The Impacts of Mountain Biking on Wildlife and People

On 30 Mar 2007 14:14:38 -0700, "Bruce Jensen"
wrote:

On Mar 30, 1:07 pm, Mike Vandeman wrote:

I see that you conveniently removed your lie, so no one will know
about it.

I don't think I've drunk any water from there in over 30 years. There
are plenty of people working on that issue, but not enough on
human-free habitat...

Well, there's you...that's one too many. One who could put his wasted
hours to far better use than trolling for arguments.

Don't the lies ever end? I'm not trolling for arguments; I'm educating
fools like you.

& stopping mountain biking.

It isn't the concept that's so bad - it's your extreme, one-size-fits-
all, hard-headed approach. Do you EVER expect anyone to take you
seriously?

Have a nice weekend as you stew in your tiny chamber, afraid of going
outside lest you harm or frighten a bird below whose nest you pass by
40 feet. I will, as I go out and ride my bike responsibly on the Bay
Trail without harming a single animal, observing thousands of them
behaving naturally and freely, and walking among them when I take a
hike in the hills tomorrow.

Bruce Jensen
===
I am working on creating wildlife habitat that is off-limits to
humans ("pure habitat"). Want to help? (I spent the previous 8
years fighting auto dependence and road construction.)

Please don't put a cell phone next to any part of your body that you are fond of!

http://home.pacbell.net/mjvande

On 30 Mar 2007 15:04:14 -0700, "Olebiker" wrote:

On Mar 30, 4:07 pm, Mike Vandeman wrote:
On 30 Mar 2007 09:48:06 -0700, "Olebiker" wrote:

Mike, what are you doing to restore the Hetch Hetchy Canyon? That's
right in your own backyard. Your community's water comes from the
reservoir created by the O'Shaughnessy Dam.

I don't think I've drunk any water from there in over 30 years. There
are plenty of people working on that issue, but not enough on
human-free habitat & stopping mountain biking.

Are you telling me that you buy bottled water to cook? Assuming that
you wash your clothes, you are using water from the reservoir. That
reservoir displaced more wildlife than any mountain bike trail. You
are in a position to help do something about it.

I'm trying to say I haven't used that water AT ALL for 30 years.
Idiot.

What are YOU doing about it?

Trying to get you to clean up your own backyard while I work on
environmental matter in my area.
===
I am working on creating wildlife habitat that is off-limits to
humans ("pure habitat"). Want to help? (I spent the previous 8
years fighting auto dependence and road construction.)

Please don't put a cell phone next to any part of your body that you are fond of!

http://home.pacbell.net/mjvande

On Mar 31, 8:15 am, Mike Vandeman wrote:
On 30 Mar 2007 14:14:38 -0700, "Bruce Jensen"
wrote:

On Mar 30, 1:07 pm, Mike Vandeman wrote:

I see that you conveniently removed your lie, so no one will know
about it.

Feel free to put it back if it makes you feel better or gives you more
ammunition, I don't care. Whatever I may have removed (?) - it
certainly wasn't worth keeping.

I don't think I've drunk any water from there in over 30 years. There
are plenty of people working on that issue, but not enough on
human-free habitat...

Well, there's you...that's one too many. One who could put his wasted
hours to far better use than trolling for arguments.

Don't the lies ever end? I'm not trolling for arguments; I'm educating
fools like you.

Yeah sure. Whatever. You just go on, worrying about whether somebody
of whom you disapprove gets to enjoy walking among the animals. I hope
it gives you great joy. I'm going back to working for things that
actually matter for the animals, like real land preservation,
restoration of habitat and securing the future of persecuted species.

Oh yes, and introducing new people to the joy of observing them.
Nothing guarantees a future for animals in jeopardy like
knowledgeable, well-acquainted new fans, something *your* schemes
discourage and will never achieve.

Bruce Jensen
****************

On Mar 31, 7:15 am, Mike Vandeman wrote:
On 30 Mar 2007 14:14:38 -0700, "Bruce Jensen"
wrote:

On Mar 30, 1:07 pm, Mike Vandeman wrote:

I see that you conveniently removed your lie, so no one will know
about it.

Coal Interests Fight Polar Bear Action :: Unequivocal, Mike Vandeman,
"warming of the climate system is unequivocal"

http://www.statesman.com/blogs/conte...interests.html
Coal Interests Fight Polar Bear Action

An organization representing companies that mine coal and burn it to
make electricity has called on its members to fight the proposed
listing of the polar bear as an endangered or threatened species.

"This will essentially declare 'open season' for environmental lawyers
to sue to block viirtually any project that involves carbon dioxide
emissions," the Western Business Roundtable said in an e-mail.

To settle a lawsuit by environmental groups, the Department of
Interior announced last month that it would take a year to consider
whether global warming and melting Arctic ice justifies declaring the
bear "endangered" or "threatened" under the Endangered Species Act.

"This seems a little unfair, pitting all those big coal companies and
power companies against the poor polar bear," sniffed Frank O'Donnell,
president of Clean Air Watch.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/20...urce=whitelist

Inside the secretive plan to gut the Endangered Species Act

Proposed regulatory changes, obtained by Salon, would destroy the
"safety net for animals and plants on the brink of extinction," say
environmentalists.

March 27, 2007 | The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is maneuvering to
fundamentally weaken the Endangered Species Act, its strategy laid out
in an internal 117-page draft proposal obtained by Salon. The proposed
changes limit the number of species that can be protected and curtail
the acres of wildlife habitat to be preserved. It shifts authority to
enforce the act from the federal government to the states, and it
dilutes legal barriers that protect habitat from sprawl, logging or
mining.

"The proposed changes fundamentally gut the intent of the Endangered
Species Act," says Jan Hasselman, a Seattle attorney with
Earthjustice, an environmental law firm, who helped Salon interpret
the proposal. "This is a no-holds-barred end run around one of
America's most popular environmental protections. If these regulations
stand up, the act will no longer provide a safety net for animals and
plants on the brink of extinction."

