This week, the House passed H.R. 5254, the Refinery Permit Process Schedule Act, by a margin of 238 to 179. This bill establishes regulatory certainty for companies as they make long-term decisions to expand oil refining capacity. It will streamline the process for bringing a refinery online by convening all the relevant state and federal agencies to coordinate schedules. It directs the president to identify at least three closed military bases as suitable sites for new refineries, one of which must be designated for biofuel refining.

Additionally, the House passed H.R. 5441, the Fiscal Year 2007 (FY07) Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, by a vote of 389 to 9 as well as H.R. 5521, the Legislative Branch Appropriations for FY07, by a vote of 361 to 53.

An Inconsistent Hysteria

He’s back! Al Gore, whose early 1990s book Earth in the Balance expressed the hope for skyrocketing gas prices in America, has reemerged with a new project. His documentary/science fiction film, An Inconvenient Truth, seeks to conjure up public fear about global warming to the point that people demand that America unilaterally dismantles our engines of economic growth and vitality. By dis-missing the very real diversity of thought on this subject in academia and employing a frantic sense of urgency, Gore himself omits some inconvenient truths.

While global surface temperatures seem to be on a slight upward trend, atmospheric temperatures are not. Furthermore, taking into account the dynamic history of the earth’s climate, there is nothing close to a scientific consensus that the recent rise in surface temperatures can be attributed to human activity. In fact, alarmists like Gore have conveniently forgotten that just a generation ago, some experts feared global cooling. In his June 5th column in the Denver Post, David Harsanyi cited a 1975 Newsweek article that actually warned of a coming ice age. The fear mongers of just three decades ago reported that, “Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change. ... The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.” All this global cooling occurred at a time when the United States was at the height of its heavy industrial development and people were driving gas-guzzling station wagons. What the evidence seems to suggest is that subtle variations in climate may occur in either direction over a period of decades. While we as a people should continue developing environmentally-friendly technology and lifestyles, we should not surrender our common sense in the face of Gore’s unfounded demagoguery.

A Key Victory

The biggest news of the week was the confirmed death of the butcher of thousands of civilians in Iraq. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the mastermind behind hundreds of bombings, kidnappings, and beheadings in Iraq, was killed Wednesday evening by a U.S. air strike outside of Baghdad. Under the guise of dispelling Coalition Forces, this bloody Jordanian thug sought to stir up hostilities between the Shiite majority and his fellow Sunnis. It is encouraging, however, that the intelligence that revealed his location to U.S. forces apparently came from a Sunni source. This is probably the most significant single military action since the capture of Saddam Hussein in 2003. Although al-Zarqawi’s demise certainly does not mark the end of the terrorist insurgency in Iraq, it is a decisive step toward stabilizing that country’s nascent democracy.

Quote of the Week

“If we had withdrawn from Iraq already, as the ‘peace’ movement has been demanding, then one of the most revolting criminals of all time would have been able to claim that he forced us to do it. That would have catapulted Iraq into Stone Age collapse and instated a psychopathic killer as the greatest Muslim soldier since Saladin. As it is, the man is ignominiously dead and his dirty connections a lot closer to being fully exposed. This seems like a good day’s work to me.” – Christopher Hitchens, Slate, June 8, 2006.