What Am I?

Chopped liver?

Aside from an idea for a t-shirt, I say that as an introduction to the State Department’s announcement that building the job-creating Keystone XL Pipeline would affect an endangered beetle.

In its Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) on the Keystone XL pipeline, which would create thousands of jobs and transport 830,000 barrels of oil a day from Canada to Oklahoma and Texas, a State Department official said its investigation found “no significant impact to most resources” along the path of the 1,700-mile project. But the State Department also said the pipeline could adversely affect the American Burying Beetle, an endangered species.

Kerri-Ann Jones, assistant secretary of the Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs at the State Department, said during an Aug. 26 conference call with reporters that there could be some impact on the beetle’s habitat. The bug was listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act in 1989.

“The FEIS does have a summary of findings, and what that summary states is that there would be no significant impact to most resources along the proposed pipeline corridor,” Jones said in answering a question from a Washington Post.

“There are some areas of impact that have been identified,” she said. “These include one that we touched on in the previous question regarding cultural resources, and I said, there’s been a program agreement put in place to address some of that. There’s also an adverse effect that is identified regarding the American Burying Beetle, as it is an endangered species, and there are – there’s a detailed biological assessment in the FEIS on that.”

Is this what the State Department does? Protect beetles?

We could have written “Beetle Affects Endangered Pipeline.” Of all the butterfly effect idiocy in the world, in all the sub-penumbra, this is some of the most idiotic yet. Even Obama has had to back off of the moronic ozone control policies pushed forward by the completely out of control EPA, after a Recovery Summer 2 (starring Lindsay Lohan) August that saw ZERO net creation of jobs and the failure of 3 government-funded green energy manufacturers.

Climate change creates violence. That’s what can be concluded by new academic analysis of weather data from around the world over the past 60 years.

An interdisciplinary team at Columbia University’s Earth Institute looked at arrivals of El Niño, which happens every three to seven years, and linked it to periodic increases in warfare. El Nino is an oceanic oscillation that warms temperatures and causes rainfall to decline in many places and to increase in others. The pattern affects half the world’s population in Africa, the Mideast, India, southeast Asia, Australia, as well as the Americas.

“We can speculate that a long-ago Egyptian dynasty was overthrown during a drought. That’s a specific time and place, that may be very different from today, so people might say, ‘OK, we’re immune to that now.’ This study shows a systematic pattern of global climate affecting conflict, and shows it right now,” says Solomon M. Hsiang, the study’s lead author. (The paper is also published in this month’s issue of Nature.)

Notice please all you climate-change deniers that “man-made” climate change wasn’t the focal point of this study. We are talking Mother Nature here. (Although I’d be remiss by not stating the fact that anthropogenic causes exacerbate climate change.)

You know what else causes war? Lack of access to energy resources, you schmuck. It’s not as though this administration hasn’t backed oil exploration and extraction off of the Amazon river basin, which we are continually told is the most biodiverse environment in the world. (Although it would be remiss of me not to note the fact that you should shoot someone siphoning off your gas in the ass so as not to puncture your gas tank, you supercilious twatwaffle.)

Should we protect beetles when they’re grubs? SCIENCE must have an answer to that. It only figures that proggies would want to protect the American Burying Beetle, since they’re so foursquare behind the administration’s efforts to bury America.

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