In recent months, the Fish and Wildlife Service has gone to
extraordinary efforts to keep drafts of regulatory changes from the
public. All copies of the working document were given a number
corresponding to a person, so that leaked copies could be traced to
that individual. An e-mail sent in March from an assistant regional
director at the Fish and Wildlife Service to agency staff, asking for
comments on and corrections to the first draft, underscored the
concern with secrecy: "Please Keep close hold for now. Dale [Hall,
director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service] does not want this
stuff leaking out to stir up discontent based on speculation."

Many Fish and Wildlife Service employees believe the draft is not
based on "defensible science," says a federal employee who asked to
remain anonymous. Yet "there is genuine fear of retaliation for
communicating that to the media. People are afraid for their jobs."

Chris Tollefson, a spokesperson for the service, says that while it's
accurate to characterize the agency as trying to keep the draft under
wraps, the agency has every intention of communicating with the public
about the proposed changes; the draft just hasn't been ready. And, he
adds, it could still be changed as part of a forthcoming formal review
process.

Administration critics characterize the secrecy as a way to maintain
spin control, says Kieran Suckling, policy director of the Center for
Biological Diversity, a national environmental group. "This
administration will often release a 300-page-long document at a press
conference for a newspaper story that will go to press in two hours,
giving the media or public no opportunity to digest it and figure out
what's going on," Suckling says. "[Interior Secretary Dirk] Kempthorne
will give a feel-good quote about how the new regulations are good for
the environment, and they can win the public relations war."

In some ways, the proposed changes to the Endangered Species Act
should come as no surprise. President Bush has hardly been one of its
fans. Under his reign, the administration has granted 57 species
endangered status, the action in each case being prompted by a
lawsuit. That's fewer than in any other administration in history --
and far fewer than were listed during the administrations of Reagan
(253), Clinton (521) or Bush I (234). Furthermore, during this
administration, nearly half of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
employees who work with endangered species reported that they had been
directed by their superiors to ignore scientific evidence that would
result in recommendations for the protection of species, according to
a 2005 survey of more than 1,400 service biologists, ecologists and
botanists conducted by Public Employees for Environmental
Responsibility, a nonprofit organization.

"We are not allowed to be honest and forthright, we are expected to
rubber stamp everything," wrote a Fish and Wildlife Service biologist
as part of the survey. "I have 20 years of federal service in this and
this is the worst it has ever been."

The agency has long seen a need to improve the act, says Tollefson.
"This is a look at what's possible," he says. "Too much of our time as
an agency is spent responding to litigation rather than working on
recovering the species that are most in need. The current way the act
is run creates disincentives for people to get involved with
recovering species."

Kempthorne, boss of the Fish and Wildlife Service, has been an
outspoken critic of the act. When he was a U.S. senator from Idaho in
the late 1990s, he championed legislation that would have allowed
government agencies to exempt their actions from Endangered Species
Act regulations, and would have required federal agents to conduct
cost-benefit analyses when considering whether to list a species as
endangered. (The legislation failed.) Last June, in his early days as
interior secretary, Kempthorne told reporters, "I really believe that
we can make improvements to the act itself."

Kempthorne is keeping good on his promise. The proposed draft is
littered with language lifted directly from both Kempthorne's 1998
legislation as well as from a contentious bill by former Rep. Richard
Pombo, R-Calif. (which was also shot down by Congress). It's "a wish
list of regulations that the administration and its industry allies
have been talking about for years," says Suckling.

Written in terse, dry legal language, the proposed draft doesn't make
for easy reading. However, the changes, often seemingly subtle,
generally serve to strip the Fish and Wildlife Service of the power to
do its stated job: to protect wildlife. Some verge on the biologically
ridiculous, say critics, while others are a clear concession to
industry and conservative Western governors who have long complained
that the act degrades the economies of their states by preventing
natural-resource extraction.

One change would significantly limit the number of species eligible
for endangered status. Currently, if a species is likely to become
extinct in "the foreseeable future" -- a species-specific timeframe
that can stretch up to 300 years -- it's a candidate for act
protections. However, the new rules scale back that timeline to mean
either 20 years or 10 generations (the agency can choose which
timeline). For certain species with long life spans, such as killer
whales, grizzly bears or wolves, two decades isn't even one
generation. So even if they might be in danger of extinction, they
would not make the endangered species list because they'd be unlikely
to die out in two decades.

"It makes absolutely no sense biologically," wrote Hasselman in an e-
mail. "One of the Act's weaknesses is that species aren't protected
until they're already in trouble and this proposal puts that flaw on
steroids."

Perhaps the most significant proposed change gives state governors the
opportunity and funding to take over virtually every aspect of the act
from the federal government. This includes not only the right to
create species-recovery plans and the power to veto the reintroduction
of endangered species within state boundaries, but even the authority
to determine what plants and animals get protection. For plants and
animals in Western states, that's bad news: State politicians
throughout the region howled in opposition to the reintroduction of
the Mexican gray wolf into Arizona and the Northern Rockies wolf into
Yellowstone National Park.

"If states are involved, the act would only get minimally enforced,"
says Bob Hallock, a recently retired 34-year veteran of the Fish and
Wildlife Service who, as an endangered species specialist, worked with
state agencies in Idaho, Washington and Montana. "States are, if
anything, closer to special economic interests. They're more
manipulated. The states have not demonstrated the will or interest in
upholding the act. It's why we created a federal law in the first
place."

Additional tweaks in the law would have a major impact. For instance,
the proposal would narrow the definition of a species' geographic
range from the landscape it inhabited historically to the land it
currently occupies. Since the main reason most plants and animals head
toward extinction is due to limited habitat, the change would strongly
hamper the government's ability to protect chunks of land and allow
for a healthy recovery in the wild.

The proposal would also allow both ongoing and planned projects by
such federal agencies as the Army Corps of Engineers and the Forest
Service to go forward, even when scientific evidence indicates that
the projects may drive a species to extinction. Under the new
regulations, as long as the dam or logging isn't hastening the
previous rate of extinction, it's approved. "This makes recovery of
species impossible," says Suckling. (You can read the entire proposal,
a PDF file, here.)

