Environmentalists wield powerful Endangered Species Act to kill jobs, impoverish families
Ron Arnold
The abuse of environmentalist power to hurt people never stops.
“Another one gone,” began the Lost Coast Outpost’s report in late January. A.A. “Red” Emmerson, chairman of Sierra Pacific Industries, announced the permanent closure of its sawmill on Samoa Peninsula in Arcata, California - with the loss of 123 crew member jobs (and over 100 secondary jobs that depended on sawmill employment).
Regulatory burdens and reduced allowable harvests from federal forests are the primary reasons for the closure, Emmerson said.
The shutdown of the last mill on once-bustling Humboldt Bay this year was just the latest loss in the timber industry’s long and steady decline under relentless environmentalist pressure and U.S. Forest Service complicity.
A year earlier the North Coast Journal had sadly bid “Goodnight, Korbel” when Arcata’s neighbor lost its 131-year-old sawmill, its 106 direct jobs and numerous local indirect positions. The Pulp & Paperworkers’ Resource Council had previously released its 119-page “Mill Curtailments & Closures From 1990,” counting more than 1,700 nationwide timber-related casualties from 1990 through 2012.
All this damage was launched by the ionic 1991 Spotted Owl court ruling won by a local bird group, Seattle Audubon Society - initially with separate plaintiff Portland (Oregon) Audubon Society - against logging in Washington, Oregon and California.
The owl ruling has been so devastating because Judge William L. Dwyer, of Washington State’s federal district court, granted and stretched Seattle Audubon’s demands to the impossible.
Using the “regional biogeography” principle from a federal “Spotted Owl Task Force” decision, Dywer ruled, “The duty to maintain viable populations of existing vertebrate species requires planning for the entire biological community - not for one species alone. It is distinct from the duty, under the Endangered Species Act, to save a listed species from extinction.”
But even wildlife specialists did not know and could not explain what the “entire biological community” of the three-state area was.
Industry analyst Paul Ehinger & Associates of Eugene, Oregon found that, after just five years, Dwyer’s Seattle Audubon ruling had shut down 187 mills and wiped out 22,654 jobs throughout the three states.
The toll expanded like the Big Bang, and running totals are no longer tracked. A few well-off Seattle industry-haters and a liberal judge who paid little attention to the human toll set in motion a curse without end, the “progressive” destruction of the jobs, incomes, hopes and dreams of thousands.
The Center for Biological Diversity in Tucson, Arizona is a legal action environmental group that sues to block human action and doesn’t care who gets hurt. The leader of its three co-founders, Kieran Suckling, had been an activist in the 1980s’ vandalism and sabotage group, Earth First! (The exclamation point was a mandatory identifier.)
Hatred of industry - and the people who ran it - prompted the founders to seek ways to permanently stop natural resource use and led them to form the CBD in 1994. With the help of environmental attorneys, CBD “weaponized” the Endangered Species Act against ranchers, loggers, miners, and human activity in general. That law now trumps virtually everything else.
In fact, about the only time the act doesn’t seem to apply is when gigantic wind turbines slaughter hundreds of thousands of eagles, hawks, falcons, other birds and bats, year after year, nearly eradicating them and “entire biological communities” across vast areas in California, Oregon and elsewhere.
The organization’s self-description says, “As the country’s leading endangered species advocates, the Center for Biological Diversity works through science, law and creative media to secure a future for all species, great or small, hovering on the brink of extinction.”
Extremism is a mild term to describe CBD’s blanket enmity to human action. It has even crossed the traditional environmentalist line that protected and revered Native Americans as “people of nature.”
The group joined a federal lawsuit last year to block essential expansion of The Navajo Mine, south of Farmington, New Mexico. The mine sits on a Navajo reservation and is owned by the Navajo Transitional Energy Company (NTEC), a wholly owned subsidiary of the Navajo Nation’s sprawling tribal government.
The mine was established for the sole purpose of delivering all its coal to the nearby Four Corners Power Plants: five coal-fired power plants, majority-owned and operated by the Arizona Public Service Company, to provide electricity to California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.
