The Bears Ears Controversy

In my last post, "The Coming Green Wave," I mentioned the controversy over Bears Ears National Monument. It's a wilderness area in southeastern Utah that was declared a national monument by President Barack Obama in December 2016. In December 2017, President Donald Trump reduced it drastically in size.

Here's a map. You can click to enlarge it:

Pursuant to President Trump's order, only the Indian Creek Unit and the Shash Jáa Unit will remain protected.

Some Bears Ears photos:

Get the picture? Bears Ears is a national treasure: lovely, vast, unspoiled, once the home of ancient North American Pueblo peoples. Many Native American tribes today still consider sites within Bears Ears sacred:

The Hopi, Navajo, Ute, Ute Mountain Ute, and Zuni tribal governments are working together to defend the Bears Ears National Monument. They support two bills now in Congress: H.R.4518, the Bears Ears National Monument Expansion Act, and S. 2354, the Antiquities Act of 2018. These bills would restore and expand the boundaries of Bears Ears National Monument to the full boundary originally proposed by the five tribes in 2015.

A national monument is "a protected area that is similar to a national park, but can be created from any land owned or controlled by the federal government by proclamation of the President of the United States." The main difference between a national monument and a national park is that the latter must be created by an act of Congress; the U.S. president, acting alone, can declare a national monument. This is what President Obama did with respect to Bears Ears.

My understanding is that if it were to remain a fully protected area, none of the original Bears Ears National Monument could undergo oil or uranium extraction; real estate development; agricultural use other than cattle grazing, which is permitted; destructive forms of recreational use; etc. After being shrunk, some 85 percent of the original site would no longer be protected.

Mr. Trump's Bears Ears order also cut another national monument, Grand Staircase-Escalante, to about half its original size.

Grand Staircase-Escalante

Grand Staircase-Escalante was declared a national monument by President Bill Clinton in 1996.

I am about to donate to the Bears Ear Defense Fund, set up by the Grand Canyon Trust. I invite you to donate to this fund or any other worthy organization that works to defend Bears Ears.

The Coming Green Wave

Timothy Egan

"A Green Wave is coming this November," writes New York Times op-ed columnist Timothy Egan, who calls it "the pent-up force of the most overlooked constituency in America. These independents, Teddy Roosevelt Republicans and Democrats on the sideline have been largely silent as the Trump administration has tried to destroy a century of bipartisan love of the land."

Mr. Egan rightly feels Mr. Trump deserves much blame for supporting our country's continuing to burn coal, thereby exacerbating climate change. He says the record firestorms in the American West and in Canada this year may finally convince voters to vote "green," in view of the fact that climate scientists are at last confirming that global warming causes strange weather patterns that can lead to forest fires, hurricanes, and (as is happening here in Maryland) repeated heavy rainstorms that produce scary, killing, financially costly flash floods.

The coming Green Wave of anti-Trump/anti-GOP voting, Mr. Egan says, will arise because:

... if just one unorganized voting segment, the 60 million bird-watchers of America, sent a unified political message this fall, you’d have a political block with more than 10 times the membership of the National Rifle Association.

Bird-watchers in Colorado

And also because:

While President Trump tries to prop up the dying and dirty coal industry with taxpayer subsidies, the outdoor recreation industry has been roaring along. It is a $374-billion-a-year economy, by the government’s own calculation, and more than twice that size by private estimates.

Huge numbers of outdoorsy potential voters are already in revolt:

The revolt started after Trump shrunk several national monuments in the West last year — the largest rollback of public land protection in our history. The outdoor retailer Patagonia responded with a blank screen on its web page with the statement, “The President Stole Your Land.” It was the first shot in a battle that has been raging all summer.

Bears Ears National Monument in Utah
was shrunk by presidential order this year.

The ultimate size of the revolt could be phenomenal. After all, "144 million Americans ... participated in an outdoor activity last year," writes Mr. Egan, and there were "344 million overall visitors to national parks."

