Within one decade, Pittsburgh is producing nearly half of the steel in the United States.

During the First World War, Pittsburgh's steel companies produced 20 million tons of high-grade steel, largely for export to the European countries, who had been the primary combatants since August 1914.

Throughout World War II, Pittsburgh made more steel than the Axis Powers (Japan-Germany-Italy) COMBINED.

Pittsburgh "won" The Second World War for the Allies because of its remarkable output of steel.

The Golden Gate Bridge; the Empire State Building; all the skyscrapers of New York (pre-1970's) were built from steel milled in Pittsburgh. Almost every city along the Mississippi was constructed with Pittsburgh Steel.

Pittsburgh "built" America during the pre and post-war industrial revolutions. Abundant steel production was one of the main reasons the U.S. became an economic powerhouse; and the lone superpower after WW II.

By 1990, Pittsburgh had foresight enough to switch its focus from steel, to health care and technology - the two leading industries in southwestern Pennsylvania today. Yet the once-mighty U.S Steel, Kennametal, and Wheeling-Pitt remain some of the region's top employers.

Pittsburgh - and its surrounding area - has been relatively recession-proof; as it continues to prosper as one of the eastern United State's few economic bright spots - until now.

Despite the fact that America is hemorrhaging jobs, to enviro-Marxists like Lisa Jackson (the EPA Czar), western Pennsylvania is one big NIGHTMARE; an industrial area thriving beneath smokestacks - hundreds of them - and every one now appears on her radar!

Coal, oil, and natural gas industries represent over 90% of U.S. energy production - supplying the economy with over 13 million jobs.

But the Obama administration- using the EPA in IRS-like fashion- has undertaken a mission to harass them all: Incredibly - to the consternation of local officials - they have declared environmental warfare on western Pennsylvania!

And what do they wield as their chief weapon? It's the EPA's recent "endangerment finding" on CO2 (carbon dioxide). 

But is it rather an "insanity finding?" 

Who else but a lunatic Marxist like Barack Obama would sic the EPA on an ENTIRE region, and deliberately undermine them - pretending they pose a danger to "climate change."

That’s right, the oldest industrial area in the county, having built America from the ground up over the last 200 years, all of sudden becomes menacing because of it's carbon dioxide emissions:

Horrors! The earth's climate now threatened by Pennsylvania's industrial CO2 greenhouse gas. All the region's hospitals, emergency clinics, and ambulance crews have been placed on red alert; EMT's and paramedics are fraught with worry- expecting the worst.

Despite an official national unemployment rate of 9.8%, Jackson's heedless enforcement of the new Federal EPA regulations not only will undermine western Pennsylvania's strong economy, it also threatens our national security!

What if we got into a future conflict - say with Red China - and it turned into a prolonged war? Lacking heavy industry, what would we do for our steel? Call on Mexico? Canada? Or Venezuela?

What is this fool anti-President doing? Is Obama on the Chinese government's payroll? By harassing our heavy industries, it will only lead to their re-location overseas.

And for each Pennsylvania coal plant the EPA forces offline, it only guarantees future brownouts and blackouts - as less supply with increasing demand portends yet higher energy prices for working families, and more overall job losses for the region.

Meanwhile, the sacrificial Obama is back in the Whitehouse suffering in shirt sleeves, with the Oval Office heat cranked to a steady 80*- setting a sterling example. 

Predictably, the EPA has "gone Stalin"; ordering that CO2 be "scrubbed" from the smokestacks of all "polluters" who emit more than 25,000 tons a year of carbon dioxide (and five other heat-trapping gases) blamed for global warming.  

But there is no PROVEN existing technology that can do this!

This means that refineries, coal plants, manufacturers, heavy industries, etc, must either come up with a miracle CO2-reduction process in the next few years, or be shut down!

Hence, Western Pennsylvania companies may actually be forced to try the unproven, prohibitively expensive "CO2 sequestration" technology -which requires going to great lengths to pipe "ever-dangerous" CO2 back into the ground - hoping it doesn't seep back up; an insanely-complicated, unnecessary, near-impossible problem - which of course is the EPA's specialty.

