According to a small, uncredited item in this morning’s paper, Bush has designated about 200,000 square miles of the central Pacific a National Monument. The area includes a few uninhabited atolls and islands, the Mariana Trench, and a hell of a lot of water.
Under this designation the area will be protected from oil and gas extraction, and commercial fishing.
Now I can’t speak to the fishing potential of the area, having never been closer to the Pacific Ocean than Denver, Colo. But oil drilling. In the Mariana Trench.
As some of you will remember from a certain thread a few years back, the Mariana Trench is the deepest point in the oceans. I can’t imagine even the greediest oilman wasting fifteen minutes of his time thinking about putting a well there.
This makes about as much sense as banning jet skiing on the moon.
The cynic in me expects an announcement forthwith to the effect that, since they’ve barred the oil companies from this huge area, it’s only fair that we let them have at that little ol’ ANWR thing.
(Yeah, this is a bit lame. But it’s probably our last opportunity to Pit the current administration - unless some interesting names appear on Bush’s Hail Mary Pardon List.)
It sounds like the kind of thing some 2nd grade class wrote to him about, and he decided, “Ehh, What the Fuck, go ahead and do it, doesn’t matter anyway, and I’m out here”
I don’t get it, what jurisdiction does the US have over the Marianas Trench? Is this just a regulation that will affect Americans? I can’t imagine Japan caring what the president has to say there, so I don’t get the point of this.
They were listing the stuff in this area that will be protected on NPR this morning.
Sounds pretty cool to me. Lots of neat stuff there, but I don’t get the impression that it’s a very daring move to mark it off-limits. It’s a good thing to do, but it’s obviously a low-risk legacy-building exercise:
No idea. Do you know how much oil is or may be there?
BTW, we have a political union with the Mariana Islands which is probably where Bush et al is deriving their ability to set this thing up. That would be my guess anyway…sort of like the US relationship with Guam IIRC.
I thought he set up some kind of big ass Pacific natural reserve years ago though. Is this a different initiative?
Why the U.S. has jurisdiction: The area designated appears to be within the territorial waters of the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas (in the same relationship to the U.S. as Puerto Rico), possibly with some in the Territory of Guam, a U.S. possession pure and simple. As far as I can tell it doesn’t extend into the Republic of Belau, which is “an independent nation in free association with the U.S.” (this is more or less PC language for “autonomous protectorate” IMO.).
The other two sites are in American territory: one in American Samoa and the other in the Line Islands between Hawaii and Kiribati.
hee hee hee hee hee hee hee hee hee hee hee