When evaluating in an honest way
all factors that contributed to the
current pollution of the Gulf, we
must ask why BP was drilling in
5,000 feet of ocean when there
are so many other accessible
and safe alternatives.
There are large deposits of oil shale
in Western Colorado that could easily
and safely be extracted as it is now
in Western Canada.
We have all heard
of the huge deposits
of oil in ANWR, on
Alaska's North Shore.
Because of improved
drilling technology, all
available oil in ANWR
can be extracted by using
only 2,000 of its roughly
19,000,000 acres.
BP now drills in 5,000 feet
of ocean because these better
alternatives have been foreclosed
to the oil industry.
Environmental groups
have effectively stymied
this safe and relatively easy
production of oil in the name
of some higher but more
nebulous good.
Where they once rationalized their
campaign against oil companies based
upon the threat of environmental
degradation, environmental
groups now use the increasingly
dubious claims of global warming
to justify their obstruction.
As the policies of environmental groups
were a factor in what we now see in the
Gulf of Mexico, so they were in the 1989
Exxon Valdez disaster.
When huge quantities of oil
were discovered in Prudhoe Bay
on the North Shore of Alaska
in the mid-1960s, one issue among
many was the transportation of this oil
The safest approach
was a pipeline from the
North Shore directly to the northern
border of the contiguous United States.
As a member of the Sierra Club
at that time, I remember well the
relentless war that the Sierra Club
waged against both the drilling
and the pipeline.
In what has now become
a predictable strategy, the Sierra Club
catastrophized the entire project and
attacked the motives of those who
sought merely to respond to the
demand for oil by the American public
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/05/environmentalists_with_oil_on.html
The conservative concept
of negative law and government
and the progressive concept of
positive law and government are
irreconcilable polar opposites.
One or the other
will eventually prevail.
Our freedom hangs in the balance :
Early on in life, kids are taught
the concepts of positive and negative
in science.
They learn about positive and negative
poles on magnets and positive and negative
terminals on batteries.
By junior high school,
kids are introduced to positive
and negative numbers in mathematics.
Unfortunately,
few schools teach
the concepts of positive
and negative as they pertain
to civics and government.
Understanding positive
and negative law and government is the most
life-impacting positive/negative polarity of all.
It is the fundamental difference
between oppression and freedom.
Negative law tells us what we may
not do; positive law tells us what
we must do.
Breaking a law incurs penalties.
Under negative law,
government penalizes
someone for doing something
that he isn't supposed to do.
Under positive law,
government penalizes
someone for not doing
something he is supposed to do.
The distinction
is profound and crucial.
The Ten Commandments
are mainly negative, e.g.,
"Thou shalt not" kill, steal,
commit adultery, lie, covet, etc.
In other words, don't do
these things to your fellow man.
(Two commandments
contain no explicit negative
language, but they deal with private,
not public, matters : one's obligation
to God and to one's parents)
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/05/positive_and_negative_governme.html