Allegheny Energy Inc., (based in Greensburg Pa.), operates 10 coal-fired power plants that could be seriously constrained by EPA regulations. This puts nearly 8000 high-paying jobs directly at risk, plus a number of other associated enterprises that could be in danger. 

The EPA is also asking the Allegheny County Health Department come up with a workable plan to reduce pollution in the Monongahela Valley, requiring that they measure up to federal clean air standards by 2014.

At last, this should relieve the hundreds of thousands of people who everyday, roll around on Pittsburgh's pavement, coughing, gasping and wheezing - some nearly blue from lack of oxygen...from lack of "clean air."

U.S. Steel's Clairton Coke Works ( the nation's largest coke battery), also could be affected. One year ago, the company broke ground on a $1.1 billion project to install new coke batteries along the Monongahela river, and planned to refurbish its older ones at Clairton.

In 1970, an unknown Nasa scientist, James Hansen, literally shook the world with a startling "discovery": (quote)... "The world was warming, and the cause was greenhouse gases from BURNING FOSSIL FUELS."

But how many people knew that Hansen, supposedly a lone “NASA whistleblower”- who stood up to the mighty U.S. government - had been bankrolled by George Soros, and his liberal think-tank - the Open Society Institute?  

Never in the history of mankind has there ever been so much hype about one single issue - global warming.

(Quote) “It amazes me that so many people believe in global warming; and that it's caused by humans," said U.S. Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma - who recently chaired a “Climate Change and the Media” gathering..."This myth has been promoted by the major media, giving much attention to those who support it, but very little to those who debunk it."

Ironicallly, Inhofe's "major media event" received almost NO media attention.

Hence, any scientist, following the trail blazed by Hansen, can achieve fame (and of course, a meal ticket) by coming out with an "alarming  study" about...sea levels rising by 18 inches...increasing fury of hurricanes...extinction of the polar bears...melting of the polar ice caps...disappearing land masses...etc. blah-blah.

But say we outlawed fossil fuels tomorrow - yet the polar ice caps kept melting, and hurricanes began intensifying. What then? Earth's history abounds with climate changes. And CO2 has little, if anything to do with it. 

Far-flung liberal policies - such as Cap 'n Trade - portend vast economic disruption before any PROOF of cause! Despite our great technological achievements, few Americans now possess even a rudimentary grasp of science. So the "global warmongers" continue to hold sway.

Not surprisingly, most people obligingly (idiotically) ascribe to the coming "crisis" that CO2 atmospheric emissions will evoke a calamitous climatic change, and we MUST move toward renewable "clean" energy, before it's TOO LATE.

CO2 is a natural part of the atmosphere. It's essential to plants. It is neither pollutant nor  'greenhouse gas'. Car emissions comprise but a mere 0.01% of its presence in the air. The balance is almost entirely the result of the carbon cycle.

Remember the "carbon cycle" diagram in your in your seventh grade science text? Well here's a quick E-Z refresher:

Plants take in CO2 (photosynthesis); we then eat the plants (or the nice, tasty animals that ate the plants), and following our digestion and respiration, we breath out CO2, which is then taken in again by the plants. Ca-pish?

So an increase in CO2 would increase plant proliferation - which begets increasing oxygen production - which each one of us then inhales. Ergo; the carbon cycle!

Therefore, there can be no global warming due to CO2 gas. If there IS global warming, it's because the SUN is putting out more radiant energy. Got it?

CONCLUSION: man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people - a political movement led by those who seek to control the worlds' economies, and redistribute the world’s wealth through the trading of "carbon credits."

America-hater George Soros is out to destroy America’s free enterprise system and our economic stability. He is an atheist - the epitome of the fraudulent money changers whom Jesus once cast out of the temple.

