Who's doing the most to hobble the productive power of the U.S. economy, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson or Department of the Interior Secretary Ken Salazar? President Obama's top two Cabinet appointees on environmental issues are running neck and neck in their race to see who can issue the most job-killing, growth-suffocating bureaucratic edicts. Regardless of who "wins" their contest, of course, the losers will be the rest of us. We will have to endure long-term double-digit unemployment, skyrocketing energy and utility costs, and the loss of individual freedom that inevitably accompanies the growth of government regulation. Jackson temporarily nosed ahead early last week when she got a green light from the White House to move forward with new regulations to combat greenhouse gases. Jackson threatened to issue these regulations last year if Congress failed to approve "cap-and-trade" legislation sought by Obama. Cap and trade was decisively defeated by a bipartisan coalition in Congress earlier this year, and now Jackson is making good on her threat. Her move elicited a chorus of pre-Christmas squeals of delight from the legions of Big Green activists angered over congressional rejection of cap and trade. Not to be outdone, Salazar countered toward the end of the week with an audacious end-around play of his own. The Constitution gives Congress exclusive authority to manage U.S. public lands. Thus, the wilderness areas, national parks system and other public lands are overseen by Interior only because Congress authorized the executive branch department to do so. Big Green environmentalists went nuts in 2003 when Gail Norton, Salazar's predecessor in the Bush administration, liberalized Interior's public lands management process to enable more energy development. So Salazar has invented out of whole cloth a "Wild Lands" designation that entirely circumvents the congressionally sanctioned process...
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3 comments:
You badmouth efforts to save the enviroment for those to come after us. Even the Bible tells you to guard the earth. Get a life and a new attitude.
My life is great, thank you, and my attitude seems much more positive than yours.
Sadly, neither initiative addressed in the article will "save" the environment. They only transfer more power to the Executive Branch at the expense of Congress.
Frank, you have spent time in the last few weeks opposing the proposed Omnibus Public Lands bill that would have designated lands along the New Mexico border as wilderness. The Salazar policies implements wilderness de facto, as it applies to lands with "wilderness characteristics" (defined in BLM's discretion with input from the environmental folks)"that are pending before Congress". All such lands are required to be managed to avoid impairment of wilderness characteristics at both the land plan and project stage - so once someone introduces a bill, that controls even if Congress doesn't act on it.
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