Jon Christian Ryter's Conservative World

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From The Mailbag

Who's kidding who? Oil prices are dropping not due to slackened demand...prices dropped only because of threats of regulation and the possibility of independent refinery competition.

With rapidly escalating gas prices on top of obscene 1st quarter oil company corporate profits, President George W. Bush and the GOP found themselves the target of public interest groups who blame the White House for rising gas prices last week. Since one of the two primary reasons for rising gas prices is the lack of enough refined gasoline due to the Clinton-era EPA regulations that forced the closure of all of the nation's independent refineries. there are no "overnight" solutions. Thus, anything Bush or Congress could do to cause the price of gas to drop sufficiently to placate the voters would take years to implement.

As energy consultant David Yergin, chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates noted: "There's no switch to pull." He told the media that "...this is a long-lead-time business. The investment horizon is 5, 10 or 20 years." Oil experts see no short term solutions that will bring down the price of gasoline before the summer consumption levels increased, driving up the price of gasoline at the pumps. Democrats sought the typical democratic solution—impose windfall profit taxes on the oil companies...knowing full well that when taxes of any type are imposed on any American corporation in any form they are simply passed on to the consumer—the working class stiff—who pays the freight so the engines of commerce will continue to churn out jobs. The voter who thinks the politician is getting "tough" with big business actually believes the new tax will come out of the rich guy's pocket. And the politician knows that's good for votes.

In the final analysis, it is always the consumer who gets soaked for the windfall profits since they are passed on to him in the form of higher prices. That's how the game of politics is played inside the beltway. Ultimately, the political charade always becomes a double windfall for the tax-and-spend politician. He gets the vote of the little guy who thinks the politician's actually concerned about the working class by imposing stiffer tax liabilities on the rich—and he gets a political contribution from the rich fat cat who knows Congress created the loopholes that will allow him to pass the winfall profit tax on to the consumers in the form of even higher prices.

The Congressional Republicans who tried to open ANWR in the days following Hurricane Katrina, and those who signed on to Bush's quickly-thwarted plan to convert closed military bases into oil refineries to process crude oil to flood the American consumer market with independent oil company produced gasoline and fuel oil to drive down the price of gasoline became angered as the Democrats stonewalled their plan as they blamed the White House for high gasoline prices since Bush took office. Congress passed a comprehensive energy bill in 2005—but only after provisions to allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge [ANWR] (which the GOP tried unsuccessfully to pass since 2001) were removed from the legislation.

In fighting the opening of ANWR in the media and through their talking heads, Democrats have repeatedly insisted that Bush and and Vice President Dick Cheney were trying to open the environmentally-protected North Slope to their Big Oil friends and financial contributors. In point of fact, Big Oil wants to keep ANWR closed to drilling.

When oil was first discovered in the North Slope, and when the Alaska Pipeline was built, the Seven Sisters scrambled to purchase every available oil lease in the 1,500 coastal plains area, many times paying the Gwich'in Indians a premium to get the leases—which they never exercised. The Seven Sisters sat on the oil leases as they lobbied Congress to enact legislation to block drilling in one of the two or three most lucrative oil fields in the world. In 1980 the Democratically-controlled Congress passed The Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980 (which created ANWR)—which President Jimmy Carter quickly signed into law creating the oil crisis we have today. What is most interesting about the ANWR legislation is that the Democrats forced it through Congress and signed it into law, effectively barring the oil industry from from tapping into a source of oil that would have made the United States oil-sufficent for the balance of the 20th century—at a time when Iran, using OPEC, was strangling the economy of America.