In the 1990's, George Soros gained international notoriety when he risked $10 billion on a single currency speculation and shorted the British pound. He turned out to be right- and in a single day- the trade generated a profit of $1 billion; ultimately, it was reported that his profit on the transaction reached $2 billion.

As a result, he is famously known as the "the man who broke the Bank of England." And now, Soros stands to make another fortune by shorting the U.S. dollar:

There are billions of dollars in grant money being thrown around to study global warming, which is why liberal politicians keep the lie alive - to create fear - the basic driver of their power bases. 

The polar bear has become the poster child for global warming:

We are constantly bombarded on television (news & public service announcements) with the same file footage of that sickly, dirty, obviously exhausted polar bear cub, struggling helplessly to climb aboard an ice floe-- a victim of the "melting Arctic ice cap."

Yes; the poor, forlorn polar bears; what shall become of these beleaguered, cuddly creatures?

But these lovable animals are the only bear species that actively hunts humans for food. And left to their own devices, they could easily survive on a seasonal diet of Inuit Eskimos, or even an occasional stranded ice road trucker.

Recently a federal appeals court threw out a Shell oil and gas leasing program in the Alaskan Chukchi Sea; and of course, it was all because of "concerns" about the potential harm to the polar bears.

But the real polar bear problem may be the threat to our national security; the bears have become pawns in the radical left's attempt to restrict our country's most vital economic mission-- domestic energy exploration. 

But polar bear habitats aside, one thing reamains clear-- America is a nation that runs on oil; and as the old oilmen like to say..."A country that runs on oil, can't afford to run out."

During the Bush years, administration officials maintained that drilling for Alaskan oil, and the survival of the polar bear, "were NOT interconnected.”

But in the Obama era. Edward J. Markey-- Chairman of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence-- now claims that indeed, they ARE "intimately connected", and has introduced legislation to reverse Bush's “oil-first, polar-bear-second” energy policy.

Chairman Markey recently was quoted: “It is time to put the interests of an industry awash in profits aside, and consider the vast impacts the Bush administration’s foolish decisions have had on an imperiled species, and on the planet.”

Markey will continue to block Arctic oil exploration at every turn-- using the bears as his "cover story." 

In the 60’s and 70’s, polar bears were being shot, and hunted down wholesale by the thousands. Currently an estimated 1200 polar bears are  being "harvested" per year; mostly in the northwestern territories of Canada. 

If Markey and the environmentalists are so gravely concerned, why do they remain silent about the hunting? Why doesn't Markey push for a "Serengeti-type" bear habitat around Hudson Bay, where --despite the so-called warming climate-- polar bear populations are on the upswing.

Polar bears have been around for as long as time. They have survived on their own through natural warming/cooling cycles long before man became a factor. So why all of a sudden are the bears incapable of surviving now, when they have done so in the past?

And why have they emerged to become the focus of the debate about global warming?

Markey (and the the left) knows that it's a convenient way for storybook emotions to trump common sense: "Protect" the polar bears; save the environment; block  drilling-- which raises fuel prices-- and (drum roll, please), opens the way for ALTERNATIVE energy sources.

Currently, U.S. foreign oil imports are nearing 70% of our annual supply, rising at an alarming rate of 2% per year-- the same rate of decline of our aging oilfields in the Southwest and Gulf of Mexico.

At this pace, by 2019, we'll be importing 90% of our oil from abroad.

What if there was a Mideast war, and oil exports to the U.S. cut off? How would we then supply our military after our strategic petroleum reserve goes dry? What then?

Why does the $700 billion we pay to the Arabs continue to be our chief annual export? Why can't we drill offshore in Alaska; are polar bears really that important?

All we need do is look to the Southern hemisphere.

Since November of 2007, Brazil has had two mega-sized oil discoveries off the coast of Sao Paulo-- among the biggest ever made in the oil industry-- estimated between 12 - 20 billion total barrels. The first commercial oil production is scheduled to begin in late 2010. 