Gutting the Endangered Species Act will only thicken the pall that has
hung over the Fish and Wildlife Service for the past six years,
Hallock says. "They [the Bush administration] don't want the
regulations to be effective. People in the agency are like a bunch of
whipped dogs," he says. "I think it's just unacceptable to go around
squashing other species; they're of incalculable benefit to us. The
optimism we had when this agency started has absolutely been dashed."


http://www.earthjustice.org/news/pre...otections.html
Bush Administration Rewrite of Endangered Species Act Regulations
Would Gut Protections

Hush-hush proposal "a no-holds-barred end run around one of America's
most popular laws"

Washington, DC -- A secret draft of regulations that fundamentally
rewrite the Endangered Species Act was leaked to two environmental
organizations, which provided them to the press last night An article
in Salon quotes Earthjustice attorney Jan Hasselman saying, "The
proposed changes fundamentally gut the intent of the Endangered
Species Act."

The changes are fiercely technical and complicated, but make future
listings extremely difficult, redefine key concepts to the detriment
of protected species, virtually hand over administration of the act to
hostile states, and severely restrict habitat protections.

Many of the changes -- lifted from unsuccessful legislative proposals
from then-Senator (now Interior Secretary) Dirk Kempthorne and the
recently defeated congressman Richard Pombo -- are reactions to
policies and practices established as a result of litigation filed by
environmental organizations including Earthjustice.

"After the failure of these legislative proposals in the last
Congress, the Bush administration has opted to gut the Endangered
Species Act through the only avenue left open: administrative
regulations," said Hasselman. "This end-run around the will of
Congress and the American people will not succeed."

A major change would make it more difficult for a species to gain
protection, by scaling back the "foreseeable future" timeframe in
which to consider whether a species is likely to become extinct.
Instead of looking far enough ahead to be able to reasonably determine
whether a species could be heading for extinction, the new regulations
would drastically shorten the timeframe to either 20 years or 10
generations at the agency's discretion. For species with long
generations like killer whales and grizzly bears, this truncated view
of the future isn't nearly enough time to accurately predict whether
they are at-risk now.

"These draft regulations represent a total rejection of the values
held by the vast majority Americans: that we have a responsibility to
protect imperiled species and the special places they call home," said
Kate Freund, Legislative Associate at Earthjustice.

According to several sources within the Fish and Wildlife Service
quoted by Salon, hostility to the law within the agency has never been
so intense. "I have 20 years of federal service in this and this is
the worst it has ever been," one unnamed source is quoted as saying.

In addition, the proposal would allow projects by the Forest Service
and other agencies to proceed even if scientific evidence suggests
that the projects might drive species to extinction so long as the
rate of decline doesn't accelerate owing to the project.

The Bush administration's antipathy to the law is shown by the numbers
of species it has protected, in each case as the result of litigation
-- 57. By comparison, 253 species were listed during the Reagan
administration, 521 under Clinton, and 234 under Bush I.

The administration reportedly had expected to reveal the new
regulations in a few weeks. The draft regulations must be published in
the Federal Register for public comment before they can become final,
which is likely to be at least a year off.

Contact:

Jan Hasselman, Earthjustice, (206) 343-7340, ext. 25

On Mar 31, 7:17 am, Mike Vandeman wrote:
On 30 Mar 2007 15:04:14 -0700, "Olebiker" wrote:

On Mar 30, 4:07 pm, Mike Vandeman wrote:
On 30 Mar 2007 09:48:06 -0700, "Olebiker" wrote:

Mike, what are you doing to restore the Hetch Hetchy Canyon? That's
right in your own backyard. Your community's water comes from the
reservoir created by the O'Shaughnessy Dam.

I don't think I've drunk any water from there in over 30 years. There
are plenty of people working on that issue, but not enough on
human-free habitat & stopping mountain biking.

Are you telling me that you buy bottled water to cook? Assuming that
you wash your clothes, you are using water from the reservoir. That
reservoir displaced more wildlife than any mountain bike trail. You
are in a position to help do something about it.

I'm trying to say I haven't used that water AT ALL for 30 years.
Idiot.

What are YOU doing about it?

Trying to get you to clean up your own backyard while I work on
environmental matter in my area.


The denial industry -- TASSC, EXXON & Serial Killer Tobacco Lies

http://environment.guardian.co.uk/cl...875762,00.html


For years, a network of fake citizens' groups and bogus scientific
bodies has been claiming that science of global warming is
inconclusive. They set back action on climate change by a decade. But
who funded them? Exxon's involvement is well known, but not the
strange role of Big Tobacco. In the first of three extracts from his
new book, George Monbiot tells a bizarre and shocking new story


ExxonMobil is the world's most profitable corporation. Its sales now
amount to more than $1bn a day. It makes most of this money from oil,
and has more to lose than any other company from efforts to tackle
climate change. To safeguard its profits, ExxonMobil needs to sow
doubt about whether serious action needs to be taken on climate
change. But there are difficulties: it must confront a scientific
consensus as strong as that which maintains that smoking causes lung
cancer or that HIV causes Aids. So what's its strategy?

Article continues
The website Exxonsecrets.org, using data found in the company's
official documents, lists 124 organisations that have taken money from
the company or work closely with those that have. These organisations
take a consistent line on climate change: that the science is
contradictory, the scientists are split, environmentalists are
charlatans, liars or lunatics, and if governments took action to
prevent global warming, they would be endangering the global economy
for no good reason. The findings these organisations dislike are
labelled "junk science". The findings they welcome are labelled "sound
science".

Among the organisations that have been funded by Exxon are such well-
known websites and lobby groups as TechCentralStation, the Cato
Institute and the Heritage Foundation. Some of those on the list have
names that make them look like grassroots citizens' organisations or
academic bodies: the Centre for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global
Change, for example. One or two of them, such as the Congress of
Racial Equality, are citizens' organisations or academic bodies, but
the line they take on climate change is very much like that of the
other sponsored groups. While all these groups are based in America,
their publications are read and cited, and their staff are interviewed
and quoted, all over the world.

