"Environmental Extremists Are Dominating Public Policy"

[Crowdog]

"Environmental Extremists Are Dominating Public Policy"

Posted by the ChronWatch Founder, Jim Sparkman
Thursday, October 16, 2003


It gets little attention, but one of the most serious problems facing the country is the degree to which environmental extremists dominate public policy. We can trace this back to the airy-fairy Clinton-Gore days. Environmentalists have become so firmly entrenched that any reasonable compromise at balancing the public interest is ''hooted down.'' ''Balance'' is a word the extremists don't recognize. The economic result in California is most noticeable in the excessively high cost of housing, gasoline, and power. But it goes further. Farming must be stopped in favor of questionable practices to save fish. No timber may be harvested. No oil drilling is allowed. The total effect is so distorted that ChronWatch noted that ''man has become the endangered species.''

On and on and on. And we had best decide to take them on aggressively before they totally ruin the country. The following article is by M. David Stirling of the Pacific Legal Foundation, writing in the California Political Review.

The Bush administration certainly doesn’t need defending by one frequently frustrated at its tortoise-like pace in restoring balance and common sense to the nation’s environmental and natural resource policies. Yet, the coordinated and unrelenting attacks on Bush’s programs by hardcore environmental organizations this early in the 2004 presidential campaign suggests that Bush’s ''people-friendly'' environmental agenda is causing them chronic heartburn.

A prime example just arrived in the mail from actor Robert Redford on behalf of the Natural Resources Defense Council. Redford’s fund-raising letter accuses Bush of ''waging a sweeping attack on our environmental laws,'' of ''cynical new policies ... (that) will enrich giant corporations even as they increase pollution and destroy some of our most treasured wildlands'' and of ''allow(ing) 17,000 of the nation’s worst polluters to spew more toxic chemicals into our air and harm the health of millions of Americans.''

When the Bush administration recently announced possible removal of Endangered Species Act protection for Oregon coastal coho salmon because of the species’ return to Oregon rivers in record numbers, the National Wildlife Federation accused Bush of ''abrogating responsibility,'' while the Native Fish Society called it ''a political fix.''

The Sierra Club harshly criticized Bush’s Healthy Forest Initiative, a major overhaul of Clinton-Gore’s disastrous forest management policies that in 2002 alone caused the conflagration of a record seven million acres of forest, destruction of countless species, and degradation of inestimable watershed and forest streams. The Sierra Club duplicitously condemned Bush reform Initiative for ''leav(ing) communities at risk of wildfire (and) pollut(ing) the air and water'' — the very effects Clinton-Gore’s forest policies produced that Bush is attempting to remedy.

The Greens’ hatred for Bush’s environmental programs is no mystery. To them, Clinton- Gore — with Bruce Babbitt at Interior — ranks as the all-time ''dream-team'' of environmental politics. So close was the partnership between Clinton-Gore and the vast network of eco-activist organizations around the country that no appreciable differences in their agendas are detectable. Now, viewed from the far left end of the environmental spectrum, each of Bush’s programs to balance environmental protection with concern for the lives and livelihoods of people is regarded, and portrayed to the public, as a radical departure from the glory days of Clinton-Gore.

A prime example of the partnership’s calculated plan was Clinton’s much ballyhooed signing of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on global warming. Not only did Clinton’s signature advance the environmental partnership’s goal of a ''nature first, people last'' international environmental policy, but it intentionally set the stage for massive worldwide condemnation of any Republican successor who later balked at international controls on the engine of America’s economic well-being: business. Although the full U.S. Senate (including all Democrat senators) immediately rejected the protocol (the vote was 95 to 0) because of its certain damage to the U.S. economy, Clinton’s signature at Kyoto established the extreme environmental standard against which the next president would be judged (not a problem for a Gore presidency, of course.) It was no surprise that President Bush’s immediate and continuing rejection of Clinton’s Kyoto-posturing triggered a barrage of criticism from the very eco-activists — here and abroad — that generated Clinton’s Kyoto position initially.

Bush has also addressed Clinton-Gore’s embrace of the Greens’ extreme environmentalism in its categorical refusal to pursue additional U.S.-based oil and natural gas supplies despite increasing instability in foreign oil-producing countries. When Bush proposed drilling on a mere 2000 surface acres of the 20-million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to tap its vast quantities of oil and much-needed natural gas, the National Wildlife Federation demanded that Bush ''stop the war on the environment,'' while the Sierra Club charged he was taking ''environmental policy back to the 19th Century.''

Hardcore environmentalism’s efforts to demonize Bush’s more people-friendly policies and programs will become more shrill in the coming months. It would be unfortunate, however, if mainstream Americans allowed themselves to fall prey to this well-orchestrated campaign to have Bush’s environmental record measured by the excesses of his predecessor.

[rockwrangler]

This says it all:

''nature first, people last''

[vb]

they are so intrenched that i fear that we cant fix it

[gipper]

I don't understand what's wrong with enjoying national forests. What is the point in preserving forests if no one is even allowed to go in and study them or enjoy them? Oh, they don't have an answer, it's just the way of being politically correct. I understand now.