Last year when the GOP introduced the Arctic Coastal Plain Domestic Energy Security Act [S.1891 and HR 39] to allow drilling in ANWR, the Democrats again thwarted to plan—as their TV talking heads insisted Bush and Cheney were favoring their oil buddies who were already making obscene profits at the expense of the American consumers. And, of couse, America is now paying $75 per barrel for oil because of that legislation failed. Had that legislation passed, and had independent drillers been allowed to sink wells in the coastal plain of the North Slope of Alaska, the Seven Sisters would have been more cautious in promulgate its agenda to push oil over $100 barrel since if enough independent drillers and refiners are reentered into the oil euation, the Seven Sisters knows that the price of oil, globally, will drop substantially. It took the Rockefeller and Rothschild oil cartels a hundred and fifty years to effectively eliminate the independent wildcatters from the pricing equation.

The Bush Impact

Less than 90-minutes after he took his oath of office on January 20, 2001, President George W. Bush doublecrossed the Seven Sisters for the first time. Calling his new chief-of-staff Andrew Card to the Oval Office, Bush instructed Card to distribute a memo throughout the bureaucracy to ordering all agency heads to refrain from publishing any new or pending regulations in the Federal Register, effectively killing the spate of last minute Executive Orders issued by outgoing President Bill Clinton. Four weeks before the November election, Clinton began issuing environmental regulations—most of them dealing with carbon dioxide emissions—suggesting Clinton knew that that Al Gore, who would have been known as the "Environmental President" had he won the White House, would not win the election. Clinton wrote an average of 210 pages of new EPA regulations per day during that four week period—the highest rate of new regulations by any president. In addition, Bush suspended all of the last minute Clinton EOs that had already been published in the Federal Register but had not yet been inplemented.

Bush launched a vigorous review of all of Clinton's last minute edicts because they were issued without proper disclosure. In particular what Bush wanted to rescind were the Clinton emissions control Executive Orders that would force US factories to close down, transferring American jobs to Mexico—and China. Frank O'Donnell, the Executive Director of the Washington, DC-based Clean Air Trust was contacted by Senate Democrats who were stunned by the Bush action. O'Donnell's organization filed a lawsuit in the US Supreme Court against Bush and newly-appointed EPA Director-designate Christine Todd-Whitman. The Clean Air Trust argued that denying Bush the right to suspend Clinton's regulations would prevent 360 thousand asthma attacks and more than 386 thousand other cases of respiratory illnesses. In addition, the Clean Air Trust claimed, it would prevent 1.5 million lost work days, 7,100 hospital admissions and 2,400 emergency room visits by asthma patients each year. In additon, they claimed, stopping Bush would reduce acid rain and reduce the risk of eutrophication and nitrification of fresh water bodies in the United States.

When the EPA and the Bush White House filed its rebuttal in court, they argued that implementing Clinton's burdensome executive orders would be too costly on the taxpayers. In delivering its decision, the high court ruled that upholding national health standards should be based on science, not cost. In this one instance, the high court said, the president lacked the right to suspend the Executive Orders of a previous president since, they ruled, Bush's decision was entirely political and was not based on the best interests of the American people.

On June 26, 2002 the Democratically-controlled Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee narrowly rejected an amendment to the Clean Air Act of 1970 that would have weakened carbon dioxide standards that threatened to close hundreds of industrial plants in the United States. The effort to defeat the legislation written by Sen. Bob Smith [R-NH] was led by Committee Chairman Jim Jeffords [i-VT] the turncoat Republican Senator who switched parties and gave control of the US Senate to the Democrats. (Bush became the first president to be denied the right to suspend an Executive Order written by a previous president.) When the US Supreme Court's decision was announced, O'Donnell said: "Today's vote was a resounding defeat for President Bush. His so-called 'Clear Skies' plan has just been sent to the ash heap of history." When he wrote the majority opinion for the high court, Associate Justice Steven Breyer cited the late Sen. Edmund S. Muskie, co-author of the The Clean Air Act, saying the legislation was not "...to be limited by what is or appears to be technologically or economically feasible [but] to establish what the public interest requires to protect the health of persons [even if that means [industries will be asked to do what seems to be impossible at the present time." (It is important to realize that when the Clean Air Act of 1970 was enacted, the utopian transnational industrialists believed that world government would occur by 1980, and that the transfer of the job base of the United States to the human capital in the third world had to take place before would government could happen.)

