CAPITOL IDEAS: Pombo Versus the Greens
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS TOM BETHELL Pombo Versus the Greens I DO MY BEST TO KEEP UP WITH ENVIRONMENTALISM, a field that has attracted a disproportionate share of lunatics. They went on the offensive 35...
...According to a new Bureau of Labor Statistics survey, only 5.6 percent of all U.S...
...Liberals don't understand this because they cannot conceive that their good intentions have bad consequences...
...This is the responsible agency within the Interior Department...
...If an endangered critter arrives on your land, in other words, it is a danger to you...
...Because everybody cares about the environment, right...
...Reforming the Endangered Species Act was on the top of Pombo's agenda--no easy matter when you consider the press coverage...
...All are variations on the same theme...
...This applied particularly to activists "who were using environmental rhetoric to cover up agendas that had more to do with class warfare and anti-corporatism than they did with the actual science of the environment...
...Many "could not make the transition from confrontation to consensus, and could not get out of adversarial politics...
...To stay in an adversarial role they had to adopt "ever more extreme positions...
...Of Portuguese descent, he was elected in 1992 and represents a central California district...
...Shoot, shovel, and shut-up" is the prudent response...
...There are more acres of forest today than in the 1920s, when the population was little more than one-third what it is now...
...We had a guy recently who said we are losing a million acres a day to development...
...Create a crisis...
...Again, lawsuits are the main weapon, mainly to prevent access across federal land...
...The land is actually owned by Indian tribes who support exploration...
...Their livelihood is at stake...
...It's not putting it too strongly to say that the major environmental groups must lie to us constantly...
...The press is partisan, without apology...
...There would be headlines and a huge battle, as there was with Reagan on tax cuts in 1981...
...Pombo's promotion, at the age of 42, is a sign that Republicans, at least on the House side, are getting their act together...
...Their own continued prosperity depends on maintaining the false crisis that they have generated...
...This has weakened business pressure on Congress to reform the law, placing the burden on the non-wealthy...
...It would have to be someone with a good knowledge of the issues, and who grasps that only frontal assault will work...
...A difficult idea for people to understand is that the environment is better cared for when it is in private hands than when it is controlled by the government...
...Proposed reforms would make these suits harder to file...
...They have become nothing more than fund-raising organizations," Pombo said...
...Tom Bethell is a senior editor of The American Spectator...
...Changing the incentives is going to cost money," Pombo said...
...SEPTEMBER 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 43...
...Of course this overlooks the "opportunity cost"—the loss of production caused by the act (not to mention the creatures shot and shoveled...
...1 AWSUITS ARE THE LIFEBLOOD of groups like the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society...
...A whole bunch of left-wing activists who no longer had any role in the peace, women's, or labor movements joined us," he said...
...As to cost, Pombo said, the greens like to say "the cost of the Endangered Species Act is what Fish and Wildlife spends...
...A destructive agenda, supported by spurious science, went unchecked for years...
...Send money now...
...The obstruction of oil and gas exploration is an outrage given the country's increasing dependence on foreign oil...
...Can't these incentives be reversed...
...If a species is listed in a particular area, farmers and ranchers start managing the land so it doesn't attract the wildlife," Pombo said...
...It's the equivalent of targeted tax breaks that reduce the pressure to lower rates across the board...
...acreage is built up—roads, towns, suburbs...
...What is the problem...
...All chairmen are busy, and as we spoke aides with slips of paper and anxious expressions kept peering into the committee room in the Longworth Office Building...
...The Clinton administration staffed up government agencies with true believers who remain in place...
...One reason why the act has survived is that big developers and companies have been able to "buy their way out of an endangered species problem" with conservation plans, Pombo said...
...Help us...
...Pombo is a good man but he can't make much of a dent on his own...
...Common sense was overwhelmed with new rulings, laws, and agencies...
...They never go back and ask the source if the claim can be substantiated...
...They went on the offensive 35 years ago, long before normal people could respond to the contrived crisis...
...At that rate it would take six or seven years to develop the entire country...
...Rep...
...Thereafter, and for an indefinite period, the government gets to decide what you can and (mostly) cannot do with your land...
...The government shows up with a check instead of a gun, say...
...Kennedy studies the mailings sent out by the major groups...
...They remove the possibility that they may have an endangered species on their property...
...The air and water is cleaner, lakes, rivers, and streams all improved...
...Meanwhile, the trend line for any and all environmental measures is one of improvement and has been for 50 years...
...If something 'protects the environment,' it's got to be true...
...He became chairman in 2003, over the heads of nine more senior members...
...Lots of federal laws have stopped oil and gas exploration inthis country," Pombo said, pointing out that we have a 150-year supply of natural gas and yet we now import it at vast expense...
...As it stands, the law is hazardous to endangered species...
...If an enviTOM BETHEL...
...Development of the oil reserves on Alaska's North Slope has been blocked by a handful of senators who take the green mail at face value: the devastation of the caribou, the destruction of the pristine landscape, and so on...
...ronmental group says something, the mainstream media will take it at face value and you have to try to disprove it," Pombo said...
...The organization was not initially left-wing, he contends, but it became so after the fall of the Berlin Wall...
...If I run A one of these organizations, I want my attorneys filing lawsuit after lawsuit," Pombo's communications director Brian Kennedy told me...
...That way they don't have a problem...
...The old fanaticism has not so much waned as it has been bureaucratized, Pombo said...
...We're suing...
...One good thing that happened in response is that Rep...
...Pombo not only understands this, he has written a book about it (This Land Is Our Land,1996...
...But even if the full House accepts the changes, they are "unlikely to make it through the 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 2004 Senate before adjournment," according to the Washington Post...
...If we are going to have grants or tax incentives, we will have to balance that off against Fish and Wildlife's budget...
...But Reagan won, and so would a president who told the world that America can no longer afford to indulge the fantasies of those who pretend to be concerned about the environment...
...We have filed suit against the federal government to protect species X from the evils of the Bush Administration, or from oil and gas development...
...a tiny increase from five years earlier...
...How are we to account for the sheer insanity of so much that passes for environmentalism...
...Since we spoke, the Resources Committee voted to modify the law, requiring Interior to establish that species really are endangered before "listing" them, and making it harder to designate lands as "critical habitat...
...They are entitled to attorney's fees, win or lose, under the citizens' suit provisions...
...Richard Pombo became chairman of the House Resources Committee, with jurisdiction over many of the relevant issues...
...We need a President who understands that he can win on "green" issues, but only by direct confrontation...
...Send us $100 and we'll fix it...
...One day recently I went to see him on Capitol Hill...
...We need a president who is fearless and understands he can win by taking on the environmentalists and their undeclared agenda...
...A group of them should come to Washington and stage sit-ins outside the offices of obstructionist Sierra Club senators such as Dopey Collins and Snowe White from Maine...
...A few leaders have quit in disgust, one of the most prominent being Patrick Moore, a founder of Greenpeace...
...But it was printed and reprinted...
Vol. 37 • September 2004 • No. 7
