By Carl Hulse, New York Times

For decades, opposition to new offshore oil drilling has been a core principle of Congressional Democrats, ranking in the party pantheon somewhere just below protecting Social Security and increasing the minimum wage. But a concerted Republican assault over domestic oil production and the threat of political backlash from financially pressed motorists have Democrats poised to embrace a fundamental shift in energy policy.

Even more surprising, the turnabout is led by the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, who has a history of fighting oil drilling going back to the early days of her career in California. Under a measure being assembled for a vote in the House next week, oil rigs could go up 50 miles from the shores of states that welcome drilling and 100 miles off any section of the United States coast - a stark reversal on an issue that has been a Democratic environmental touchstone since the 1980s.

“It shows what $4 a gallon gas will do,” said Daniel J. Weiss, a senior fellow on energy and climate issues at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, an advocacy group. Republicans and oil industry representatives are skeptical that Democrats are serious about allowing offshore exploration. They say that the outlines of the emerging bill do not go far enough to satisfy them and that the legislation appears intended to do more political than policy good. And they say a decision not to share any new oil royalties with the states eliminates a prime incentive for states to say yes to drilling. Read more here.

See also in this piece in the Nashua Telegraph, how the Climate is Right for an Arctic Oil Rush. It’s a scramble for the spoils of global warming as the rapid melting of Arctic sea ice is opening access to previously unreachable deposits of oil and gas, setting off a race by northern nations - including the United States, Canada and Russia - to claim them.

The pursuit of those resources was underscored last month when the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Healy sailed north from Barrow, Alaska, to map the sea floor of the Chukchi Cap, an area at the northern edge of the Beaufort Sea. The maps could eventually bolster U.S. claims to the area as part of its extended outer continental shelf.

The U.S. Geological Survey confirmed this summer what the oil industry had long suspected when the agency released an estimate that the area north of the Arctic Circle may hold as much as 90 billion barrels of oil and 1,669 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, or roughly 13 percent of the world’s total undiscovered oil and 30 percent of the undiscovered natural gas.

And finally in this story Gas, Gas Everywhere by Christopher Palmeri in Business Week, In the oil patch, they are calling it the “shale sweepstakes"-a fevered rush to purchase drilling rights to natural gas that lies deep in deposits of shale rock. Output from these fields has been on a rocket ride for the past four years. It is the reason why natural gas production overall in the U.S. is expected to jump 9% in 2008, after nearly a decade of no growth.

This is good news for consumers who’ll be turning up their gas furnaces this winter. Natural gas prices have fallen 50%-much steeper than oil-in the past two months, to a recent $7 per 1,000 cubic feet. All the new shale development could keep a lid on natural gas prices for years to come. The oil companies, says Ed Siefert, president of market researcher RigData, “are all spending money like drunken sailors.” (h/t Benny Peiser CCNET)

By Anthony Watts, Watts Up With That

I’ve been wrestling with this topic for hours now as to how to best present it in this forum.  I finally decided to simply just write it as I see it. It has been an ugly day for law and common sense in the world. Vandalism in the name of ecological causes is now “ok” thanks in part to Dr. James Hansen, of NASA GISS coming to the defense of eco-vandals.  See the second story here. Now, encouraged by this “victory” that gives a sanction to eco-vandalism in the UK, how many more shall we see? And if one of these people is injured and kills themselves or others in the process of the next stunt? What then? Who is responsible?

Certainly I want a cleaner world, and better energy resources with focus on the future. But, sanctioning vandalism for these causes is not the way to get there. What do I want from NASA as a taxpayer? Science, solutions, and inspiring ideas turned into reality. I don’t want political activism in the name of science. After thinking awhile about this, I’ve come to the following conclusions:

1- A NASA scientist siding with vandalism as a “lawful excuse” is an inappropriate abuse of the position. It was a question of law, not of science.

2- Dr. Hansen cannot separate himself from the agency as private citizen in this case, because he was brought in as an “expert witness”. Even if he paid his own way and took personal time, his presence was based on taxpayer funded research.

