thin out the trees and the buildings."

 

Gloria, the last big storm to hit the New York area, caused about $900 million in economic losses along the East Coast in 1985, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"It's not like we can all run down to Home Depot and pick up these two-by-fours to board up windows," said John Koch, lead forecaster at the NWS forecast office in New York. "What we want people to do is know what they are going to do with their family and their pets."

Koch urged residents to familiarize themselves with the location of evacuation zones and make plans to have extra dry clothes, medicines, batteries, water and copies of valuable documents.

 U.Va. researcher says temperature isn't only factor for hurricanes

 

Global warming by itself cannot be blamed for the increase in severe Atlantic hurricanes, University of Virginia climate researchers report.

"It is too simplistic to only implicate sea-surface temperatures in the dramatic increase in the number of major hurricanes," said the study's lead author, Patrick J. Michaels.

Warm water fuels tropical cyclones. Some hurricane researchers have related warming in the Atlantic basin with greater hurricane severity, pointing to greenhouse-induced atmosphere warming as the cause for the ocean heating.

But hurricanes' ultimate strength is not directly linked to the underlying water temperatures, the Virginia scientists said.

"There are more severe hurricanes appearing than are explainable by the rise in sea-surface temperatures since the 1990s," said Michaels, a professor of environmental sciences and director of the Virginia Climatology Office.

Michaels is a leading skeptic of global warming's potential harm.

To fire off monster hurricanes of Category 3 or stronger, the brewing storm has to move over water with a temperature of at least 83 degrees.

Areas where the water is regularly hotter, such as the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, won't see more intense storms than in the past, Michaels said.

"At that point, other factors take over," he said, "such as the vertical wind profile, and atmospheric temperature and moisture gradients."

The U.Va. climatologists found that increasing water temperatures account for only about half of the increase in strong hurricanes over the past 25 years.

"We should have had 28 Category 3 storms from the warming" between 1995 and 2005, Michaels said. "Instead we had 42." By comparison, 16 such storms developed between 1982 and 1994.

Michaels believes the increase in hurricane activity beginning in the 1990s is related mainly to variation in the North Atlantic's temperature patterns, not temperature change itself.

"The pattern can appear whether it's cool or whether it's warm," he said.

While expanding the 83-degree zone ought to produce more severe hurricanes, Michaels said, that expansion would also place the storms farther north in the Atlantic, "where there are very few things to hit."

"In the future we may expect to see more major hurricanes," Michaels said, "but we don't expect the ones that do form to be any stronger than the ones that we have seen in the past."

The Virginia study looked at the water temperatures along the paths of the 205 Atlantic tropical cyclones since 1982, providing a more precise picture of the tropical environment involved in each hurricane's development.

The study will appear today in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Michaels did the report with U.Va. environmental science professor Robert E. Davis and Paul C. Knappenberger, a former graduate student in environmental sciences at Virginia.

 

The recent ending of the Zacarias Moussaoui is a concrete example of why we don’t want combatants detained in the war on terror to be brought into civilian courts. I have produced a power point presentation of the history of Military Tribunals.

 

You can view it here if you download it as a Power Point file. You have to have MS Power Point installed to use this file. You can get a stand alone viewer here . 

 

Or here as a web presentation.

 

One sour note is that the web presentation doesn’t look so great in Firefox so unfortunately use Internet Explorer instead.

Please feel free to use this to discuss these important issues. The main stream media is doing it’s best to cloud the issue and make it look like this is some kind of slippery slope to all of us losing our rights as American citizens.  A firm grasp of the facts is important to our victory over the enemy. One of the few tools left in the enemies arsenal is using the courts and the liberal press to turn the American people against the war. Take that weapon away by informing yourself and as many others as you can.