The Jones Act Prevents Gulf Oil Clean-Up

As Charles Krauthamer has pointed out, the reason wells are being drilled in the deep water Gulf of Mexico is because environmentalists have exerted such influence upon the federal government that on-shore and shallow-water Gulf drilling has been greatly restricted.  Unfortunately, the U.S. does not have much in the way of deep sea drilling technology, though it has the best shallow-water and on-shore drilling technology in the world.  It turns out that the Europeans have more deep-sea technology.

Many countries have offered to use deep-water technology and other technology to help clean up the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico due to the BP Horizon platform oil spill.  Canada, Croatia, France, Germany, Ireland, Mexico, the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Romania, the Republic of Korea, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United Nations have all offered to help with the oil spill and the clean-up.  The U.S. has not accepted their help.  Why?

The Merchant Marine Act of 1920 regulates maritime commerce in U.S. waters and between U.S. ports.  Section 27, called the Jones Act, requires that all goods transported by water between U.S. ports must be carried in U.S.-flag ships, which were constructed in the U.S.  The ships must be owned by U.S. citizens and crewed by U.S. citizens and U.S. permanent residents.  This act subsidizes a U.S. merchant marine at great cost to U.S. consumers, while providing some strategic value in a possible future war.

The Dutch news site De Standaard says Belgian and Dutch dredgers have the capability to greatly speed up the oil spill clean-up.  The Belgian group DEME says it can clean up the oil in three to four months using specialty vessels and equipment.  The U.S. is estimating a 9-month clean-up.  Only 5 or 6 of the needed specialty clean-up ships are available in the world.  The top companies with these special ships have them built in the Far East, where they cost half what they would cost in the U.S.  They are mostly owned by two Belgian companies, DEME and De Nul and their Dutch competitors.  Thanks to the Jones Act, they cannot be used to speed up the clean-up.

Unless.......  A waiver is given by the Obama administration, as the Jones Act says it can in a time of national emergency or due to a strategic interest.  The Business Insider article says the exemption has not been made simply out of pride.  I suspect it is more involved than that.  Obama does not want to be seen giving jobs to foreigners during our recession and when many Gulf Coast workers are idled by the oil spill itself.  There are also U.S. maritime labor unions he does not want to offend.  So, his policy is to take 9 months to do the clean-up (probably a classic government underestimate), rather than call in the Dutch and Belgians and others with their specialized oil clean-up ships and technology.

But, instead of allowing that the tragedy is in good part due to not allowing shallow-water Gulf oil drilling and the clean-up is being dragged out by the Jones Act, the Obama power thirsters wish to blame everything on BP and a regulatory federal ocean leasing bureau due to a lax regulatory climate claimed to be due to George W. Bush!  The permit to drill was issued after Obama usurped the presidency.  The environmentalists, the Democrats, and BP share the blame for this environmental disaster.

The Rising Seas Will Flood Bangladesh?

According to the UN IPCC AR4 report, the rising seas in the next 40 years will bring great destruction to the low-lying Bangladesh.  Like earlier exaggerated claims that 55% of the Netherlands was below sea level, this claim turns out to be wrong.  The UN report claimed that a three-foot rise in sea level would flood 17% of Bangladesh by 2050 and result in 20 million refugees.  The Center for Environment and Geographic Information in Dhaka, Bangladesh looked into this looming catastrophe.  They found that the UN IPCC forgot to take into account the fact that rivers arising in the Himalayan Mountains carry 1 billion tons of sediment through Bangladesh to the ocean.  The Ganges and the Brahmaputra are among these rivers and they dump this load of sediment where the river meets the ocean.  If the ocean rises, the rivers dump more of the sediment at the threatened land areas and builds them up.  In fact, recent measurements have noted that Bangladesh is actually rising.

Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Morner, the former head of the International Commission on Sea Level Change, says that despite fluctuations, the sea level has not risen in the last 50 years.  He says if there is a rise in the remainder of this century, it will not be more than 10 cm, with an uncertainty of 10 cm.  10 cm is about 4 inches.  He and his team went on six expeditions to the Maldive Islands and found no rise of the sea level there over the last 50 years.  Trips to Tuvalu, where leaders use the phantom of sea level rise to try to get welfare payments from the industrialized world, the sea has actually dropped, if anything, in recent decades.  Of course, Venice, Italy is sinking, literally.

The Dutch are now saying that only 26% of the Netherlands is below sea level, not the 55% claimed by the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007.

The IBD article in the second link above concludes:

There's been a sea change in the consideration of the bogus claims of the IPCC, Gore, Britain's CRU and other climate charlatans. No longer accepted on faith, they are being challenged and disproven by scientific fact.

Our sediments exactly.

I added the emphasis to "sea change" and "sediments."  I would not want anyone to miss the fun.

UN IPCC Falsely Says 55% of Netherlands Endangered by Global Warming Flooding

The UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007 erred in saying that 55% of the Netherlands was in danger of being flooded due to global warming.  They arrived at this figure by adding the 20% of the country that consists of below sea level polders that are pumped dry to all areas which are subject to flooding.  However, the area subject to flooding includes most of the 20% of the land below sea level already.  The Dutch Environment Minister has ordered an investigation into the quality of the climate reports they use to base Dutch climate policy on.

Even though much less than 55% of the Netherlands is subject to flooding, it is also not at all clear that all of that land subject to flooding is endangered by the rising sea levels as claimed in the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007 either.  There is some more sloppy thinking being revealed here.  But, it no doubt seemed such a dramatic story at the time.  Not only was this dire tale likely to scare many a Dutchman into supporting the theory of catastrophic man-made global warming, but it was likely to cause many another sympathetic soul to have visions of poor little Dutch boys in wooden clogs valiantly manning every hole in every dike with a finger or an arm plugging the hole even as the water rose past his knees, then his waist, then his chest, then his neck, ........