By funding a large number of organisations, Exxon helps to create the
impression that doubt about climate change is widespread. For those
who do not understand that scientific findings cannot be trusted if
they have not appeared in peer-reviewed journals, the names of these
institutes help to suggest that serious researchers are challenging
the consensus.

This is not to claim that all the science these groups champion is
bogus. On the whole, they use selection, not invention. They will find
one contradictory study - such as the discovery of tropospheric
cooling, which, in a garbled form, has been used by Peter Hitchens in
the Mail on Sunday - and promote it relentlessly. They will continue
to do so long after it has been disproved by further work. So, for
example, John Christy, the author of the troposphere paper, admitted
in August 2005 that his figures were incorrect, yet his initial
findings are still being circulated and championed by many of these
groups, as a quick internet search will show you.

But they do not stop there. The chairman of a group called the Science
and Environmental Policy Project is Frederick Seitz. Seitz is a
physicist who in the 1960s was president of the US National Academy of
Sciences. In 1998, he wrote a document, known as the Oregon Petition,
which has been cited by almost every journalist who claims that
climate change is a myth.

The document reads as follows: "We urge the United States government
to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto,
Japan, in December 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed
limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the
advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare
of mankind. There is no convincing scientific evidence that human
release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is
causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating
of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate.
Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in
atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the
natural plant and animal environments of the Earth."

Anyone with a degree was entitled to sign it. It was attached to a
letter written by Seitz, entitled Research Review of Global Warming
Evidence. The lead author of the "review" that followed Seitz's letter
is a Christian fundamentalist called Arthur B Robinson. He is not a
professional climate scientist. It was co-published by Robinson's
organisation - the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine - and an
outfit called the George C Marshall Institute, which has received
$630,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998. The other authors were Robinson's
22-year-old son and two employees of the George C Marshall Institute.
The chairman of the George C Marshall Institute was Frederick Seitz.

The paper maintained that: "We are living in an increasingly lush
environment of plants and animals as a result of the carbon dioxide
increase. Our children will enjoy an Earth with far more plant and
animal life than that with which we now are blessed. This is a
wonderful and unexpected gift from the Industrial Revolution."

It was printed in the font and format of the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences: the journal of the organisation of which
Seitz - as he had just reminded his correspondents - was once
president.

Soon after the petition was published, the National Academy of
Sciences released this statement: "The NAS Council would like to make
it clear that this petition has nothing to do with the National
Academy of Sciences and that the manuscript was not published in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences or in any other peer-
reviewed journal. The petition does not reflect the conclusions of
expert reports of the Academy."

But it was too late. Seitz, the Oregon Institute and the George C
Marshall Institute had already circulated tens of thousands of copies,
and the petition had established a major presence on the internet.
Some 17,000 graduates signed it, the majority of whom had no
background in climate science. It has been repeatedly cited - by
global-warming sceptics such as David Bellamy, Melanie Phillips and
others - as a petition by climate scientists. It is promoted by the
Exxon-sponsored sites as evidence that there is no scientific
consensus on climate change.

All this is now well known to climate scientists and
environmentalists. But what I have discovered while researching this
issue is that the corporate funding of lobby groups denying that
manmade climate change is taking place was initiated not by Exxon, or
by any other firm directly involved in the fossil fuel industry. It
was started by the tobacco company Philip Morris.

In December 1992, the US Environmental Protection Agency published a
500-page report called Respiratory Health Effects of Passive Smoking.
It found that "the widespread exposure to environmental tobacco smoke
(ETS) in the United States presents a serious and substantial public
health impact. In adults: ETS is a human lung carcinogen, responsible
for approximately 3,000 lung cancer deaths annually in US non-smokers.
In children: ETS exposure is causally associated with an increased
risk of lower respiratory tract infections such as bronchitis and
pneumonia. This report estimates that 150,000 to 300,000 cases
annually in infants and young children up to 18 months of age are
attributable to ETS."

Had it not been for the settlement of a major class action against the
tobacco companies in the US, we would never have been able to see what
happened next. But in 1998 they were forced to publish their internal
documents and post them on the internet.

Within two months of its publication, Philip Morris, the world's
biggest tobacco firm, had devised a strategy for dealing with the
passive-smoking report. In February 1993 Ellen Merlo, its senior vice-
president of corporate affairs, sent a letter to William I Campbell,
Philip Morris's chief executive officer and president, explaining her
intentions: "Our overriding objective is to discredit the EPA
report ... Concurrently, it is our objective to prevent states and
cities, as well as businesses, from passive-smoking bans."

To this end, she had hired a public relations company called APCO. She
had attached the advice it had given her. APCO warned that: "No matter
how strong the arguments, industry spokespeople are, in and of
themselves, not always credible or appropriate messengers."

So the fight against a ban on passive smoking had to be associated
with other people and other issues. Philip Morris, APCO said, needed
to create the impression of a "grassroots" movement - one that had
been formed spontaneously by concerned citizens to fight
"overregulation". It should portray the danger of tobacco smoke as
just one "unfounded fear" among others, such as concerns about
pesticides and cellphones. APCO proposed to set up "a national
coalition intended to educate the media, public officials and the
public about the dangers of 'junk science'. Coalition will address
credibility of government's scientific studies, risk-assessment
techniques and misuse of tax dollars ... Upon formation of Coalition,
key leaders will begin media outreach, eg editorial board tours,
opinion articles, and brief elected officials in selected states."

APCO would found the coalition, write its mission statements, and
"prepare and place opinion articles in key markets". For this it
required $150,000 for its own fees and $75,000 for the coalition's
costs.

By May 1993, as another memo from APCO to Philip Morris shows, the
fake citizens' group had a name: the Advancement of Sound Science
Coalition. It was important, further letters stated, "to ensure that
TASSC has a diverse group of contributors"; to "link the tobacco issue
with other more 'politically correct' products"; and to associate
scientific studies that cast smoking in a bad light with "broader
questions about government research and regulations" - such as "global
warming", "nuclear waste disposal" and "biotechnology". APCO would
engage in the "intensive recruitment of high-profile representatives
from business and industry, scientists, public officials, and other
individuals interested in promoting the use of sound science".