In the process, it generated 800 mine and power plant jobs, many of them Navajos, and $40 million in annual revenue to the Navajo Nation. NTEC was granted a federal permit to expand the mine.
However, the CBD was determined to stop the expansion and shut down the mine via a huge lawsuit. It helped organize a coalition of co-plaintiffs including little local groups such as Amigos Bravos, San Juan Citizens Alliance, and Dine [Navajo] Citizens Against Ruining Our Environment, as well as the $100-million-a-year Sierra Club and the powerful Western Environmental Law Center.
The attack by CBD et al. won a Colorado federal judge’s order nullifying the expansion permit. The order was confirmed by the Tenth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals when NTEC lost an appeal for a stay on the lower court’s ruling. Even with that victory, the CBD gang insisted that ongoing mining must also halt, pending a new environmental review of alleged public health and environmental risks from the mine expansion: from pollutants that are actually a minor problem at these technologically advanced and well-run Navajo facilities.
Only the Navajo Nation’s sovereignty, an environmental review and agreements with the EPA to fight regional haze by closing three of the plant’s five units and installing emission controls on the remaining two plants saved some of the jobs and revenue - for now. Of course, all that could change as the CBD gang fights on, threatening to sue the federal permitting agency.
Lost jobs of course mean seriously impaired living standards, health and welfare for unemployed workers and their families. But for the CBD and judges, those concerns are irrelevant.
In January, the Farmington Daily Times reported that the town’s San Juan College received a $1.4 million federal grant to help retrain displaced coal miners and workers in other industries, including oil and gas. But oil and gas operations are also under assault by the CBD gang and various federal agencies, which are using climate change, the EPA’s Clean Power Plan and other regulations to restrict or eliminate leasing, drilling and other resource extraction on western lands.
Clearly, even the sovereignty that comes with being a federally recognized Indian tribe on an established reservation provides no protection against a weaponized Endangered Species Act. Other communities, industries, workers and families are even more powerless.
Once again, poor, minority and working class families are at the mercy of wealthy ruling elites, for whom exaggerated and even fabricated environmental concerns are paramount. It’s wrong, and it has to end.
Ron Arnold is executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, a policy advisor to The Heartland Institute, author of ten books on environmentalist excesses, and editor of the Undue Influence website, which exposes leftist funding and practices.
Anthony Watts March 29, 2016 From Blue Virginia
Unprecedented Coalition Vows To Defend Climate Change Progress Made Under President Obama And To Push The Next President For Even More Aggressive Action
NEW YORK - Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman today joined Attorneys General from across the nation to announce an unprecedented coalition of top law enforcement officials committed to aggressively protecting and building upon the recent progress the United States has made in combatting climate change.
Attorneys General Schneiderman, William Sorrell of Vermont, George Jepsen of Connecticut, Brian E. Frosh of Maryland, Maura Healey of Massachusetts, Mark Herring of Virginia, and Claude Walker of the US Virgin Islands were joined by former Vice President Al Gore for the announcement in New York City. Today’s announcement took place during a one-day Attorneys General climate change conference, co-sponsored by Schneiderman and Sorrell.
The participating states are exploring working together on key climate change-related initiatives, such as ongoing and potential investigations into whether fossil fuel companies misled investors and the public on the impact of climate change on their businesses. In 2015, New York State reached a historic settlement with Peabody Energy - the world’s largest publicly traded coal company - concerning the company’s misleading financial statements and disclosures. New York is also investigating ExxonMobil for similar alleged conduct.
“We cannot continue to allow the fossil fuel industry or any industry to treat our atmosphere like an open sewer or mislead the public about the impact they have on the health of our people and the health of our planet. Attorneys General and law enforcement officials around the country have long held a vital role in ensuring that the progress we have made to solve the climate crisis is not only protected, but advanced. The first-of-its-kind coalition announced today is another key step on the path to a sustainable, clean-energy future” said Vice President Al Gore.
Vermont Attorney General William Sorrell said, “We are happy to have worked closely with New York to organize this meeting. As we all know, global warming, if not reversed, will be catastrophic for our planet. We, the states, have a role to play in this endeavor and intend to do our part.”
