I read in my Jersey Shore weekly SandPaper that the National Science Foundation is funding seismic testing near Barnegat Inlet on Long Beach Island. It said the studies are to be conducted by Rutgers University and the University of Texas at Austin, “as part of a climate change study.”
I wondered what we could learn about climate change from taking soundings of the ocean floor, but I decided to leave it to the scientists. My sense of wonder came back to me when I read a July 19 New York Times article, “White House Opens Door to Exploring Atlantic for Oil.”
The first few sentences read:
“The Obama administration approved guidelines on Friday for seismic searches for oil and gas deposits in the Atlantic Ocean, handing the petroleum industry a significant victory in a bitter dispute with environmental groups over the searches’ impact on marine life.
The decision opens the way for companies to seek permits to look for oil in a stretch of the Atlantic from Delaware to Florida, using compressed-air guns that blast the ocean bottom with thousands of sound pulses as loud as a howitzer. The pulses bounce off geologic formations deep in the earth, giving geologists hints of where oil and gas deposits may lie.”
I no longer believe that the seismic testing to be done off LBI is really “part of a climate change study”, or that it differs in kind from the testing to be conducted “from Delaware to Florida?”
The truth is that the White House, the Department of the Interior, the National Science Foundation, along with enabling Congressmen, Senators and judges, are using our tax dollars to perform free research for the oil and gas industry. Ironically, they are using the environmental concern of climate change to hide a huge subsidy to the fossil fuel industries that are exacerbating it.
Mark Twain once said “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its pants on,” and that was before the internet! Let’s not get caught with our pants down. We are being lied to on this one.
According to unnamed experts cited by the Times, the approval of seismic exploration off the Atlantic Coast “sends a clear signal that allowing offshore drilling rigs would be approved as well.” Does anybody doubt it? Let’s not be duped like naïve children.