By September 1993, APCO had produced a "Plan for the Public Launching
of TASSC". The media launch would not take place in "Washington, DC or
the top media markets of the country. Rather, we suggest creating a
series of aggressive, decentralised launches in several targeted local
and regional markets across the country. This approach ... avoids
cynical reporters from major media: less reviewing/challenging of
TASSC messages."

The media coverage, the public relations company hoped, would enable
TASSC to "establish an image of a national grassroots coalition". In
case the media asked hostile questions, APCO circulated a sheet of
answers, drafted by Philip Morris. The first question was:

"Isn't it true that Philip Morris created TASSC to act as a front
group for it?

"A: No, not at all. As a large corporation, PM belongs to many
national, regional, and state business, public policy, and legislative
organisations. PM has contributed to TASSC, as we have with various
groups and corporations across the country."

There are clear similarities between the language used and the
approaches adopted by Philip Morris and by the organisations funded by
Exxon. The two lobbies use the same terms, which appear to have been
invented by Philip Morris's consultants. "Junk science" meant peer-
reviewed studies showing that smoking was linked to cancer and other
diseases. "Sound science" meant studies sponsored by the tobacco
industry suggesting that the link was inconclusive. Both lobbies
recognised that their best chance of avoiding regulation was to
challenge the scientific consensus. As a memo from the tobacco company
Brown and Williamson noted, "Doubt is our product since it is the best
means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the mind of
the general public. It is also the means of establishing a
controversy." Both industries also sought to distance themselves from
their own campaigns, creating the impression that they were
spontaneous movements of professionals or ordinary citizens: the
"grassroots".

But the connection goes further than that. TASSC, the "coalition"
created by Philip Morris, was the first and most important of the
corporate-funded organisations denying that climate change is taking
place. It has done more damage to the campaign to halt it than any
other body.

TASSC did as its founders at APCO suggested, and sought funding from
other sources. Between 2000 and 2002 it received $30,000 from Exxon.
The website it has financed - JunkScience.com - has been the main
entrepot for almost every kind of climate-change denial that has found
its way into the mainstream press. It equates environmentalists with
Nazis, communists and terrorists. It flings at us the accusations that
could justifably be levelled against itself: the website claims, for
example, that it is campaigning against "faulty scientific data and
analysis used to advance special and, often, hidden agendas". I have
lost count of the number of correspondents who, while questioning
manmade global warming, have pointed me there.

The man who runs it is called Steve Milloy. In 1992, he started
working for APCO - Philip Morris's consultants. While there, he set up
the JunkScience site. In March 1997, the documents show, he was
appointed TASSC's executive director. By 1998, as he explained in a
memo to TASSC board members, his JunkScience website was was being
funded by TASSC. Both he and the "coalition" continued to receive
money from Philip Morris. An internal document dated February 1998
reveals that TASSC took $200,000 from the tobacco company in 1997.
Philip Morris's 2001 budget document records a payment to Steven
Milloy of $90,000. Altria, Philip Morris's parent company, admits that
Milloy was under contract to the tobacco firm until at least the end
of 2005.

He has done well. You can find his name attached to letters and
articles seeking to discredit passive-smoking studies all over the
internet and in the academic databases. He has even managed to reach
the British Medical Journal: I found a letter from him there which
claimed that the studies it had reported "do not bear out the
hypothesis that maternal smoking/ passive smoking increases cancer
risk among infants". TASSC paid him $126,000 in 2004 for 15 hours'
work a week. Two other organisations are registered at his address:
the Free Enterprise Education Institute and the Free Enterprise Action
Institute. They have received $10,000 and $50,000 respectively from
Exxon. The secretary of the Free Enterprise Action Institute is Thomas
Borelli. Borelli was the Philip Morris executive who oversaw the
payments to TASSC.

Milloy also writes a weekly Junk Science column for the Fox News
website. Without declaring his interests, he has used this column to
pour scorn on studies documenting the medical effects of second-hand
tobacco smoke and showing that climate change is taking place. Even
after Fox News was told about the money he had been receiving from
Philip Morris and Exxon, it continued to employ him, without informing
its readers about his interests.

TASSC's headed notepaper names an advisory board of eight people.
Three of them are listed by Exxonsecrets.org as working for
organisations taking money from Exxon. One of them is Frederick Seitz,
the man who wrote the Oregon Petition, and who chairs the Science and
Environmental Policy Project. In 1979, Seitz became a permanent
consultant to the tobacco company RJ Reynolds. He worked for the firm
until at least 1987, for an annual fee of $65,000. He was in charge of
deciding which medical research projects the company should fund, and
handed out millions of dollars a year to American universities. The
purpose of this funding, a memo from the chairman of RJ Reynolds
shows, was to "refute the criticisms against cigarettes". An undated
note in the Philip Morris archive shows that it was planning a "Seitz
symposium" with the help of TASSC, in which Frederick Seitz would
speak to "40-60 regulators".

The president of Seitz's Science and Environmental Policy Project is a
maverick environmental scientist called S Fred Singer. He has spent
the past few years refuting evidence for manmade climate change. It
was he, for example, who published the misleading claim that most of
the world's glaciers are advancing, which landed David Bellamy in so
much trouble when he repeated it last year. He also had connections
with the tobacco industry. In March 1993, APCO sent a memo to Ellen
Merlo, the vice-president of Philip Morris, who had just commissioned
it to fight the Environmental Protection Agency: "As you know, we have
been working with Dr Fred Singer and Dr Dwight Lee, who have authored
articles on junk science and indoor air quality (IAQ)
respectively ..."

Singer's article, entitled Junk Science at the EPA, claimed that "the
latest 'crisis' - environmental tobacco smoke - has been widely
criticised as the most shocking distortion of scientific evidence
yet". He alleged that the Environmental Protection Agency had had to
"rig the numbers" in its report on passive smoking. This was the
report that Philip Morris and APCO had set out to discredit a month
before Singer wrote his article.