Bush—who has been labeled a neocon by far right zealot "conservatives" who are, for the most part, really left-of-center neocons—began biting the hand that fed him within an hour of taking office in 2001. While I personally disagree with Bush's left-of-center spending, I agree with his throwing a monkey wrench into the cogs of Big Oil and the environmentalist organizations the transnationalists funded to kill all independent competition in the oil industry, and using the myth of man-made global warming to create the catalyst that would allow the barons of business to proceed with an EPA-mandated transfer of the industrial strength of America to the third world—including those nations who are determined to destroy the United States. When that strength vanishes, so will America. It will have been successfuly eclipsed by the taskmasters of the New World Order who have tried, since the dawning of the post-World War II world, to replace the liberty of America with the failed "democracy" of communism. America's military strength comes from its industrial strength. Rob the industrial strength of a nation, and you take not only its economic vigor, you also steal its military might.

Extreme analogy? Not as extreme as you think. The "bad news" that theoretically started the last oil spike was an announcement last month that the production of ethanol was only about 85% to 90% of that projected by the Energy Information Administration. The oil industry argued that because the ethanol industry did not meet the president's so-called "Advanced Energy Initiative," the shortfall caused the price spike.

The oil industry would have us believe that ethanol shortfalls caused the current wave of price spikes that has driven up the price of gasoline nationwide by almost a half dollar, with retail prices at the pump now setting at, or just above, $3.00 per gallon. The average prices nationwide was $2.92 a weel ago. Now, let's look at that "shortfall." Does logic suggest such a shortfall could genuinely cause a sufficient fear in the oil futures market to send shock waves through the industry?

The media thinks so.

In fact it's convinced that the price at the pumps jumped because new federal fuel-switching requirements created sporadic nationwide shortages. Media spinmeisters for the oil industry claimed that the new federal requirement mandating that all gasoline contain 10% to 15% ethanol in order to stretch America's fuel reserves was compounded by rising tensions over Iran's nuclear ambitions. Both conspired to drive up the price of crude.

Oil prices soared above $75 per barrel on Friday, driving retail gas prices to the $3 per gallon threshold. America's daily consumption of oil at the end of 2004 (the last complete set of figures) was 20,731,000 barrels of which 9.1 million barrels were refined for gasoline. (Less than 50% of the oil that is refined in the United States is sold at the nation's gas stations. Most is used for industry, yet the consumers—not industry—are blamed for the rapidly escalating price of oil.) To blame an ethanol production shortfall for the latest round of gasoline price spikes borders on stupidity since the Federal Reformulated Fuels Act of 2005—had it successfully sidestepped the hurdles put before it by environmentalists in the US Senate—would have mandated that ethanol production double by 2012, from 3.9 billion to 7.5 billion gallons.

At that time—6 years from now—ethanol production would reduce the consumption of oil by 80 thousand barrels per year, or less than 1% of America's gasoline usage. Today, 3.9 billion gallons of ethanol is a mere drop in the consumption bucket. A 10% to 15% drop in ethanol production means a shortfall of 39 to 50 million gallons of auto fuel over a one year period—or 100 to 180 thousand gallons per day. That's less than 1/2 of 1% of the supply. It would barely register a ripple in the gasoline pool, let alone cause a spike severe enough to impact retail prices.

The oil industry statement that oil prices initially spiked because of the shortfall in ethanol is a total sham. The oil industry uses any excuse from hangnails to a brief afternoon rain shower to manipulate the futures market. But what amazes me most is that the American public—and whatever presidential administration is in the White House—can't put two-and-two together and ask why it is that [a] the oil industry is allowed to bid up the prices of their own product, or [b] when the futures market bids up the price of oil for the next quarter, or the next year, why it is that the price of gasoline at the pump spikes the following day?