These discoveries literally changed Brazil's status overnight, from a net energy importer to a future exporter. Result? Do the math; 20 billion x $70/barrel = 1.4 trillion dollars of wealth that Brazil will realize over approximately the next decade, as they harvest their petroleum bounty.

Meanwhile, back in the good ol' USA, we continue to worry about polar bears, as our deficits rise, the dollar shrinks; American drivers are looking at three/four dollar gallon gasoline, and our economy continues to crater.

Chances are (within the next five years) a combination of drilling restrictions and falling oil supplies is going to make gasoline too expensive for routine use in America's 250 million private automobiles.

When news of Brazil's amazing oil strike was flashed across the country, it touched off a wild, national celebration; the Brazilians knew it would put money in the pockets of every citizen in the form of social services, government infrastructure improvements, and basically, lifting all boats on a rising economic tide of oil exports.

So why can't we use the Brazilian model? Why should we be the only country worried about polar bears, oil splls, and the like? Deepwater offshore drilling techniques-- developed by U.S. engineers-- have made the process virtually hazard free, and it's been adopted by China, Brazil, Norway, and around the world.

The National Geological Survey has estimated that there are anywhere from 90-160 billion barrels of oil north of the Arctic Circle; at current crude prices, 160 billion x $70 = 11.2 TRILLION dollars-- money that roughly equals our national debt; a total that keeps rising as we continue to borrow money from the Chinese, and then send to OPEC.

But the leftists in Congress (and the Whitehouse) are quite content to preserve this insane staus quo, and watch our standard of living slide toward that of the third world.

The more the left can deny Americans of the wealth that is theirs, the more political control they will garner, as a struggling populace must look to Washington DC to solve economic problems that wouldn't exist were it not for these power-crazed, callous liberals.

But there is a simple solution: Why don't we build a Gitmo for polar bears? Would it not be a lot cheaper than to keep importing oil, and leaving12 trillion bucks in the ground?

Given that the U.S.will continue one of the world's biggest consumers of petroleum, why should we continue to be its biggest importer of oil?

But even if there were no polar bears around in a few decades, would it really change anything? Aren’t efforts to list the polar bear as endangered (or threatened) just liberal attempts to control our lives, and put the UN (and the leftists) in charge of us all?

If the polar bears went away-- so what? Polar bears are hardly the first-- and will definitely not be the last-- of animals to become extinct; this planet could survive just fine without them.

Why should we bankrupt ourselves for 25,000 polar bears? Since when did they get the vote? With so much attention on animals, where’s the concern for people?

100 years from now, people will look upon this present time in sheer bafflement:

History will be written about how a nation-- once the envy of theworld-- literally turned against itself and self-destructed, over a dog-eat-dog environmental argument; an apocalypse of ecological insanity versus common sense-- a nation that caused its own economic downfall, because animal rights had surperseded human rights.

America is a nation that can't afford to wait around for $10/ gallon gas. We need to develop our resources now, and let the polar bears fend for themselves; there are more than enough tasty seals around to keep them happy.

The tension is palpable.

You can feel the suspense...the foreboding. Were fast-approaching the 11th hour-- (play "Dragnet" music) DAHN, ta- dun- dunt...dahn- ta-dundun- DIR-R-R-R (music fades).

So what's all the drama about? Of course; it's those dreaded, fast-rising sea levels, ominously licking away at land masses everywhere.

Time is running out!

Does anyone remember the fallout shelter-building mania that swept America a generation (or two) ago? There was utter paranoia that the Russians would, at any time, launch simultaneous thermonuclear attacks, and concerned schoolchildren were taught, "if you see a blinding flash, duck 'n cover" (your head).

Recently, a report issued from a UN climate change conference in Copenhagen stated a similar grim warning: Given the rapid melting of the Antarctic ice sheet, we should prepare for the worst-- a possible 20 foot rise in sea levels during the 21st century, triggered by global warming.

So now, we have "major risk" that many coastal areas will be inundated by the end of the century, because polar ice sheets have been (quote)... "melting much faster than previously estimated"...and..."low-lying areas in Bangladesh, the Maldives, Florida, plus certain areas in Europe, all face catastrophic flooding by the year 2100."

