Don's Tuesday Column

THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   5/20/2014

Decades-long, fantastical agendas and Bundy’s cattle

An emailed question prompted me to reply that no, I hadn’t forgotten about the role that solar energy projects played in the confrontation that culminated in the BLM seizing cattle from Cliven Bundy’s ranch. Column limits simply postponed telling that part of the story: It began around 1994 when then-Interior Secretary Bruce Babbit, having failed to acquire legislative authorization for radically reshaping BLM’s management of its 260 million federal acres, simply pronounced “Rangeland Reform,” doubling of grazing fees and more environmental rules to prevent “overgrazing.”

Babbit didn’t even have science on his side; a National Academy of Sciences report “concluded that so little was known about the condition of U.S. rangeland that the new standards were essentially a shot in the dark” (Kerry Pickett, Breitbart.com). Moreover, higher grazing fees were based on fees charged to graze on privately owned acreage. Yet, private grazing cost more because there was relatively little of it; the fact that government owned the vast majority of grazeable land drove up private fees which Babbit’s Interior Dept. “reform” used to justify hiking public fees.

So, they ignored Congress, science and the marketplace to jam through self-fulfilling regulations designed to inexorably strangle ranchers out of the business that they were induced into by the feds decades earlier, with promises of abundant grazing land. That’s the heavy, hypocritical hand of out-of-control agencies acting with authoritarian malice toward the people they exist to serve.

Having established by regulatory fiat that environmental considerations, absent specific Congressional authority, would drive the Interior Department’s BLM policy, it’s a short jump to more recent “green energy” agendas: Giving over vast swaths, thousands upon thousands of acres, to development—environmental, habitat and species disrupting development—under the auspices of arbitrary mandates for wind and solar projects.

Here’s where the ideology and agenda of “global warming” intersects grazing: The Dry Lake Solar Energy Zone (SEZ) was tasked for a massive solar energy array built, of course, with oodles of taxpayer subsidies and credits. Oodles of desert tortoises would be disrupted in their underground homes. Therefore, 32 miles east, the Gold Butte area’s 350,000 acres south of I-15 near the Arizona border were, for purposes of mitigating Dry Lake SEZ’s tortoise displacement,  “designated as an Area of Critical Environmental Concern (ACEC) by the BLM in 1998 as part of a land management plan for the Las Vegas area” (Steve Kanigher/Jim Robinson, FreeRepublic.com). Bundy’s cattle were the only ones still using part of Gold Butte; his property and rights fell victim to progress, changing mores and arbitrarily shifting environmental mandates, which gave zero heed to pre-existing grazing agreements.

The money quote: “One reason Gold Butte was singled out in the mitigation report was that research performed by the National Park Service for the Lake Mead National Recreation Area suggests ‘under future climate change, high-quality desert tortoise habitat will remain in the Gold Butte ACEC while most of the adjacent desert tortoise habitat in the national recreation area will decline and disappear’” (Jim Robinson). Like everything global warming/climate change/climate disruption-related, the future is computed, modeled, and catastrophe-predicted.

However, contrary to temperature and weather predictions, there has been no warming for 15 to 17 years (95 percent of forecasts missed that); tornadoes, hurricanes and droughts haven’t shown any surge or upward trend over recent history (heightened news coverage to the contrary). Their computing models and algorithms cannot predict the past, in that they can’t explain the warming from 1910-1940, followed by cooling from then until around 1978 (CO2 rose the whole time). They are incapable of quantitatively differentiating the 1910-1940 warming (lower CO2) from the 1978-1998 warming. Neither can they apply computer models to why we had the Little Ice Age or the Medieval Warming Period and certainly not the warmer-than-now Roman Warm Period. They (warming alarmists) don’t deserve our trust.

If you type “gold butte acec” in a search window you will find numerous links, three of which I opened: “Connection drawn between cattle roundup and BLM report, KLAS-TV,” “Nevada standoff: Yes, it’s solar-industry cronies (but NOT the Chinese)” by J.E. Dyer, LibertyUnyielding.com, and a green-leaning piece, “Mojave project tests Interior strategy for stemming habitat losses” by Phil Taylor, eenews.net. The big picture is that Obama’s policy prescriptions, like Jerry Brown’s under AB 32, call for nearly fantastical mandates of supposedly carbon reducing “green” wind and solar energy, requiring massive land-use, environmental, wildlife, economic and ratepayer disruptions and costs.

Complete the circle: “The new head of the BLM is a former Reid staffer placed … on Reid’s recommendation. Harry Reid is known to be a corrupt politician, who has gotten wealthy on a public employee’s salary … benefiting from sweetheart real estate deals. Does Harry Reid now control more than 80% of Nevada? If you need federal authority to conduct business in Nevada, do you need to pay a bribe to Harry Reid or a member of his family?” (John Hinderaker) Power, in the hands of politicians, bureaucrats or environmental fanatics, corrupts.