OPINION/COMMENTARY

MANAGING “ROADLESS” FOREST LANDS AS WILDERNESS IS ILLEGAL

The U.S. Forest Service may not manage federal land as wilderness unless Congress has designated that land as wilderness, a Colorado task force was advised today by a public interest law firm with years of experience regarding federal land management and the nation’s public land laws. Mountain States Legal Foundation, which has made numerous appearances before the U.S. Supreme Court and federal courts of appeals, filed comments with the Colorado Roadless Areas Review Task Force. In 2004, Colorado enacted legislation creating the task force to advise Colorado’s governor how 4.4 million acres of inventoried “roadless” acres of Forest Service lands in Colorado should be managed. “In 1964, Congress adopted the Wilderness Act, pursuant to which it designated areas of federal land as wilderness; this is the only manner in which such a classification may be attached to federal land,” said William Perry Pendley of Mountain States Legal Foundation. “In addition, Congress reasserted its constitutional authority over federal lands and put a clock on when, if ever, federal lands might be designated as wilderness. That clock has run, which requires that lands not designated by Congress as wilderness be managed as non-wilderness and open to all of the American people.” In 1924, the Forest Service established the first de facto wilderness area; by 1964, it had created 88 de facto wilderness areas totaling 15 million acres. In 1964, Congress dealt legislatively with the issue of wilderness: creating wilderness areas, reserving for itself the designation of wilderness areas, and setting a deadline for the study of potential new wilderness areas....

'Deadline' for Senate ESA rewrite likely to pass without action

Senators working to rewrite the Endangered Species Act appear to be backing away from a previously scheduled deadline to introduce a bill this week, though a spokesman for a key negotiator said the senators still hope to produce a compromise measure soon. Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman James Inhofe (R-Okla.) had previously set a deadline for the end of March to move a bill through committee. Meeting that deadline now looks less likely, if not impossible, with no bill yet on the table and no hearings scheduled on the issue for this week. Inhofe, ranking member Jim Jeffords (I-Vt.) and Sens. Lincoln Chafee (R-R.I.) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) have said they would like to work together to produce consensus ESA legislation. And discussions between staff members from both sides of the aisle are continuing, EPW Committee spokesman Bill Holbrook said yesterday. "We anticipate having a bipartisan bill soon," he said. Lobbyists following the issue said they expect to see legislation in April, possibly next week. Congress only has two weeks to work with before returning to their districts April 10 for the two-week spring recess. Analysts following the issue said parties are still having trouble with the "big ticket" issues, most importantly how to protect habitat for listed species....

FEDS MUST DELIST PREBLE’S MEADOW JUMPING MOUSE

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) was advised today by a Colorado public interest law firm that it must remove the Preble's Meadow Jumping Mouse (PMJM) from protection under the Endangered Species Act. In comments filed with the agency, Mountain States Legal Foundation noted that official documents prove that the PMJM is not a morphologically, genetically, or ecologically distinct subspecies of meadow jumping mouse, nor is the PMJM a distinct population segment of meadow jumping mouse. The comments follow a February 2006 decision by the FWS to reopen comments for proposed delisting of the PMJM as a result of an unpublished report in January 2006 arguing that the PMJM must be listed. At the time, the FWS was due to rule on delisting, thus ending a process that began with a January 2005 announcement by Secretary Norton following the filing a federal lawsuit challenging the listing of the PMJM. "Even if the agency does what the law requires, it is eight years too late for landowners and governments along the Front Range of Wyoming and Colorado who suffered distress at the hands of federal bureaucrats," said William Perry Pendley of Mountain States Legal Foundation. “Experts long knew that the listing of the mouse is the epitome of junk science."....