This of course begs the obvious question: in all recorded history, has there ever existed a NON-catastrophic flood? After all, a flood is a flood; and no one-- save Noah-- is usually prepared.

The UN conference report also stated that Britain, in particular, remains "imperiled". (Quote)..."Large areas of the Thames Estuary are likely to disappear by 2100; and cities including London, Hull and Portsmouth will need new flood defenses."

New flood defenses?

Well allright then; no problem. It's actually just what the worldwide economy needs-- a monumental, shovel-ready, stimulus package. Dig, baby dig!

So why not take a cue from the Dutch, and initiate a massive, comprehensive, dike construction project?

Yup; we'll show those darn, stubborn rising seas a thing or two.

Imagine...a worldwide dike-building project: the economic stimulus...the jobs created; and above all-- we'd now feel SAFE.

People would again be able to sleep at night, and no longer would children come home from school and preach environmentalism to Ma 'n Pa. We'd could laugh in the face of "climate change" resulting from our use of those horrendous, nasty-nasty fossil fuels-- no more controversy! 

It seems like the Chinese had the right idea from the git-go: Got a problem with invaders? Well, just build a great wall to stymie the rascals. But instead of inland, everyone would be building their own version of the Great Wall adjacent to their coastlines.  

Makes sense doesn't it? Turning a negative into a positive, and thwarting invasion from the seas. The unemployed now have jobs, and the world economy takes off. 

Of course, it would block coastal views, but what's aesthetics compared to saving lives? If your worried about it, just make like a submariner and get a periscope.

It can't miss!  It would spark a revival in the construction-building trades, creating yet more union employment for the jobless masses, and give them a well-deserved chance at a middle class lifestyle.

Indeed, for almost a generation now, the global warmongers have been forecasting the coming of the great coastal boogie man--worldwide rising sea levels.

But now, with the advent of the dyke (er, dike) era, we can return to our good ol' wasteful American selves, and continue to use up 25% of the world's resources, while letting those sea levels rise merrily away-- the fish will love it!

Basically, the crux of the global warming argument has been obfuscated.

An environmental threat has transformed into a "heated" political debate: we must literally "pay" (cap 'n trade) if we dare emit too much "greenhouse gas", which warms the earth, melts the glaciers, and ultimately raises sea levels -- all that calamity-stuff  jazz.

But now, with the onset of the modern dike-building era, we can just greenhouse gas-away to our hearts' content!

Ergo...problem solved, except for the environmentalists, who would be forced into seeking  a new line of work. After all, as the old saying goes...what goes 'round, comes around (etc.)

So let the oceans rise; who cares? They won't have a chance. Man conquers nature, a first in world history!

And no need for shared sacrifice, economic turmoil, or lifestyle disruption brought on by noisy windmills, ugly electric cars, or energy conservation-- thereby negating the Congressional "enviro-crats," who've been trying to jam climate change legislation down our throats, and tax us to oblivion.

Furthermore, America would retain its role as the economic engine of the world. It would be our chance to play locomotive, and chug-chug the world out of recession, as coastal countries all adopt dike-building programs of their own.

So now, with the world's economic and environmental problems in remission (and everyone busy at work again) we all could go on living happily ever after-- or at least until the next big problem comes along.

So let the earth continue to warm, and let those dreaded winter blizzards fade away. The plants and trees will proliferate, our heating bills plummet, the sea levels rise, and the marine mammals (and all those billions of schools of fish) no longer face ocean overcrowding.

And besides all the newly-carefree plant and marine life, the land animals also experience welcome lifestyle changes as never before:

No more sleepy wintertime bears; no more skinny hibernating squirrels; and birds of a feather no longer need migrate south together; all due to the resourcefulness of the Dutch, who as it turns out-- all along-- have been hundreds of years ahead of the rest of the world.

Why didn’t we think of this before?