The Congress of the United States has an obligation to the taxpayers—not the fat cats who fill their campaign coffers“to make sure we are not being gouged by greedy oil companies—or gas station operators or owners. Since they have no actual cost increases on the oil they have in their holding tanks, neither the oil companies nor the gas stations that sell the refined oil product, should be allowed to arbitrarily raise their prices in anticipation of a price increase somewhere down the supply chain that theoretically will not occur for three to six months.

Fearmongering only works today when the catalyst that triggers that fear exists. The oil industry counts on that to justify the price increases they want to implement without anyone being able to accuse them of price fixing or gouging.

The first shoe dropped early last week when oil passed $70 per barrel on the announcement that rebels in Nigeria were attacking oil pipelines in the African nation. The second shoe dropped with speculation about heightened diplomatic tensions between the United States and Iran. Neither problem impacted current oil supply levels. Nor would either threaten the availability of crude oil in the immediate future since Saudi Arabia and the UAE have agreed to make up any shortfalls resulting from actions taken by the governments or dissidents in either nation.

The price of oil is skyrocketing because the oil giants need it to skyrocket. The oil cartel needs to go after deep oil. Deep oil is found below basalt in the mantle where oil is created. Drilling through granite and basalt to reach it is an expensive proposition. The Russians know that because they've been doing it since 1967.

The oil cartel knows that for that type of drilling to be profitable, oil needs to be at $100 barrel. But that's only because the oil cartel is used to gouging the consumers. Their quarterly earnings statements prove that.

The media aside, it really doesn't matter how many shoes "drop" since the subtle "thud" of the shoes hitting the ground aren't the reason for high oil prices—or its negative impact on the stock market or, for that matter, for the escalating price of gold. First, oil coming from decayed dinosaurs is a myth. Second, peak oil is a myth. Third, the world is not running out of oil although the planet is not replenishing it as fast as man can use it. Fourth, the oil industry knows all this since Yukos Oil proved it.

Yukos Oil, Russia's oil monopoly, proved that oil gravitates to the surface of the planet from the hot magma where its created. Oil seeps upwards through the strata of granite and basalt to the mantra where it is trapped in oil pools. The Soviets have published over 200 papers on deep oil. Most of those papers have never been widely distributed in the west simply because hard intelligence that contradicts the views of the Seven Sisters doesn't set well at 120 Braodway. And, views that don't set well at 120 Broadway likewise don't set well up the street at 26 Broad. What Standard Oil doesn't like generally does not set well with the investment bankers at JP Morgan & Company or at the Stock Exchange.

Although the Seven Sisters know that oil is not really a fossil fuel created by decaying dinosaurs; and they also know that oil is self-replenishing. They also know that deep oil production is much more costly than drilling shallow oil wells where the oil is pooled within the Earth's crust rather than its mantra. But, they also know that oil does not replenish itself as fast as we use it. Big oil, and the wealthy transnational free market capitalists and communist industrialists and bankers who control the global oil cartel are the driving force behind the emerging one-world economy and a quasi-democratic one-world political systemÑa view their oil partners in the Middle East don't share.

But big oil needs the oil sheiks since the flow rates of the Gulf oil fields in Iraq and Saudi Arabia replenish faster than any oil reservoirs anywhere else in the world. It is estimated that the Gulf oil fields will continue forever even though the sheiks are seeing flow slowdowns of between 20% to 30%. (The slowdown is not the result of diminishing oil reserves but contaminants in the crude that increase friction and slowdown the flow. Inevitably, the initial flow rate will slowly decline—a fact known to every oilman in the businessÑbut that slowdown is not indicative that the well is running out of oil.)

You now have a picture of the oil industry as it really is. There is no oil crisis. There are no global oil shortages. There is, however, a massive gasoline crisis thanks to the Seven Sisters and their environmentalist allies who believe that "fossil fuels" are destroying the world when in fact the increased levels of carbon dioxide in the world provide the increased crop yields that is now feeding the world. If carbon dioxide is dramatically reduced as the environmentalists who believe its the cause of global warming insist it needs to be, crop yields would be dramatically reduced, the amount of arable farmland in the world would shrink, and global starvation would increase dramatically.