Green Gold and Cargo Cults

The biggest environmental meeting of the year will run until the end of March in Curitiba, Brazil. If you ever wondered why efforts in the UN to protect the environment rarely succeed, all the reasons are on display. It is a case study for the Harvard Business Review. The meeting is described by code - "COP8MOP3". Like a message from Big Brother it is everywhere in Curitiba. It dominates the main conference room and is on the sides of buses and every branch in the city of the HSBC Bank, the conference sponsor. The environmental cognoscenti will instantly know the code means this is the eighth meeting of the members of the UN Convention on Biodiversity (CBD) -- MOP8, joined with the third meeting of the parties to the Cartegena Protocol on Biosafety to the Convention -- COP3. So what is the meeting for? The Convention on Biodiversity enjoins the world to protect Biodiversity. It was never clear what that meant, leading the US Congress to warn the Administration -- any administration -- not to join it. That was sound advice. The main business at this conference is not to protect biodiversity, but to endorse a return to the sort of economic philosophy that has impoverished many nations. Explaining this is a difficult message. Maybe that is why the UN officials have used code to define the meeting....

Senate Shuts Out Dissent on Greenhouse Gas Limits

Next week’s scheduled Senate hearing on mandatory greenhouse gas emissions limits misses a valuable opportunity to present a representative view of the debate on the topic. Instead of soliciting testimony from a range of views, Energy & Natural Resources Committee Chairman Pete Domenici (R-NM) and Ranking Member Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) have stacked the witness list with alarmist environmental activist groups and opportunistic corporations trying to profit from the artificial scarcity that would be imposed by caps on carbon emissions. “Not only have Senators Domenici and Bingaman refused to include reasonable input from skeptics of an emissions trading scheme, they seem to have forgotten to include a representative from the one corporation which most enthusiastically embraced emissions credits – Enron,” said Competitive Enterprise Institute President Fred L. Smith, Jr. “Many of Enron’s former employees would no doubt have been happy to remind the committee of the company’s strong lobbying for carbon caps and emissions trading and their plans to profit massively under such a system.” An emissions trading program of the kind envisioned by Domenici and Bingaman would amount to an undeclared tax on energy, raising costs to consumers and disadvantaging energy-intensive industry to the profit of a handful of well-positioned corporations....

UTAH FAMILY ADDS TWO COUNTS TO FEDERAL BOMBING SITE CASE

A Utah family, which for decades has urged the United States to fulfill its contractual and moral obligations to the family by cleaning up family property the United States used as a bombing and weapons testing site, today added two more counts in the family’s lawsuit against the United States in Utah federal district court. The lawsuit, filed by F. Douglas Cannon, Margaret Louise Cannon, and Allan Cannon, contends that the failure of the United States to reclaim some 1,417 acres of land that the Cannon family owns just south of the Army Dugway Proving Grounds in Tooele County in west central Utah violates the federal Solid Waste Disposal Act and the Administrative Procedure Act. The Cannon family’s grandfather signed a contract with the Army under which the land was to be reclaimed. “It is clear that the United States, by failing to do what it committed by contract to do, violated federal administrative procedure law as well as an environmental law adopted to protect the public from hazardous wastes,” said William Perry Pendley of Mountain States Legal Foundation, which represents the family. “The United States agreed to restore the property to ‘as good as condition’ as it was in at the time of the contract, which the United States failed to do. Today we added two federal charges created by that failure.” In May 1945, during World War II, the U.S. Army entered into a contract with Jesse Fox Cannon to survey and to perform exploratory and construction work in a section of Mr. Cannon’s property. Instead, the Army began “Project Sphinx” in which, contrary to the contract, it bombed the entire property and used incendiary weapons such as butane, gasoline, and napalm, chemical munitions such as phosgene and mustard agent, and some defoliants....

Easing the natural-gas crunch

High gasoline prices have grabbed headlines over the past year, but the bigger story is natural gas. The rise in natural-gas prices has been considerably greater and imposes serious burdens on consumers and industries that use natural gas. Yet domestic gas production has been flat, largely due to legal and political constraints on drilling. Throughout the 1990s, natural gas was cheap and plentiful, and policymakers became complacent about its future. Yielding to opposition from environmentalists as well as legislators from Florida and a few other coastal states, the federal government placed strict limits on new exploration and drilling, especially in offshore areas. At the same time, tough Clean Air Act regulations raised the cost of generating coal-fired electricity, making natural gas an attractive alternative for utilities. As a result, most power plants built since 1990 have been natural gas-fired, further straining supplies. Plus, consumer demand for natural gas was rising, as were the needs of gas-dependent industries such as chemical and fertilizer production. With supplies limited and demand growing, price hikes were inevitable. Natural gas stayed around $2 per thousand cubic feet throughout the 1990s but has shot up since, averaging $9 per thousand cubic feet in 2005. If the price of gasoline had risen that much in percentage terms, it would exceed $5 per gallon....

