OPINION/COMMENTARY


The Anti-Kelo Wave

We'll all find out soon whether next week's elections yield the "Democratic wave" so many political seers have predicted. There isn't much doubt, however, about another kind of electoral wave that has been building across America and is set to crash on Tuesday. That tsunami is the property-rights backlash, which is the direct result of last year's misguided and deeply unpopular Supreme Court decision in Kelo v. City of New London. A narrow Court majority decided that the Constitution's "takings" clause somehow allowed the government to seize private property not merely for "public use" but also on behalf of other private interests. As Justice Sandra Day O'Connor argued in dissent, this departed from 200 years of precedent and was an invitation for the politically powerful to use government as an ally against the weak. The one grace note was the majority's concession that "Nothing in our opinion precludes any State from placing further restrictions on its exercise of the takings power." Next week's vote will show just how many Americans are taking up the Court's challenge. No fewer than 11 states (see nearby table) have ballot measures designed to limit government's ability to pilfer private property for someone else's private economic development. Eight initiatives would enshrine those restrictions in state constitutions, and polls show that most are headed for victories. The 11 states where anti-Kelo property-rights initiatives will be on the ballot Tuesday. Louisiana voters approved a constitutional amendment Sept. 30. These referendums build on anti-Kelo measures already passed by state legislatures, which aren't known for moving quickly, much less for exhibiting courage in the face of the powerful special interests (developers, local governments) driving eminent domain abuses. But fear is a powerful motivator, and voter anger at Kelo has yielded striking results. Some 28 states have already passed statutes that limit "takings" powers, and five of Tuesday's 11 ballot measures were crafted by state legislatures....



BUSH ADMINISTRATION PROPOSES MASSIVE LAND GRAB

Days ago, in a proposal unnoticed by the media, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) announced the largest land grab since President Clinton designated massive national monuments across the West. When Clinton decreed 1.9 million acres of federal land in Utah as the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument to kill a vast underground coal mine that would have employed 1,000 locals in the most economically depressed region of southern Utah, generated $20 million in annual revenue, and produced environmentally compliant coal for generating electricity, there were protests across the West. When the Bush Administration published its plans, there was barely a ripple of protest. There should have been a tidal wave of opposition! What Bush officials propose would make Clinton and his Interior Secretary, Bruce Babbitt, proud indeed. While Clinton’s national monument proclamations affected only federal land, the Bush plan affects primarily state- and privately-owned land. Moreover, while Clinton designated a total of 5.9 million acres to receive special federal protection as national monuments, the Bush plan would impose a protective federal overlay upon 11.5 million acres (18,000 square miles) or an area the size of the states of Massachusetts and Maryland combined. Formally entitled “Revised Designation of Critical Habitat for the Contiguous United States Distinct Population Segment of the Canada Lynx” and published in the Federal Register on November 9, 2005, the plan results from a March 2000 ruling by a federal district court in the District of Columbia. There, after ten years of litigation, a host of environmental groups succeeded in efforts to require the FWS to use the Endangered Species Act (ESA) to protect the Canada lynx (Lynx canadensis) in the contiguous United States. That was only the beginning....



Global cooling? Bring it on!

As about six inches of snow fell on Calgary and Edmonton last week, and Fahrenheit temperatures plunged to the 20-above zero level and stayed there, the thoughts of some Albertans – of this one, anyway – focused on the subject of global warming.
"How come," I asked a friend in Virginia, who knows about such things, "how come, if the globe is warming, we have mid-winter arriving here before the end of October?" My trouble, he replied, is that I don't keep up with scientific discovery. Had I not read, for instance, the report of the chief of the Space Exploration Department of the Central Astronomical Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences and supervisor of the Astrometria project of the Russian part of the International Space Station. He warned last summer that another problem is rapidly overshadowing the global warming problem. This, he continued, was the problem of global cooling. There is mounting evidence that long before the global warming threat begins to become serious, we may be entering another glacial age. This man is Dr. Khabibullo Abdusamatov, and he reached his conclusion from his readings of solar cycles. Dr Abdusamatov notes that there are three types of solar cycles – an 11-year, a 100-year, and 200-year. The effects of the 11- and 100-year cycles afford little cause for concern. The 200-year cycle, however, is a very different matter. "The whole world has recognized the global warming theory, which pictures catastrophic situations in the future," he told the Russian press. "I do not march in step with the world at this point. However, my theory has raised a certain interest in other countries. Hardly had I made a statement when I received several messages from scientists living in the USA, Iceland and other countries. They wanted to know more of my theory. They also want to know if I have delivered a detailed report on the matter and where it was published." Dr. Abdusamatov said that a global reduction of temperatures would become evident about halfway into this century because solar radiation will be receding. The big chill will begin slowly, gathering pace between 2050 and '55. In effect it will repeat the conditions recorded between 1645 and 1715 when all canals froze in Holland and severe cold forced the evacuation of many communities....



The Snowe-Rockefeller Road to Kyoto

In a recent letter to ExxonMobil Chairman and CEO Rex Tillerson, Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and John Rockefeller (D-WV) urge Tillerson to end his company's support of "climate change denial front groups." The only group they identify by name is the one for which I work—the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). I guess the Senators haven't been keeping up with the news, because ExxonMobil stopped funding CEI months ago. The Senators get several other easily checked facts wrong as well. They fault ExxonMobil for not "investing in the development of technologies that might see us through this [global warming] crisis." Maybe they didn't get the memo, but back in 2002, ExxonMobil pledged "to invest $100 million in a groundbreaking Stanford University project dedicated to researching new options for commercially viable, technological systems for energy supply and use which have the capability to substantially reduce greenhouse emissions." More importantly, CEI is not a global warming "denier"—a highly pejorative term, meant to imply a resemblance to "Holocaust deniers." CEI does not deny that global warming is happening, nor that man-made greenhouse gas emissions are contributing to the warming. Rather, we question climate alarmism—the claim, in Vice President Al Gore's words, that global warming is a "planetary emergency." For example, in An Inconvenient Truth, Gore warns that half of the Greenland Ice Sheet could melt or "slip into the sea," raising sea levels by 10 feet. He doesn't say how long this might take, but gives the impression it could happen within our lifetimes, or those of our children. The annual net loss of ice in Greenland is about 92 cubic kilometers per year. That may sound like a lot—but it translates into less than one inch of sea level rise in a century. Apocalypse Not!....


Arizonans Get An Animal-Rights Reality Check

The people who brought you constitutional rights for pigs and the "Fish Empathy Project" have descended on the Copper State. And through a series of crafty campaigns of bait-and-switch, they're hoping to impose their destructive ideology on the good people of Arizona. But we're pushing back. With mobile billboards, full-page ads in major newspapers, and opinion pieces -- like the one in today's Arizona Daily Star -- we're telling Arizonans the truth about exactly who it is they're dealing with. As we wrote in the Star: Animal "rights" sees the institution of pet ownership, including seeing-eye dogs and police K-9 units, as a form of slavery. Extending rights to rhinos would mean zoos simply couldn't keep them anymore. Likewise for circus elephants, marine-park dolphins and every living thing sold at pet stores. Embracing the animal-rights philosophy requires shifting vegetarianism from a choice to an obligation. In the long term, words like beef, pork, veal, cheese, omelet and even "wishbone" would exist only in a Scrabble dictionary. Activists may start out agitating merely for larger cages, but their real goal is the end of all animal agriculture. Including those small "family" farms....