I have no evidence that Fred Singer or his organisation have taken
money from Philip Morris. But many of the other bodies that have been
sponsored by Exxon and have sought to repudiate climate change were
also funded by the tobacco company. Among them are some of the world's
best-known "thinktanks": the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the
Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Hudson Institute, the
Frontiers of Freedom Institute, the Reason Foundation and the
Independent Institute, as well as George Mason University's Law and
Economics Centre. I can't help wondering whether there is any aspect
of conservative thought in the United States that has not been formed
and funded by the corporations.

Until I came across this material, I believed that the accusations,
the insults and the taunts such people had slung at us
environmentalists were personal: that they really did hate us, and had
found someone who would pay to help them express those feelings. Now I
realise that they have simply transferred their skills.

While they have been most effective in the United States, the impacts
of the climate-change deniers sponsored by Exxon and Philip Morris
have been felt all over the world. I have seen their arguments
endlessly repeated in Australia, Canada, India, Russia and the UK. By
dominating the media debate on climate change during seven or eight
critical years in which urgent international talks should have been
taking place, by constantly seeding doubt about the science just as it
should have been most persuasive, they have justified the money their
sponsors have spent on them many times over. It is fair to say that
the professional denial industry has delayed effective global action
on climate change by years, just as it helped to delay action against
the tobacco companies.

· This is an edited extract from Heat, by George Monbiot, published by
Allen Lane. To order a copy for £16.99 with free UK p&p (rrp £17.99),
go to Guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875.

On 31 Mar 2007 20:00:45 -0700, "Bruce Jensen"
wrote:

On Mar 31, 8:15 am, Mike Vandeman wrote:
On 30 Mar 2007 14:14:38 -0700, "Bruce Jensen"
wrote:

On Mar 30, 1:07 pm, Mike Vandeman wrote:

I see that you conveniently removed your lie, so no one will know
about it.

Feel free to put it back if it makes you feel better or gives you more
ammunition, I don't care. Whatever I may have removed (?) - it
certainly wasn't worth keeping.

Lies usually aren't.

I don't think I've drunk any water from there in over 30 years. There
are plenty of people working on that issue, but not enough on
human-free habitat...

Well, there's you...that's one too many. One who could put his wasted
hours to far better use than trolling for arguments.

Don't the lies ever end? I'm not trolling for arguments; I'm educating
fools like you.

Yeah sure. Whatever. You just go on, worrying about whether somebody
of whom you disapprove gets to enjoy walking among the animals. I hope
it gives you great joy. I'm going back to working for things that
actually matter for the animals, like real land preservation,
restoration of habitat and securing the future of persecuted species.

Oh yes, and introducing new people to the joy of observing them.

The "joy" is entirely one-sided -- something you steadfastly ignore.
The wildlife don't appreciate having their habitat destroyed and
invaded. That is obvious to anyone who actually CARES about wildlife.

Nothing guarantees a future for animals in jeopardy like
knowledgeable,

Your "knowledge" excludes "inconvenient" facts, as I described above.

well-acquainted new fans, something *your* schemes
discourage and will never achieve.

Bruce Jensen
****************
===
I am working on creating wildlife habitat that is off-limits to
humans ("pure habitat"). Want to help? (I spent the previous 8
years fighting auto dependence and road construction.)

Please don't put a cell phone next to any part of your body that you are fond of!

http://home.pacbell.net/mjvande

On Apr 1, 10:43 am, Mike Vandeman wrote:

Your "knowledge" excludes "inconvenient" facts, as I described above.

I've yet to see you mention a "fact." Your's is pure opinion based on
generalities, ignoring specifics, and amounting to elitism.
Conceptually you have some good ideas, but the devil is in the
details, and those, you are woefully short on. Keep trying, but know
that you won't get far until you give somebody reason to believe you.

Bruce Jensen

Coal Interests Fight Polar Bear Action :: Unequivocal, Mike Vandeman,
"warming of the climate system is unequivocal"

http://www.statesman.com/blogs/conte...interests.html
Coal Interests Fight Polar Bear Action

An organization representing companies that mine coal and burn it to
make electricity has called on its members to fight the proposed
listing of the polar bear as an endangered or threatened species.

"This will essentially declare 'open season' for environmental lawyers
to sue to block viirtually any project that involves carbon dioxide
emissions," the Western Business Roundtable said in an e-mail.

To settle a lawsuit by environmental groups, the Department of
Interior announced last month that it would take a year to consider
whether global warming and melting Arctic ice justifies declaring the
bear "endangered" or "threatened" under the Endangered Species Act.

"This seems a little unfair, pitting all those big coal companies and
power companies against the poor polar bear," sniffed Frank O'Donnell,
president of Clean Air Watch.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/20...urce=whitelist

Inside the secretive plan to gut the Endangered Species Act

Proposed regulatory changes, obtained by Salon, would destroy the
"safety net for animals and plants on the brink of extinction," say
environmentalists.

March 27, 2007 | The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is maneuvering to
fundamentally weaken the Endangered Species Act, its strategy laid out
in an internal 117-page draft proposal obtained by Salon. The proposed
changes limit the number of species that can be protected and curtail
the acres of wildlife habitat to be preserved. It shifts authority to
enforce the act from the federal government to the states, and it
dilutes legal barriers that protect habitat from sprawl, logging or
mining.

"The proposed changes fundamentally gut the intent of the Endangered
Species Act," says Jan Hasselman, a Seattle attorney with
Earthjustice, an environmental law firm, who helped Salon interpret
the proposal. "This is a no-holds-barred end run around one of
America's most popular environmental protections. If these regulations
stand up, the act will no longer provide a safety net for animals and
plants on the brink of extinction."

In recent months, the Fish and Wildlife Service has gone to
extraordinary efforts to keep drafts of regulatory changes from the
public. All copies of the working document were given a number
corresponding to a person, so that leaked copies could be traced to
that individual. An e-mail sent in March from an assistant regional
director at the Fish and Wildlife Service to agency staff, asking for
comments on and corrections to the first draft, underscored the
concern with secrecy: "Please Keep close hold for now. Dale [Hall,
director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service] does not want this
stuff leaking out to stir up discontent based on speculation."