3- It appears Dr. Hansen has violated the code of ethics posted on the NASA Office of General Council webpage. From the Goddard Institute for Space Studies web page:  GISS is a component laboratory of Goddard Space Flight Center’s Earth Sciences Division, which is part of GSFC’s Sciences and Exploration Directorate. Thus Hansen falls under these ethics rules. Specifically, Dr. Hansen’s defense of vandalism in the name of a cause he believes in fails under the NASA Misuse of position rule. If he received compensation of any kind, such as airfare, rooms, board etc. to appear as a NASA expert, he would also be breaking other NASA conduct rules.

4- As keeper of data, specifically the GISTEMP dataset, he has now brought the impartiality of that data into question due to his activism in areas unrelated to scientific research. Certainly Dr. Hansen has a body of work that is impressive, there is no disputing that. But it is time for Dr. Jim Hansen to go. Thanks to him, GISS as a dataset is no longer impartial. We have potential bias from the gatekeeper of the data that can’t be separated from the data. If he can come to the defense of lawbreakers in the name of his global warming cause, then it is an even easier jump to allow that same bias to creep into scientific data he is responsible for and his conclusions drawn from that data.

If you feel the same way, your recourse is to write to

Michael D. Griffin
Administrator
c/o NASA Public Communications Office
NASA Headquarters
Suite 5K39
Washington, DC 20546-0001
(202) 358-0001 (Office)
(202) 358-3469 (Fax)

Or use the online submission form. See one such letter here.

Icecap Note: We support Anthony and encourage you to write to NASA. We have a situation where we have 3 people. Hansen, Karl and Jones with strong activist ties serving as gatekeepers to the world’s station data bases with free reign to select and adjust that data as they see fit. That alone is an unacceptale position. When they abuse the public trust by refusing to release data, procedures or algorithms (Jones). Allow 87% of the stations to fail government standards for siting and then remove the urban adjustment in the station data bases for change analysis and then lead a biased group of enironmental activists in producing the least scientific and most biased document I have ever seen (far worse than the IPCC) in the CCSP (Karl). And continually adjust the data with a clear bias to cool the prior early 20th century warm period and warm recent years and then travel the country and world testifying against new coal power plants, calling train coal cars the equivalent of holocoust death trains and now advocating vandalism to stop the building of coal and nuclear plants that even environment friendly governments realize will be necessary for years to come to provide for the energy and heating needs of the populations (Hansen), it is time to sweep house. Hansen by his actions deserves to go first. We need an independent data group not beholding to anyone to review and reanalyze the old data. We have fortunately the satellite groups UAH and RSS that we can rely on going forward but their data unfortunately starts in 1979 at the beginning of the only two decades in the last 7 where temperatures actually rose!!!

Tom Nelson Blogspot

Breaking News: Kingsnorth Six found not guilty!  After hearing all of the evidence, the jurors (representatives of ordinary British people) supported the right to take direct action to protect the climate from the burning of coal. It’s been a pretty unusual ten days but today has been truly extraordinary. At 3.20pm, the jury came back into court and announced a majority verdict of not guilty! All six defendants - Kevin, Emily, Tim, Will, Ben and Huw - were acquitted of criminal damage.

To recap on how important this verdict is: the defendants campaigners were accused of causing 30,000 pounds of criminal damage to Kingsnorth smokestack from painting. The defence was that they had ‘lawful excuse’ - because they were acting to protect property around the world “in immediate need of protection” from the impacts of climate change, caused in part by burning coal. So the evidence for the defence centred around the enormous damage burning coal does to ecosystems, people and property around the planet - and the UK government’s abject failure to take any meaningful action.

(This is the first case, by the way, where preventing property damage from climate change has been used as part of a ‘lawful excuse’ defence in Crown Court.) During the trial, the world’s leading climate scientist (NASA’s James Hansen) came to court and challenged the government’s plans for new coal, calling for Gordon Brown to announce a moratorium on all new coal-fired power plants without carbon capture and storage. Cameron’s environmental policy adviser said there was “a staggering mismatch between what we’ve heard from government and what we’ve seen from government in terms of policy”. An expert on climate change impacts in the UK said some of the property in immediate need of protection from sea level rises included parts of Kent (Kingsnorth being “extremely vulnerable") and that “it behoves us to act with urgency”. And an Inuit leader told of his first hand experiences of the impacts of climate change.

After hearing all of the evidence, the jurors (representatives of ordinary British people) supported the right to take direct action to protect the climate from the burning of coal. Read more of this jubilant story by UK Greenpeace here.