Global warming is a fact because global warming is a cyclic event. Whether man was here or not, global warming and global cooling would occur. If there was not a single internal combustion engine, nor one ounce of carbon emissions, global warming—to some degree or another—would still occur. The gasoline crisis exists because John D. Rockefeller, Sr. learned early on his path to becoming the single wealthiest man in the world that when you were determined to control the oil industry it didn't matter how much oil was pumped from the ground, it only mattered how much of it was refined.

Until its refined, crude oil has no commercial value. Standard Oil, which controlled 85% of the world's oil output by 1885, was not an oil driller. Standard Oil was an oil refinery. Until US District Court Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis used the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1896 to break up Standard Oil on Aug. 3, 1907, Rockefeller—who was the most hated man in America—simply undercut his competition until they went bankrupt. He bought their assets and absorbed whatever parts of the companies added value to Standard Oil. In most cases, Rockefeller simply boarded up the buildings since his core objective in buying them was to eliminate what he viewed as an excessive glut of refineries. In the equation of supply and demand,

Standard Oil made sure that demand always exceeded the supply. As long as demand exceeds supply and regardless how many barrels of oil are waiting to be refined, the price of oil—and conversely, the price of gasoline at the pump—will continue to rise.

When the US Supreme Court confirmed Landis' breakup of Standard Oil on March 15, 1911, the US Justice Department made it clear to Standard Oil and the Seven Sisters (as the spun-off oil companies were labeled by the media) that Standard Oil's anti-competitive heavy-handedness would no longer be tolerated. Through the first half of the 20th century the American oil cartel devised the master scheme that would allow them to eliminate their competition without fingers being pointed at them. And, they spent the second half of the 20th centuryÑand billions of dollars—bringing their plan to fruition. They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams during the co-presidency of Bill and Hillary Clinton thanks in large part to the environmental vice president, Al Gore. When the US Supreme Court completed the breakup of Standard Oil on Mar. 15, 1911, the oil giant and the Seven Sisters appeared to have gotten the message—price-fixing and running competition out of business simply would not be allowed. Market forces would prevail, and prices would be determined by the basic laws of supply and demand.

The Seven Sisters got the message because it was, after all, their message. When you control supply, you control demand. Artificially choking off supply by crushing the competition, however, would likely be construed by the free enterprise watchdogs as a restraint of trade rather than a free exercise of entrepreneurialism by those with the financial muscle to overwhelm their competitors.

The Seven Sisters had to find a way to entice the government to not only crush their independent competition in the oil and natural gas drilling and refining business, but to prevent new competitors from entering either the drilling or refining arenas in the United States. That was the problem facing Standard Oil in the 1950s and 60s. They solved the problem by funding a new industry and hiring the lobbyists to muscle their demands through Congress.

The 1960s saw the birth of the radical environmental movement through the exploitation of a myth—global warming caused by a population explosion that threatened the existence of human life on Earth. No one questioned the funding that brought into existence radical environmentalist organizations like Greenpeace, the Nature's Conservancy, the Sierra Club, the World Wildlife Fund, the Wilderness Society, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the Earth Island Institute and scores of lesser known radical groups like Earth First!.

All of the mainstream environmentalists had one thing in common—their source of funding. Where the radical, violent, fringe environmentalists received most of their funding from socialist organizations and foundations, the mainstream environmentalists received their initial funding from the world's oil giants and the foundations of the international industrialists and bankers.

Their job? To protest sufficiently loud enough to grab the media headlines. The goal of the environmentalists is to raise the specter of global warming, convince the people of the world that global warming is a threat and then successfully lobby Congress to ban all carbon fuel emissions.