Big Government’s New Pet Project If your cat is planning to have kittens, you better take a number. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has hatched the National Animal Identification System (NAIS). The NAIS comes in response to fears of mad cow disease and bioterrorism, even though there are at most three instances of mad cow disease in U.S. history and no documented instances of animals being used for bioterrorism. This program, which began on a voluntary basis in 2004, becomes mandatory this year for 25 percent of premises where animals are kept. Eventually, all premises will be required to register their animals with the government or face criminal penalties, including a fine of $1,000 per day. Every animal on the premises must be given a radio-frequency identification tag (RFID). States can choose to administer the program themselves. Each state can determine the definition of a “premise.” Texas and most other states will likely exclude private pets, but persons who raise or transfer animals will be covered. Accordingly, if a litter of kittens is born and the owner wishes to sell or give them away, the owner must register his premises and tag the kittens with a 15-digit electronic identification device. While large agribusiness operations may have the wherewithal to implement this scheme, small farmers throughout the nation are bracing for an unbearable regulatory burden. Even high school 4-H or FFA programs will have to comply with this mandate, although the Commission is considering an amendment to allow them to register each project rather than every animal. The red tape associated with the NAIS does not end after a premises owner registers his premises and tags and registers his animals. Rather, the burden continues as the owner must report, within 24 hours, any missing animal, any missing tag, the sale of an animal, the death of an animal, the slaughter of an animal, the purchase of an animal, the movement of an animal off the farm or homestead, or the movement of an animal onto the farm or homestead....

Equal Rights for Animals?

Believe it or not, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals may have finally gone too far. The group, which decries the killing of chickens but apparently has no stand on the partial-birth abortion of human beings, has decided to suspend its latest animal rights campaign—just a few weeks after kicking off its national tour. The exhibit went by the bizarre title, “Are Animals the New Slaves?” It compared the lynching of black Americans to the killing of animals for food. Twelve panels showed such images as noosed black men hanging from trees, juxtaposed with shots of slaughtered cows. But, even though PETA now appears to be pulling back, the damage has already been done. The exhibit appeared in 17 cities before PETA decided to put the campaign on hold. PETA spokesperson Dawn Carr told the Associated Press, “We’re not continuing right now while we evaluate. We’re reviewing feedback we’ve received—most of it overwhelmingly positive and some of it quite negative.” I’d really like the chance to see those individuals who offered the positive feedback. Were they on two legs or four? PETA has certainly had some shenanigans to its credit in the past, but this latest stunt truly crosses the line. In New Haven, Connecticut, the situation surrounding the exhibit became so volatile that police had to be called in. This has to be insensitivity at its highest....

Animal-rights groups hide violent subculture

Given the animated debate over the use of live animals in medical education ("Wisconsin medical school's dog research draws scrutiny," March 12), it is worthwhile, I feel, to take a close look at the practice's chief antagonists: the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, or PCRM. The misnamed "physicians committee" is a PETA-affiliated animal-rights group whose membership includes fewer than 4 percent physicians. Dr. John Pippin is an exception, a doctor who openly associates with PCRM. Most mainstream physicians understand how radical the group really is, including Pippin's former employer. In 2004, the world-renowned Cooper Clinic terminated Pippin, its then-chief cardiovascular specialist, because the clinic learned he was moonlighting for the animal-rights fringe. Earlier in 2004, Newsweek reported that PCRM's president, psychiatrist Neal Barnard, had "co-signed letters on PCRM letterhead with the leader of Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty, an animal-rights group the Department of Justice calls a 'domestic terrorist threat."' That same leader, Kevin Kjonaas, who co-signed the letters with Barnard, was convicted earlier this month in federal court on domestic terrorism charges related to an animal-rights campaign....