The government isn't forcing them to place the well and drill for oil in the first place, they are forcing them to remove the well after its useful life is over. I do not think the feds are forcing them to use explosive removals. Have the feds banned the alternate removal technologies, or are the oil companies just reluctant to adopt alternate methods because they are more expensive?
You are going to have to take that up with the oil companies, they are doing what is cheapest to fulfill their legal obligations
It comes down to money. Making sportsman pay more money for lead free ammunition and circle hooks, etc. is reasonable,
So now its reasonable? You have been harping on how this is just big gov't coming in to takeour rights, even going so far to compare it to Nazis and the Jews
but making oil companies pay more to remove wells with methods that don't cause massive fish kills is unreasonable?
So you want MORE gov't overreach? Because this is what it sounds like in this sentence
The oil companies define better as cheaper. I would define better as not having a negative impact on sustainable fisheries.
Run for Senate and get the law changed or contact Mary Landrieu and/or David Vitter (their phones are surely blowing up already due to this), they are simply doing what is defined in the law and what is cheapest.
I'm not proposing changing it, but with 20+ years of hindsight, we can prevent repeating some of the mistakes by limiting restrictions of new laws to those demonstrated to be necessary by sound
science.
What mistake? Banning lead was/is far from a mistake in my opinion and there are numerous publications out there to show that lead kills birds long after it comes out that shotgun shell (see my reference to Catahoula Lake)
This was an unpublished, unreviewed study from another state. Neither the data nor the methods are available, nor is it known what other game fish are used for comparison. The statement was presented as hearsay at a meeting and cannot even be attributed to a specific scientist, just a vague connection with a Mississippi study. Is this what fish and game laws should be based on in Louisiana?
After conducting extensive scholarly searches for all possible published tag studies in tripletail, I came up empty. I reviewed the CVs and publication lists of the authors in Gulf states who have published anything on tripletail in the last two decades - no published tag studies. A google search finally turned up a news report of a tag study in tripletail I emailed one of the scientists on the tag study earlier today, not published.
I will see if I can track it down also.
So what if we err on the side of caution and implement a law that stays in place for a number of years. Then science shows that some of the restrictions in the law were never necessary. By that point (your above argument), it's water under the bridge and established law "too late to jump on that train."
Regulations can always be changed once science supports it. It happens every year with waterfowl. Limits are established every single year depending upon the waterfowl counts (these are estimates by the way). Commercial quotas of fish change every year as well. Many things we thought in the past change and that is what makes science have rigor, the more you learn from 'mistakes' (as you put it), the more you can add to the future. One of the gurus of wild turkeys is a professor from Georgia. I heard him talk last week about a study they did with radio transmitters on turkeys in the Morganza Spillway when they opened the floodgates and one of the questions that was asked after the talk was 'what have radio transmitters taught you?'. Dr. Chamberlain said that he realizes now that many of his former publications were not correct. All his assumptions have been falsified by the data he collects from radio-transmitted turkeys. Thats just how things work, we once thought the earth was flat
Dying as a result of catch and release mortality isn't cool either, and many species of fish have release mortalities in the 20-80% range (even with circle hooks and vent tools). I hope no one figures out that sport anglers occasionally hook loggerhead turtles!
That whole red snapper venting thing is crap I agree. That is all federal junk there. The common sense thing to do (in my opinion) would be to make the regs where the angler has to keep the every fish he catches (no catch and release, most are going to die anyways when they return to the water so why not keep them) this would also be an incentive for people to use larger baits to target larger fish
Those trumpeting the need for new restrictions to reduce mortality of non-target species mention the successes but seldom the failures. Remember a few years back when the shrimpers had to install the devices to reduce the mortality of juvenile red snapper? And then several years later, they figured out that the shrimp bycatch mortality was not hurting the population. Circle hooks decrease release mortality in some fisheries, but there are other fisheries where their benefits have been shown to be insignificant years after mandating them.
Turtle Excluder Devices (TEDs) are one exception, they have been shown to work
And the LA requirement to use steel shot to kill nuisance blackbirds is laughable. I shot hundreds of blackbirds when I raised corn in Ohio, and lead shot is so much more effective, it's not even funny. Farmers should be allowed to use the effective tools in controlling nuisance species.
Wasn't awarer of a steel shot requirement to shoot blackbirds
But it makes sense to me, because much of the areas blackbirds inhabit are wetlands or can be wetlands (flooded corn, flooded rice) and it ties in with waterfowl ingestion of lead