Many Fish and Wildlife Service employees believe the draft is not
based on "defensible science," says a federal employee who asked to
remain anonymous. Yet "there is genuine fear of retaliation for
communicating that to the media. People are afraid for their jobs."

Chris Tollefson, a spokesperson for the service, says that while it's
accurate to characterize the agency as trying to keep the draft under
wraps, the agency has every intention of communicating with the public
about the proposed changes; the draft just hasn't been ready. And, he
adds, it could still be changed as part of a forthcoming formal review
process.

Administration critics characterize the secrecy as a way to maintain
spin control, says Kieran Suckling, policy director of the Center for
Biological Diversity, a national environmental group. "This
administration will often release a 300-page-long document at a press
conference for a newspaper story that will go to press in two hours,
giving the media or public no opportunity to digest it and figure out
what's going on," Suckling says. "[Interior Secretary Dirk] Kempthorne
will give a feel-good quote about how the new regulations are good for
the environment, and they can win the public relations war."

In some ways, the proposed changes to the Endangered Species Act
should come as no surprise. President Bush has hardly been one of its
fans. Under his reign, the administration has granted 57 species
endangered status, the action in each case being prompted by a
lawsuit. That's fewer than in any other administration in history --
and far fewer than were listed during the administrations of Reagan
(253), Clinton (521) or Bush I (234). Furthermore, during this
administration, nearly half of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
employees who work with endangered species reported that they had been
directed by their superiors to ignore scientific evidence that would
result in recommendations for the protection of species, according to
a 2005 survey of more than 1,400 service biologists, ecologists and
botanists conducted by Public Employees for Environmental
Responsibility, a nonprofit organization.

"We are not allowed to be honest and forthright, we are expected to
rubber stamp everything," wrote a Fish and Wildlife Service biologist
as part of the survey. "I have 20 years of federal service in this and
this is the worst it has ever been."

The agency has long seen a need to improve the act, says Tollefson.
"This is a look at what's possible," he says. "Too much of our time as
an agency is spent responding to litigation rather than working on
recovering the species that are most in need. The current way the act
is run creates disincentives for people to get involved with
recovering species."

Kempthorne, boss of the Fish and Wildlife Service, has been an
outspoken critic of the act. When he was a U.S. senator from Idaho in
the late 1990s, he championed legislation that would have allowed
government agencies to exempt their actions from Endangered Species
Act regulations, and would have required federal agents to conduct
cost-benefit analyses when considering whether to list a species as
endangered. (The legislation failed.) Last June, in his early days as
interior secretary, Kempthorne told reporters, "I really believe that
we can make improvements to the act itself."

Kempthorne is keeping good on his promise. The proposed draft is
littered with language lifted directly from both Kempthorne's 1998
legislation as well as from a contentious bill by former Rep. Richard
Pombo, R-Calif. (which was also shot down by Congress). It's "a wish
list of regulations that the administration and its industry allies
have been talking about for years," says Suckling.

Written in terse, dry legal language, the proposed draft doesn't make
for easy reading. However, the changes, often seemingly subtle,
generally serve to strip the Fish and Wildlife Service of the power to
do its stated job: to protect wildlife. Some verge on the biologically
ridiculous, say critics, while others are a clear concession to
industry and conservative Western governors who have long complained
that the act degrades the economies of their states by preventing
natural-resource extraction.

One change would significantly limit the number of species eligible
for endangered status. Currently, if a species is likely to become
extinct in "the foreseeable future" -- a species-specific timeframe
that can stretch up to 300 years -- it's a candidate for act
protections. However, the new rules scale back that timeline to mean
either 20 years or 10 generations (the agency can choose which
timeline). For certain species with long life spans, such as killer
whales, grizzly bears or wolves, two decades isn't even one
generation. So even if they might be in danger of extinction, they
would not make the endangered species list because they'd be unlikely
to die out in two decades.

"It makes absolutely no sense biologically," wrote Hasselman in an e-
mail. "One of the Act's weaknesses is that species aren't protected
until they're already in trouble and this proposal puts that flaw on
steroids."

Perhaps the most significant proposed change gives state governors the
opportunity and funding to take over virtually every aspect of the act
from the federal government. This includes not only the right to
create species-recovery plans and the power to veto the reintroduction
of endangered species within state boundaries, but even the authority
to determine what plants and animals get protection. For plants and
animals in Western states, that's bad news: State politicians
throughout the region howled in opposition to the reintroduction of
the Mexican gray wolf into Arizona and the Northern Rockies wolf into
Yellowstone National Park.

"If states are involved, the act would only get minimally enforced,"
says Bob Hallock, a recently retired 34-year veteran of the Fish and
Wildlife Service who, as an endangered species specialist, worked with
state agencies in Idaho, Washington and Montana. "States are, if
anything, closer to special economic interests. They're more
manipulated. The states have not demonstrated the will or interest in
upholding the act. It's why we created a federal law in the first
place."

Additional tweaks in the law would have a major impact. For instance,
the proposal would narrow the definition of a species' geographic
range from the landscape it inhabited historically to the land it
currently occupies. Since the main reason most plants and animals head
toward extinction is due to limited habitat, the change would strongly
hamper the government's ability to protect chunks of land and allow
for a healthy recovery in the wild.

The proposal would also allow both ongoing and planned projects by
such federal agencies as the Army Corps of Engineers and the Forest
Service to go forward, even when scientific evidence indicates that
the projects may drive a species to extinction. Under the new
regulations, as long as the dam or logging isn't hastening the
previous rate of extinction, it's approved. "This makes recovery of
species impossible," says Suckling. (You can read the entire proposal,
a PDF file, here.)