If just a tenth of these patrons of national parks and a tenth of all these outdoors-loving people show up at the polls and vote "green" this year, it could dramatically change our politics going into the 2020 presidential election year.

Thomas L. Friedman

And then, writes Times op-ed columnist Thomas Friedman in "What if Mother Nature Is on the Ballot in 2020?," Katy bar the door!

What if all the extreme weather this year — linked to climate change — gets even worse and more costly? What if the big 2020 issue is not left-right — but hot-cold or wet-dry? What if the big 2020 issue is not “Who lost Russia?” or “Who lost North Korea?” but “Who lost planet Earth?” ...

Mother Nature is done letting us pretend that we don’t know and can’t connect the dots — and that could create some very interesting politics. ...

Sure, Trump will sneer that “green” is girlyman, uneconomic, unpatriotic and vaguely French. But Democrats can easily counter that green is globally strategic, locally profitable and working class — green is the new red, white and blue. That message can play today in Rust Belt battleground states like Michigan and Ohio.

If the "green" message — surprisingly to many, perhaps, it's a highly pragmatic one — plays out the way it ought to in Michigan, Ohio, and other key states, it could turn Mr. Trump into a one-term president!

Pope Francis Weighs In On Climate Change

Thank you, Holy Father!

Your encyclical Laudato Sí ("Praise Be To You") arrived on Thursday to the joy of liberal Catholics, myself included. Also, it drew great consternation from conservatives, Catholic or otherwise. The reason: it establishes a crucial link between the Catholic Church's traditional social-justice agenda and the need for us all to be concerned about what we are doing to the planet, namely, engendering adverse climate change.

An op-ed appearing in today's Baltimore Sun captures the gist of your argument. David Cloutier, an associate professor of theology at Mount St. Mary's University here in Maryland, writes:

Francis calls us "to recognize that other living beings have a value of their own in God's eyes." The rest of the world — animals, plants, even mineral resources — is not merely raw material for human consumption. Pope Benedict [your predecessor] insisted that there is a "grammar of creation," an "inbuilt order" that is from God and must be respected and cherished.

Also:

... proper care for the environment is only really possible if we love our neighbor rightly. The idea that "everything is connected" is repeated throughout [your] encyclical.

So we need, all of us, to do more than just cease misusing the Earth's natural resources to our own selfish ends. We must likewise change "the dynamic of an economy where workers are just another 'resource' ... [as well as] the dynamic of a sexual culture where we use other people for our own pleasure."

Not caring for the environment and not caring for people are really rooted in the same [unjust] moral stance [Cloutier writes]: a practical relativism that, in Francis' words, "sees everything as irrelevant unless it serves one's own immediate interests."

We are all connected by virtue of the fact that we are all creatures of God — humans, animals, plants, even mineral resources and the fertility of the soil. I begin to see that your extending the template of social justice to include all of Mother Nature ought not to be as much of a surprise as, frankly, I myself find it to be.

At one of his talks, I once asked Father Thomas Reese, SJ, senior analyst at the National Catholic Reporter, "Why is it that the words Catholic and environmentalist are not often found in the same sentence?" His bemused answer suggested to me that he found my question well taken.

Until now.

You show in your encyclical, manifestly, the extent to which the pronouncements of our previous two popes, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, agree with your core ideas, so maybe I was wrong. Maybe care for the natural world is indeed part of "Catholicism 101," as has been said of Laudato Sí (see "Why Pope Francis’s climate message is so hard for some Americans to swallow," from a recent issue of the Washington Post).

That article has it that

The Pope’s entire case for caring for “our common home,” as he puts it, is moral.

We as Christians and as human beings accordingly have a moral duty to "address the planet’s vulnerability," in other words.

As Americans in particular, moreover, we need to rein in our vaunted individualism, replacing it with a newfound "communitarianism." That's a tough one, I admit. All of what you say in Laudato Sí amounts to as hard-to-follow a moral prescription as any aspect of Catholic teaching is. Yet I do see that your encyclical weaves for us a "seamless garment" of commitment that we all need to put on right now.