Wait a minute. Why would the oil cartel fund an advocacy industry to lobby for the banning of carbon dioxide emissions? Because the environmentalists were created to fight the fight the oil cartel could not legally wage—to financially weaken and destroy the independent oil industry, particularly the independent oil refiners. Partnering with the oil cartel was America's Fortune 500 companies who spent 60 years watching their bottom lines shrink even as their industries grew from national corporations to behemoth transnational giants.

Americans, whose affluence provided them with a lifestyle unequaled anywhere else in the world, had everything. But, because they did, America became a replacement market, new fad items notwithstanding. By jumping on the global warming band wagon, as Bill Clinton signed NAFTA into law, he also signed the UN Convention on Climate Change and the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. Both covenants had been flatly rejected by the Bush-41 Administration at the UN Rio Summit as the product of voodoo science.

In 1995 radical environmentalists Vice President Al Gore and former Senator Timothy Wirth [D-CO], a Clinton Administration Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs, were the key authors of the Convention on Climate Change, drafted at Kyoto, Japan. The document became known as the Kyoto Protocol. It was the instrument that was to make American manufacturers blameless when they were "forced" to move their factories from the United States to the third world nations in order to minimize global warming and protect the planet.

Somehow I've never been able to understand how carbon dioxide emissions in the United States cause global warming, but carbon dioxide emissions in China, Pakistan, India and Mexico do not. The oil cartel now had a vested partner in their war on global warming. In their search for the consumers of the 21st century, the transnationalist industrialists, bankers and merchant barons of the world needed to find first generation consumers who needed the products they had to sell. Those consumersÑthe human capital of the 21st century—were found in the third world. All that was required for them to become actual consumers were jobs.

Our jobs. The trick was to have Congress create a tariff-free swinging door that would allow 15 million jobs a year to leave the United States and the products those jobs—at greatly reduced wages with little or no fringe benefits—created by nearly slave labor to be returned through the swinging doors to the stores and shops in the most affluent nation in the world without payiing the traditional tariffs that would make them too expensive for the American consumers to buy, thus protecting American industry.

The Houdini part of this stunt was to find a way for Congress to accomplish that feat without being fired by the voters. An ecological alliance with big oil offered the solution. Signing on to the tenets of the Kyoto Protocol were the nation's worst environmental offenders: Union Carbide, E.I. DuPont, Exxon-Mobil, Dow Chemical, Monsanto, Ashland Oil, and scores of others who became among the first to move their industrial plants and assembly line facilities to the third world.

To environmentalists like Al Gore, Kyoto was about protecting the planet from the people living on it. To the labor unions who were tricked by big business into what they thought would be power-sharing the global economy, and who are now fighting it, its about keeping what jobs are left—and providing American union jobs to illegal aliens.

To the politicians who lie about the threat of global warming, its about getting re-elected. To the transnational corporations it's about expanding their bottom line and keeping small competitors from becoming larger ones. And, to the oil cartel, is simply business as usual. They must keep anyone who is not part of the cartel from building oil refineries anywhere in the world because the secret to $100 per barrel oil isn't having enough oil to refine, it's limiting how much refined oil products reach the consumers who need it and will always pay more to get it when there is not enough to go around.

Global warming, like peak oil, is a myth created and promoted by the merchant princes of the world to shift the economic might of the industrialized world to the third world where tomorrow's consumers—70% of the world's population—live in order to provide the incomes they will need to buy the goods and services that will be made available to them. Ecoalarmists in the federal bureaucracy and in Congress, support the latest voodoo statistics provided by the liberal environmental think tanks who claim that the Earth's average temperature could rise by as much as 16 degrees during this century because of increased carbon dioxide or other so-called greenhouse gas emissions. Clearly, temperature increases of 16 degrees over a sustained period of time would be catastrophic and, as the ecoalarmists fear, the potential for serious coastal flooding not only in North America but Europe would be a reality. The State of Florida would be reduced to a series of small islands that would link Tallahassee with Key West.

However, the simple truth is (and most truths are simple realities), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation joined with Duke University researchers to study the question of whether or not 13% of the nations scientists (the number of scientists who jumped on the global warming band wagon) are blowing smoke at us.