Gutting the Endangered Species Act will only thicken the pall that has
hung over the Fish and Wildlife Service for the past six years,
Hallock says. "They [the Bush administration] don't want the
regulations to be effective. People in the agency are like a bunch of
whipped dogs," he says. "I think it's just unacceptable to go around
squashing other species; they're of incalculable benefit to us. The
optimism we had when this agency started has absolutely been dashed."


http://www.earthjustice.org/news/pre...otections.html
Bush Administration Rewrite of Endangered Species Act Regulations
Would Gut Protections

Hush-hush proposal "a no-holds-barred end run around one of America's
most popular laws"

Washington, DC -- A secret draft of regulations that fundamentally
rewrite the Endangered Species Act was leaked to two environmental
organizations, which provided them to the press last night An article
in Salon quotes Earthjustice attorney Jan Hasselman saying, "The
proposed changes fundamentally gut the intent of the Endangered
Species Act."

The changes are fiercely technical and complicated, but make future
listings extremely difficult, redefine key concepts to the detriment
of protected species, virtually hand over administration of the act to
hostile states, and severely restrict habitat protections.

Many of the changes -- lifted from unsuccessful legislative proposals
from then-Senator (now Interior Secretary) Dirk Kempthorne and the
recently defeated congressman Richard Pombo -- are reactions to
policies and practices established as a result of litigation filed by
environmental organizations including Earthjustice.

"After the failure of these legislative proposals in the last
Congress, the Bush administration has opted to gut the Endangered
Species Act through the only avenue left open: administrative
regulations," said Hasselman. "This end-run around the will of
Congress and the American people will not succeed."

A major change would make it more difficult for a species to gain
protection, by scaling back the "foreseeable future" timeframe in
which to consider whether a species is likely to become extinct.
Instead of looking far enough ahead to be able to reasonably determine
whether a species could be heading for extinction, the new regulations
would drastically shorten the timeframe to either 20 years or 10
generations at the agency's discretion. For species with long
generations like killer whales and grizzly bears, this truncated view
of the future isn't nearly enough time to accurately predict whether
they are at-risk now.

"These draft regulations represent a total rejection of the values
held by the vast majority Americans: that we have a responsibility to
protect imperiled species and the special places they call home," said
Kate Freund, Legislative Associate at Earthjustice.

According to several sources within the Fish and Wildlife Service
quoted by Salon, hostility to the law within the agency has never been
so intense. "I have 20 years of federal service in this and this is
the worst it has ever been," one unnamed source is quoted as saying.

In addition, the proposal would allow projects by the Forest Service
and other agencies to proceed even if scientific evidence suggests
that the projects might drive species to extinction so long as the
rate of decline doesn't accelerate owing to the project.

The Bush administration's antipathy to the law is shown by the numbers
of species it has protected, in each case as the result of litigation
-- 57. By comparison, 253 species were listed during the Reagan
administration, 521 under Clinton, and 234 under Bush I.

The administration reportedly had expected to reveal the new
regulations in a few weeks. The draft regulations must be published in
the Federal Register for public comment before they can become final,
which is likely to be at least a year off.

Contact:

Jan Hasselman, Earthjustice, (206) 343-7340, ext. 25

Mike Vandeman wrote in
:

On 30 Mar 2007 15:04:14 -0700, "Olebiker" wrote:

On Mar 30, 4:07 pm, Mike Vandeman wrote:
On 30 Mar 2007 09:48:06 -0700, "Olebiker" wrote:

Mike, what are you doing to restore the Hetch Hetchy Canyon?
That's right in your own backyard. Your community's water comes
from the reservoir created by the O'Shaughnessy Dam.

I don't think I've drunk any water from there in over 30 years.
There are plenty of people working on that issue, but not enough on
human-free habitat & stopping mountain biking.

Are you telling me that you buy bottled water to cook? Assuming that
you wash your clothes, you are using water from the reservoir. That
reservoir displaced more wildlife than any mountain bike trail. You
are in a position to help do something about it.

I'm trying to say I haven't used that water AT ALL for 30 years.
Idiot.


I collect my water from a 'catch basin' and a well we had drilled
several years ago (tastes like sulpher).

Mike, Just where does the water you consume come from?

Another resivior? Well? Any idea??



What are YOU doing about it?

Trying to get you to clean up your own backyard while I work on
environmental matter in my area.
===
I am working on creating wildlife habitat that is off-limits to
humans ("pure habitat"). Want to help? (I spent the previous 8
years fighting auto dependence and road construction.)

Please don't put a cell phone next to any part of your body that you
are fond of!

http://home.pacbell.net/mjvande



--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

On 13 Apr 2007 17:09:14 GMT, Chris wrote:

Mike Vandeman wrote in
:

On 30 Mar 2007 15:04:14 -0700, "Olebiker" wrote:

On Mar 30, 4:07 pm, Mike Vandeman wrote:
On 30 Mar 2007 09:48:06 -0700, "Olebiker" wrote:

Mike, what are you doing to restore the Hetch Hetchy Canyon?
That's right in your own backyard. Your community's water comes
from the reservoir created by the O'Shaughnessy Dam.

I don't think I've drunk any water from there in over 30 years.
There are plenty of people working on that issue, but not enough on
human-free habitat & stopping mountain biking.

Are you telling me that you buy bottled water to cook? Assuming that
you wash your clothes, you are using water from the reservoir. That
reservoir displaced more wildlife than any mountain bike trail. You
are in a position to help do something about it.

I'm trying to say I haven't used that water AT ALL for 30 years.
Idiot.


I collect my water from a 'catch basin' and a well we had drilled
several years ago (tastes like sulpher).

Mike, Just where does the water you consume come from?

Another resivior? Well? Any idea??

That's impossible to know. Water molecules are mostly identical, &
can't be traced.



What are YOU doing about it?

Trying to get you to clean up your own backyard while I work on
environmental matter in my area.
===
I am working on creating wildlife habitat that is off-limits to
humans ("pure habitat"). Want to help? (I spent the previous 8
years fighting auto dependence and road construction.)

Please don't put a cell phone next to any part of your body that you
are fond of!

http://home.pacbell.net/mjvande

===
I am working on creating wildlife habitat that is off-limits to
humans ("pure habitat"). Want to help? (I spent the previous 8
years fighting auto dependence and road construction.)

Please don't put a cell phone next to any part of your body that you are fond of!

http://home.pacbell.net/mjvande