Full story here
UPDATE: all is not well in Goreville
Democratic Attorneys General Refuse to Join Rockefeller-Backed Climate Investigation
3:03pm EDT March 29, 2016
by Steve Everley, steve@energyindepth.org , Dallas, Tex.
A press conference today featuring Al Gore and more than a dozen state attorneys general was expected to reveal new state-level investigations of U.S. energy companies regarding climate change. But the vast majority of AGs standing on stage refused to join such an effort, signaling a lack of interest in wasting their own states’ resources.
Last year, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced that he had launched an investigation into fossil fuel companies regarding what the New York Times called “possible climate change lies.” The investigation was based entirely on a series of controversial articles written by researchers at the Columbia School of Journalism and InsideClimate News, which selectively pulled statements from company documents to suggest Exxon Mobil’s public policy advocacy was inconsistent with its own research.
Unsurprisingly, environmental activists embraced the articles, and even began an online campaign - complete with the hash tag #ExxonKnew on Twitter - to pressure state and federal officials to launch investigations into so-called “climate denial.” To date, they have succeeded in convincing Schneiderman as well as the attorneys general for California and Massachusetts.
But Democratic attorneys general from New Mexico, Washington, D.C., Rhode Island, Maine, Illinois, Virginia, Maryland, Connecticut, and Vermont - all of whom stood on the stage next to Al Gore today - refused to announce that they would be launching their own investigations. In fact, reporters covering the event struggled to find much of anything new in what the officials were promising. The Huffington Post even conceded that the AGs “were vague on what exactly they have planned.”
Editorial boards across the country have criticized the #ExxonKnew campaign as an attempt to “stamp out all disagreement,” while also worrying about the legal precedent of pursuing “criminal penalties over those involved in a scientific debate.” An editorial from Bloomberg News called Schneiderman’s investigation a “dangerous arrogation of power.”
Legal experts have also questioned the merits of New York’s investigation. John Coffee, a law professor at Columbia University, told the New York Times that a “leading obstacle [to a conviction] would be the First Amendment, as climate change is a matter of robust public debate.”
Paying for Media, Policy Outcomes
Although Schneiderman’s office contends the investigation is based on allegations of “fraud,” one of the groups who funded the research underpinning Schneiderman’s investigation - the Rockefeller Family Fund - admitted last week that their funding of non-profit news entities, including Columbia and InsideClimate News, was geared toward achieving “better climate policy”. More
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State Department’s $500 Million Transfer to the U.N.
Last week, the Obama administration transferred $500 million in U.S. funds to the United Nations’ Green Climate Fund. Congress never authorized the Green Climate Fund or any appropriations to it. The State Department must fully account for how it decided to give taxpayer dollars to a U.N. fund that Congress never authorized.
Last week, the Obama administration transferred $500 million in U.S. funds to the United Nations’ Green Climate Fund. Other countries will welcome the administration’s handover of American tax dollars to subsidize their own economies. The American people will reject it as another executive power grab that ignores their judgment and misuses their hard-earned money.
FUNDING AN UNAUTHORIZED PROGRAM
On March 8, Deputy Secretary of State Heather Higginbottom testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Congress never authorized the Green Climate Fund. Congress did not authorize Green Climate Fund, State Department testified
Before Higginbottom admitted this simple fact, she struggled to provide specific authority for her department’s $500 million contribution to the fund. She said that the president’s proposed fiscal year 2016 budget included money for the fund. The Senate rejected this budget 98 to 1, and it was never enacted into law. She said that the fiscal year 2016 omnibus appropriations bill included money for the fund. This bill was enacted into law, but it appropriated no money for the fund.
She said that State Department lawyers determined that it was authorized to reprogram money from other programs to the fund. This appears to contradict the decision by Congress to exclude the funds from the enacted fiscal year 2016 omnibus bill. Congress specifically excluded a provision that would have authorized reprogramming money from other accounts to the fund.
