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Why Are Anti-Development Environmentalists Funding Begich?

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Fairbanks, Alaska. January 30, 2014 – While Mark Begich professes to be an advocate of off-shore drilling, US Senate candidate Joe Miller isn’t so sure Alaskans are getting the whole story.

“Mark Begich promised to be an advocate for resource development,” said Miller. “But given the results, coupled with his behavior in the senate, Alaskans are having their doubts.”

In his latest radio ad, Begich takes credit for the return of Shell Oil rigs to the Chuckchi Sea. There’s only one problem. Last week’s Ninth Circuit Court decision to suspend permits resulted from litigation brought by some deep-pocketed friends of the junior senator.

Begich has collected nearly $20,000 in campaign cash over the last two cycles from board members, executives, and associates of the plaintiffs who sued to stop drilling in the Arctic Ocean. These plaintiffs included the Alaska Wilderness League, Pacific Environment, Defenders of Wildlife, the Village of Point Hope, Oceana, and EarthJustice.

That doesn’t include other affiliated groups and non-profits who account for thousands more. And who knows what their donors are doing?

“It all adds up to a rather disturbing pattern,” Miller concluded. “When seen through the purview of his party’s stance on development issues, his support for Obama and Reid, votes to confirm radical environmentalists to cabinet-level positions in the Department of Interior and at the EPA . . . I have to scratch my head. Do Mark’s big government friends know something that Alaskans aren’t being told?”

It’s time to send a senator to Washington that folks can trust to put principle over party. Alaskans deserve a leader that they know won’t be cheating on them with Barack Obama and Harry Reid’s environmentalist friends.

Joe Miller is a husband, father, combat veteran, businessman, and advocate for constitutional liberty, who believes in limited government, the Right to life, individual rights, private property, and free markets.

Obama’s Interior Department Releases Plan to Close 1.6 Million Acres to Shale Oil Development

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photo credit: farther along
The Interior Department on Friday issued a final plan to close 1.6 million acres of federal land in the West originally slated for oil shale development.

The proposed plan would fence off a majority of the initial blueprint laid out in the final days of the George W. Bush administration. It faces a 30-day protest period and a 60-day process to ensure it is consistent with local and state policies. After that, the department would render a decision for implementation.

The move is sure to rankle Republicans, who say President Obama’s grip on fossil fuel drilling in federal lands is too tight.

Interior’s Bureau of Land Management cited environmental concerns for the proposed changes. Among other things, it excised lands with “wilderness characteristics” and areas that conflicted with sage grouse habitats.

Read more from this story HERE.

Alaska Natives Lobby Obama Admin. Against Oil Development in NPR-A

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Native Alaskans have teamed up with environmental forces to urge the Obama administration to stick with a conservative management plan for the National Petroleum Reserve, despite oil industry protests that the proposal would block energy development in lands specifically reserved for extracting fossil fuels.

Joseph Sagviyuaq Sage, a whaling captain from Barrow, Alaska, and Lillian Stone, a teacher from Anaktuvuk Pass, are set to meet with Senate staffers and Deputy Interior Secretary David Hayes while in Washington, D.C. this week. The pair are collaborating with the Alaska Wilderness League to make the case that some areas in the 23-million acre reserve should be off limits to oil development.

The push comes as the administration nears a final decision on how to balance energy production and conservation in the 89-year-old reserve in northwest Alaska. In August, the Interior Department unveiled its “preferred” management plan, which would allow oil and gas development in 11.8 million acres of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska while blocking the activity in other areas that are home to caribou herds and polar bears.

The Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management appears likely to make a final decision on whether to adopt its preferred approach sometime after the Nov. 6 presidential election.

Stone said she wanted policymakers in the nation’s capital to know “we are real people and we are directly impacted by any activity that goes on within NPR-A.” Oil drilling in the reserve threaten the caribou that roam the land, Stone said, as well as the Alaska Natives who hunt the animal for food and clothing.

Read more from this story HERE.

Busted! Leaked emails snag NASA’s global warming alarmists

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Photo credit: Rob Shenk

While NASA climate alarmist James Hansen insists record summer heat and drought are caused by man-made global warming, leaked internal emails from just three summers ago reveal that he and his colleagues expressed alarm that the planet was inexplicably … cooling.

Hansen, often called the “godfather of global warming,” announced earlier this month that blistering heat across the United States is so rare that it can’t be anything but the man-made global warming he has been warning about for decades.

“This is not some scientific theory,” he told the Associated Press. “We are now experiencing scientific fact.”

But in 2009, as the thermometer hit record lows in America, he and other climate scientists panicked in a flurry of emails: “Skeptics will be all over us – the world is really cooling, the models are no good.”

They lamented that Mother Nature was not cooperating with their predictions that global temperatures would smash heat records last decade. They blamed their miscalculation on sulfate emission trajectories and revised their forecast to show a cooling trend lasting until 2020.