OPINION/COMMENTARY

When Uncle Sam Owns the Land

What would you do if a neighbor's tree falls on your house and causes a thousand dollars of damage? You would ask your neighbor to pay for the damage, and the law would require that he or his insurance pay the cost of the damage. Likewise, if your neighbor keeps hazardous materials on the edge of his property, such as dead trees and brush, and if they catch fire and burn down your house, you would have legal recourse.

But what happens if your negligent neighbor happens to be the government? You may be out of luck because the government may choose not to compensate you or allow you to sue it.

As the California fires have just illustrated, the questions raised above are now all too real for the thousands of families whose homes burned down needlessly, because of the negligence of the government in its stewardship of the land it owns. We know the government had allowed highly flammable brush to build up and failed to clear it, which would have been the responsible thing to do. We also know the government allowed bark beetles to kill millions of trees on the government land, and then failed to remove the dead trees, creating an additional hazard...

Green Power

Advocates of so-called "green power" are comically utopian in their belief that America's economy can be fueled almost entirely by wind, solar, and biomass.

Fossil fuels, they say, can be quickly and easily replaced by renewable energy. "Renewable energy technology has advanced commercially to the point where it is now ready for wide-scale development," according to energy analysts with the extremist U.S. Public Interest Research Group (US PIRG)...

FACT: US PIRG's utopia is contradicted by experience.

Consider the Board of Water and Light (BWL) in Lansing, Michigan, which began buying green power two years ago. Under a new program, customers could get half of their power from green sources, but at an extra cost of $7.50 a month.

The result? Only 700 of the company's 100,000 customers signed up for it...

Environmentalism Helped Kindle Fires

...Pombo pointed to a GAO study released October 29 that found that 66% of fuel reduction projects planned by the U.S. Forest Service for national forests in California were stalled by administrative appeals—mostly filed by environmental groups—in fiscal years 2001 and 2002.

Forest fuels reduction is aimed at limiting the severity of fires when they inevitably break out by preemptively clearing underbrush and thinning trees. Pombo said that no projects were delayed by appeals in the specific areas that burned last month in Southern California because the Forest Service had scheduled none.

"You can't point to a specific project that was appealed," he said, "but because so many of these projects are appealed, the Forest Service has stopped proposing them in areas where there is a lot of resistance."

"We need to go back in and manage these forests in some way," he said...

The Road to Milan

At the beginning of October, Russian President Vladimir Putin played a "knight's move" on global warming alarmists. Russians -- chess players all -- know the value of the knight, the chess piece that can jump over the opponent's defenses to surprise him, and fond of imitating the knight in their approach to national strategy. At the World Climate Change Conference in Moscow, they surprised the scaremongers and forces opposed to economic growth by not only failing to back the Kyoto treaty, but re-opening the scientific debate over the causes and scope of climate change. The myth of scientific "consensus" on the issue should now be buried once and for all.

Russia was in fact never going to ratify the Kyoto Protocol once President Putin had announced his ambition to double Russia's gross domestic product by 2010. The Kyoto Protocol seeks to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in certain countries to levels below those seen in 1990. Environmentalists and their political allies had taken it as a given that Russia would ratify Kyoto because, thanks to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dismantling of its smokestack industries, Russia's carbon emissions are already below those seen in 1990. They even thought there was a financial incentive for Russia to ratify, because she would be able to sell credits for emissions beyond the targets to countries that could not meet their own targets. They regarded Kyoto as "free money" for Russia...

Who Should Have Air Supremacy?

The Clean Air Act (CAA), perhaps the federal government's most powerful environmental tool, concedes in its very first section, "air pollution control at its source is the primary responsibility of states and local governments." Notwithstanding these sentiments, the CAA has been implemented by Washington in a manner that crowds out most state and local autonomy. There are many problems, but also some benefits to this approach, as is demonstrated by two pending Supreme Court cases involving state and local challenges to federal air policy.

Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation v. Environmental Protection Agency involves a permit dispute over the Red Dog Mine, the world's largest zinc mine located above the Arctic Circle in Alaska. In 1999, the state issued a permit allowing the facility to add a seventh electricity-generating unit. The permit required the mine to install so-called low nitrogen oxide technology to control air pollution at the new unit. The federal EPA then stepped in and overrode the state, declaring these permit provisions too weak and demanding that the mine install a costlier selective catalytic reduction system instead. Alaska is challenging EPA's actions, arguing that the federal government exceeded its limited oversight authority in state permitting decisions.

In Engine Manufacturers Association v. South Coast Air Quality Management District, motor vehicle engine makers have challenged local provisions mandating alternatives to gasoline and diesel powered vehicles in parts of California. These requirements would apply to new vehicles purchased for use in government and private fleets throughout Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, and Riverside counties. The engine makers assert that the CAA preempts any such local vehicle standards at odds with the nationally-approved ones...