CONGRESS, NOT ADMINISTRATION LAWYERS, APPROPRIATES FUNDS
The State Department raided $500 million from the Economic Support Fund to pay for its Green Climate Fund contribution. This was more than 26 percent of the total $1.9 billion that Congress appropriated for the Economic Support Fund to “promote economic or political stability” in countries with “special economic, political, and security conditions.’ Congress designated this money to do things such as to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon; to assist Ukraine with counteracting Russian aggression; to assist Egypt with educational, democratic, and economic reforms; to assist Africa with its public health crises; to combat human trafficking; to help exhume mass graves and identify victims of war crimes and crimes against humanity; and to empower women in conflict prevention, peace building, and reconstruction efforts.
The State Department either stole $500 million from these priorities, or it did not need the $500 million in the first place. The deputy secretary insisted in her March 8 testimony that the Economic Support Fund was not underfunded or overfunded. Instead, she argued that the transfer of $500 million to the Green Climate Fund was one of many budget “tradeoffs” the State Department regularly makes. “It raises serious concerns then that the State Department has at least $500 million sitting around in funding that’s no longer needed for the purposes for which it was approved,” Senator Barrasso noted during the hearing. “Whether you have the legal authority or not to move it, you have chosen to move $500 million from programs for which it was approved.”
The American people, through their representatives in Congress, have the power to authorize or reject the Green Climate Fund and to approve or disapprove any contribution of tax dollars to it. Senator Gardner explained: “We have a Constitution that makes it very clear that appropriations are carried out by the legislative branch, and when you sit here before the American people and say that the Green Climate Fund was never approved by Congress, and yet $500 million just went to it, I don’t think that lawyers can replace the Constitution. Lawyers don’t replace the constitutional requirements that Congress approve these funds and this appropriation.”
A U.N. SLUSH FUND SHOULD NOT GET U.S. FUNDS
Congress was right to reject the Green Climate Fund and to disapprove a $500 million contribution to it. Officially, the Green Climate Fund will finance “low-emission and climate-resilient projects and programmes in developing countries.” Realistically, it will operate as a slush fund for the U.N. and government officials in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere. According to one analysis last year, the top climate finance recipients of 2014 have serious problems with corruption. India, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, Vietnam, Egypt, South Korea, Kenya, Thailand, and the Philippines each score as “corrupt” to “highly corrupt” on Transparency International’s 2015 Corruption Perceptions Index. The 10 riskiestcountries for money laundering and terrorist financing, according to the International Centre for Asset Recovery’s 2015 Basel AML Index, have said they could need more than $900 billion in climate financing by 2030. Even the Green Climate Fund board includes several government officials from some of the riskiest countries for money laundering and terrorist financing.
The State Department’s $500 million payment is the first tranche in the Obama administration’s multi-year commitment to transfer $3 billion in American wealth to other nations. That figure will grow if developing countries have their way. They are demanding trillions of dollars in return for participating in last December’s climate agreement in Paris. Seventy-three developing countries said they would need approximately $341 billion per year from the U.S. and other developed countries. Iran wanted $840 billion by 2030 - and warned that its greenhouse gas pledge was entirely dependent on the removal of all sanctions. These demands will only grow when another 90 developing countries announce how much money they expect to get.
A FULL ACCOUNTING IS NEEDED
Senators Barrasso and Gardner have suggested that the State Department’s decision to unilaterally transfer $500 million of U.S. tax dollars to a U.N. slush fund that the American people never authorized and for which money was never appropriated breaks down trust between the executive branch and the legislative branch as well as between Washington and the American people. The evasive testimony by the deputy secretary of state on March 8 served only to underscore concerns that the State Department has been less than forthcoming. transferred $500 million in U.S. funds to the United Nations’ Green Climate Fund. Congress never authorized the Green Climate Fund or any appropriations to it. The State Department must fully account for how it decided to give taxpayer dollars to a U.N. fund that Congress never authorized.
Last week, the Obama administration transferred $500 million in U.S. funds to the United Nations’ Green Climate Fund. Other countries will welcome the administration’s handover of American tax dollars to subsidize their own economies. The American people will reject it as another executive power grab that ignores their judgment and misuses their hard-earned money.