After an exhaustive study, the NOAA-Duke study showed the chances that Earth's temperatures will rise even by 11 degrees is only about 5%. These estimates fall in line with all previous studies done by reputable government agencies not being paid by the oil cartel or the "ecology-sensitive" business barons who are hurriedly building their factories in human capital-rich third world countries with 60% or greater unemployment.

Most previous studies were done by environmental advocacy groups or liberal academicians (whose universities are funded with grants not only from the oil cartel and the industrialists who will benefit most from global warming) but from some of the largest environmentalist advocacy groups themselves. In a global warming study released recently by the University of Toronto, a researcher warmed that fully one-fourth of the planet's plants and animals would be extinct by 2050 because of rising temperaturesÑeven though increased carbon dioxide means an increase in plant stimulation, increased rain in formerly arid land, and increased crop yields. Oregon State University issued a paper last year in which its author linked future "societal disruptions"—race riots—to global warming. Harvard University warned Congress in 2004 that global warming had doomed the planet to what the author called "climatic shocks and surprises."

Asked what these surprises would entail, the author of the report didn't know. I guess that's what makes them surprises. The Carnegie Institute noted that the atrium affect of the northern forests in the northeastern United States and Canada would have such an insulating character that the forests alone would raise the Earth's temperatures by at least 6 degrees.

Former vice president Al Gore and his former chief-of-staff, Roy Neel (now a well-heeled Democratic consultant) created a 94-minute ecoalarmist documentary called "An Inconvenient Truth" that was aired in movie theaters starting on May 24. In the film, Gore calls global warming a "planetary emergency." It is not. It is ecoalarmist fearmongering plain and simple. Anti-green environmental groups—as well as the government agencies mentioned above—have tracked the world's average monthly temperatures since 1979, when NASA satellite record-keeping began.

NASA temperature tracking is important because it provides real-time data. It's not a weather forecast, nor is it a whimsical guess. It's the hard data of what is happening to our world as it happens. The data harvested by NASA is being ignored by the greens since that information discredits those who argue that an ecological Armageddon awaits the world in the not to distant future unless the people stop consuming oil, coal or burning wood. Global satellite measurements are made from a series of orbiting platforms that record the average temperatures in various atmospheric layers. Temperature levels at 5,000 feet and 28,000 feet are taken by weather balloons which feed the data to the satellite which, in turn, feeds the data back to NASA. These measurements are accurate to within 0.001 degrees centigrade, and provide climatologists with uniform data for the entire globe. It is far more accurate and therefore, more reliable, data than any earth measurements—or the wild guesses of doomsday pundits.

NASA's global temperature tracking since 1979 reveals typical weather anomalies—unseasonable hot summers or cold winters, or cool summers and warm winters. Overall, NASA's data since 1979 clearly and irrefutably shows no sustained planetary warming. During 1998 when Al Gore defended the Kyoto Protocol because America's 1998 El Nino winter hinted that global warming was fact we needed to get used to, the global temperature departure was -0.094 degrees. Not only was there no global warming, the Earth was actually cooler by a fraction of one degree.

Just don't misunderstand me. Global temperature departures—up and down—are cyclic. They happen. Minor fluctuations in the average temperature departures occur in conjunction with solar activity. Major fluctuations occur every 20 or 30 years or a half century to a century. At the risk of sounding repetitious, global warming is a myth. So is peak oil. You are paying more per gallon for gasoline because you chose to believe the myth. If you didn't believe the myth, you would understand the oil cartel was ripping you off and Congress is doing nothing to protect you. If you didn't believe the myth, you would be angryÑand you would be raising Hell with your Congressman and Senators, reminding them that they are coming up for election in November. And you would tell them that if they don't rein in the gift horses that are filling their campaign war chests with financial fodder, they will be out of work come November. Okay, now you know the whole truth behind the increase in oil prices. What are YOU going to do about it?

Well—once again—for whatever its worth, you have my two cents worth.