Why the call for a new study on red snapper populations, and why from the Department of Commerce, instead of NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is actually qualified and prepared to carry out fish population studies? The answer has more to do with commerce than it has to do with science.

Are we willing to watch the devastation of Pacific salmon runs, the disappearance of resident killer whale populations, and the general impoverishment of California’s riverine and marine ecosystems, just for the sake of inexpensive strawberries and salad greens in winter?

It’s worth keeping some skepticism about Senator Murkowski’s promises about what the legislation would do. However, the basic idea of taking advantage of natural movements in the oceans, due to to tides, wave action, and thermal patterns, to gather energy that can be used by human communities, is a good one.

It isn’t just Arctic coastlines that are environmentally vulnerable to oil spills. Why should the Alaskan coasts receive special treatments other shorelines do not receive?

Congressman Young thinks that it’s just terrible that American citizens who go over to Canada to shoot and kill polar bears aren’t allowed to bring the heads of those polar bears back into the United States.

Right now, you need to begin to reduce your consumption of electricity. You need to develop a plan for driving your car less. Waiting for Congress to start research into this matter will ensure that the acidification crisis will get much worse before we even begin to try to control it.

The Democrats don’t have the excuse of a Republican majority in Congress any more. They don’t have the excuse of a Republican President who can stop their legislation with a veto. It’s time to get Oceans 21 passed and signed into law.

As the price of gasoline goes down, the Republicans’ twisted logic for expanded offshore oil drilling becomes increasingly incoherent. At the very least, Nancy Pelosi should seek to delay a vote on offshore drilling. Time is on the side of the opponents of new drilling.

Barack Obama wants to attract Republican voters to his campaign, and so he is continuing his shift to the Right, away from the progressive voters who gained him the Democratic nomination. Obama is supporting offshore drilling not because it’s the right thing to do, but because it’s the politically convenient thing to do at this particular moment.

If a marine mammal is at a population level that is truly in line with its historically sustainable levels, then it can’t be to blame for the endangered status of their prey or competing species. After all, historically, those species fit together just fine, ecologically speaking. No marine mammal species, historically speaking, drove any other existing marine animal to the brink of extinction… unless you count human beings taking to the sea in their boats as a marine mammal. It’s human activity that has upset the ecological balance of the oceans, not wild marine mammals.