DuBois column: Got some catching up to do

Got some catching up to do.

Livestock grazing

Last month I wrote about the lawsuit claiming the Forest Service and US Fish and Wildlife Service had failed to protect the threatened Yellowbilled cuckoo and the threatened Sonora chub from livestock grazing.

Most recently Western Watersheds Project (WWP) and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) have filed suit against the BLM for failing to perform required grazing permit reviews across the West, with special attention on Nevada.

In Nevada, PEER claims to have reviewed 25 years worth of data and found that only nine percent of the grazing permits issued have been reviewed. Of the 15 million acres that were reviewed, sixty-three percent failed to meet federal standards due to damage caused by livestock, the lawsuit says.

If you ranch in or near a national monument, don’t feel left out, you are not being neglected.

The Western Watersheds Project and other groups have just won a lawsuit that stops livestock grazing authorizations in the Sonoran Desert National Monument. This will be BLM’s third try for a redo. One of the issues in this case is how far will cattle travel from water. The BLM says two miles or less. The enviros claim they will travel farther and they have the studies to prove it.

Climate disasters

According to a paper recently issued by a subsidiary of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the United States has sustained $2.6 trillion in costs associated with hundreds of climate disasters over the past 40 years. They figured these costs were incurred through “physical damage to residential, commercial, and municipal buildings, and damage to material assets and equipment. Business interruptions and loss of living quarters were taken into consideration, as well as damage to vehicles and boats; bridges, levees; electrical infrastructure and offshore energy platforms; agricultural assets including crops, livestock, commercial timber; and wildfire suppression.”

This year alone, they say there have been 23 confirmed climate disasters in the United States, “with 253 people killed and estimated losses topping more than $1 billion in each catastrophe, including two floods, 18 severe storms, one tropical cyclone, one major wildfire, and one blizzard.”

You can smell this coming from a mile away.

Let's spend money now on climate change and save ourselves from the long term expenses of climate disasters.

The Biden Curtain

What is this Biden Curtain? New videos from Lahaina, Maui, reveal miles of black curtains erected to prevent people from seeing what's happening at the origin site of the catastrophic wildfires in Hawaii.

 

One poster wrote, "Miles and miles of black fencing being put up in Lahaina. Ground Zero is now behind the Biden curtain.” Another writes, "There are miles and miles of this black fence going up that is obscuring ground zero and making sure no one can see what's going on inside of there from the road, no one can get in there, no one can take any pictures."

 The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, has confirmed they are being asked to stop posting "new imagery of damage/disaster/debris starting now." Another FEMA official has written, "They are asking for a full stop in disaster imagery going forward. At this time, we have not been asked to take any photos or videos down.”

These requests are coming from local authorities and there are mentions of “cultural sensitivity”. Not sure what that would be.

I dunno. If I was going to spend millions of dollars to rehab an area, I wouldn’t want hundreds of people stomping around in there. But hide all images? That seems mighty suspicious to me.

Meatless Houston & Austin?

Both Houston and Austin are part of C-40 Cities, an alliance of mayors who want to impact climate change by cutting their emissions in half by 2030. Mostly funded by Michael Bloomberg, it does have other donors such as FedEx, Google, and the Clinton Foundation. They have established various targets for different groups of items, such as “food, clothing and textiles, private transportation, electronics, and household appliances, as well as private aviation travel.”

Their goal for meat and dairy consumption is 0 grams of either. In other words, if the C-40 Cities program is successful, Houston and Austin would be totally meatless. Can you believe that?

Until next time, be a nuisance to the devil and don’t forget to check that cinch.

 Frank DuBois was the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003, is the author of a blog: The Westerner (www.thewesterner.blogspot.com) and is the founder of The DuBois Rodeo Scholarship and The DuBois Western Heritage Foundation

This column originally aooeared in the October editions of the New Mexico Stockman and the Livestock Market Digest.