By Jeff Dunetz
Ouch! That’s going to leave a scar!
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) chief Gina McCarthy and the Republican Governor of Michigan Rick Snyder each testified about the Flint Michigan water crisis on Thursday before the House Committee On Oversight And Government Reform. When questioned by committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), Governor Snyder admitted mistakes and said that people responsible for the errors were fired. Ms. McCarthy arrogantly refused to acknowledge any EPA mistakes, provoking Chaffetz to “lose it” at the administrator - and call for her resignation.
The hearings addressed the EPA’s failure to take action immediately, after EPA Region 5 (which includes Michigan) regulations Manager Miguel Del Toral began to sound warnings after he visited Flint in February 2015, and followed with series of memos. The first memo was written in April 2015 indicating there were high lead-levels, but they didn’t know exactly where they were coming from. He said that water samples were being tested by Virginia Tech Professor Marc Edwards who should provide answers to the origin of the lead. The June 2015 memo contained professor Edwards’ report, which indicated where the water was being contaminated, as well as the seriousness of the problem.
The EPA, however, did not get involved until January 2016.
Sworn testimony earlier that same week at the Snyder/McCarthy hearings given by Marc Edwards indicated that Mr. Del Toral was afraid of pushing the issue because his superiors at the EPA might retaliate.
Mr. Edwards: I do not think Ms. Hedman [Susan Hedman Mr. Del Toral’s boss] understands the climate she created at Region 5 EPA. Even before Mr. Del Toral wrote that memo, he told me that he had to protect Flint’s children while minimizing the likelihood he would be retaliated against.
Mr. Meadows: Had he shared with you that he has been retaliated against? Is that your belief?
Mr. Edwards: Well, I mean, obviously he was told not to talk to anyone in Flint or about Flint. A deal of some sort was made between EPA and MDEQ where MDEQ felt emboldened to say that “they had handled Mr. Del Toral.” That Flint residents would not be hearing from Mr. Del Toral again.
EPA’s Susan Hedman resigned of because of the Flint water crisis in January, 2016.
Adding fuel to the fire, on September 26, 2015, EPA Administrator McCarthy wrote an email to top EPA officials warning that the situation in Flint could “get very big quickly,” and “findings by university researchers and local doctors of high lead levels in the city’s water and in some children’s blood,” and still the EPA did nothing until January 2016. In other words, Rep. Chaffetz couldn’t have been pleased with Ms. McCarthy even before Thursday’s hearings.
Chaffetz began the hearings by calling the Del Toral memos “one of the more troubling things.”
It’s one of the more offensive, concerning things I’ve seen, that there were people = more than one that were making decisions and thinking, well maybe Flint isn’t who we should go out on a limb for.
But, the real fireworks began when it was Chairman Chaffetz’s turn to ask questions. The Utah congressman noted that, while the state has accepted responsibility and fired or suspended Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) employees involved in the Flint water crisis, the EPA fired no one and even called Susan Hedman’s resignation “courageous.”
McCarthy began to obfuscate by refusing to take any responsibility, giving what Chaffetz called a “cheap” response. The EPA head wouldn’t admit any wrongdoing, saying, “I don’t know if we did everything right. That’s the challenge that I’m facing. “I would have hoped we would have been more aggressive,” she added while claiming that she couldn’t act earlier because she didn’t have the information (despite Mr. Del Toral’s warnings).
Every time she tried to give an excuse, Chaffetz cut her off. And each time he cut her off it, seemed as if his temper was increasing. Chaffetz snapped at her at one point, “You failed” Cutting off another McCarthy response, he added, “Don’t look around like you’re mystified! That’s what happened, Miguel Del Toral showed up in February, you didn’t take action, you didn’t.”
Chaffetz finished his time by chastising McCarthy as his voice got louder:
You want to do the courageous thing, like you said Susan Hedman did? Then you too should resign! Nobody’s going to believe that you had the opportunity, you had the presence, you had the authority. You had the backing of the federal government, and you did not act when you had the chance. And if you’re going to do the courageous thing you, too, should step down.
The full five minutes of Jason Chaffetz’s questioning is on the video below.