Boomers planting a debt bomb -- baltimoresun.com

Baltimore Sun financial columnist Jay Hancock writes in today's "Boomers planting a debt bomb" of the impending disaster that today's spendthrift ways will become for post-boomers:

The biggest U.S. financial crisis isn't the housing crunch. It's the government debt bomb being planted by baby boomers to explode in the faces of their children and grandchildren ...

The country already owes $9 trillion, a record, and almost half of it to foreigners, also a record. [The U.S. government] pays more in interest [on the national debt] than the annual cost of the Iraq war.

By the middle of this century, 20 percent of the national income — not just a fifth of the budget but a fifth of the whole economy! — will have to be diverted to pay interest on the debt ... . Another 20 percent will be needed to finance health care and pensions for boomer geezers.

That'll leave virtually nothing for education, roads, basic research and other investments that make the country great.

Oh, wonderful! Not only do we have to worry about the threat of global warming and the need to wean ourselves off foreign oil, we have to stop spending so much money into the bargain. Or everything will go bust.

Only problem is, not only do liberals like to spend money, so do today's conservatives à la George W. Bush.

oldstyleliberal sees little evidence that either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton can fix this. They are, after all, liberals.

Nor does one, such as oldstyleliberal, who hopes to seem wise, tend to feel that John McCain — he who is willing to keep troops in Iraq for the next 99 years, and hang the cost — has a handle on the impending meltdown of the federal budget.

All of the presidential hopefuls will, like oldstyleliberal, be long gone by mid-century. (Well, maybe the youngish Obama will be still here, in his geezer-hood.) In fact, the next president, should he or she serve two terms, will be leaving office in 2017, just about the time that, the experts say, we will have begun to spend over 20 cents of every dollar of U.S. gross domestic product on health care alone.

That figure is due to go up to 25 cents on the GDP dollar by 2030. When the Hancock column talks about "20 percent ... to finance health care and pensions for boomer geezers" by mid-century, he means 20 percent of the federal budget, and it doesn't include private expenditures on health care/health insurance.


All of this, of course, pales in insignificance compared to whether Sen. Obama ought to wear a flag lapel pin or Sen. Clinton is fighting too dirty a campaign.

We hear more about how Sen. McCain is supposedly too soft on illegal immigrants than about how, with Sen. Lieberman, he has co-sponsored a bill that would put a down payment on quashing global warming.

McCain-Lieberman would set up a cap-and-trade system for reining in companies that spew too much carbon into the sky and rewarding companies whose carbon footprint is moderate and shrinking. But that's not a topic that commands our attention as voters; lapel pins are.

If the next president doesn't get a grip on our looming problems, we will know who to blame.

As Pogo used to say, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

"BGE rate to climb higher in June" | baltimoresun.com

According to an article in the Baltimore Sun today, January 23, 2008 — click on the image above to see the whole article — residential electricity customers who are served by Maryland's Baltimore Gas & Electric, a subsidiary of the Constellation Energy Group,

... will pay an estimated 5.5 percent more for electricity starting in June, largely as a result of federal rules that are driving wholesale energy prices higher. ... The increase will add about $100 to the average customer's annual utility bill ... When combined with increases imposed since rate caps expired in 2006, BGE customers will be paying 85 percent more for electricity than they were before the General Assembly approved deregulation in 1999.

In 1999, the Maryland General Assembly deregulated the state's providers of electrical power in an effort to introduce competition into the electricity market and thereby hold down prices. An unintended consequence of that, combined with recent regulatory (not deregulatory) initiatives at the federal level, has been:

... more than a year into that effort [by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to impose new rules on the wholesale energy market], the latest increase shows just how difficult it is for state regulators to influence the federally regulated ... market. Many policy decisions affecting prices in Maryland are made in Washington with only limited input from state regulators.

"Because utilities no longer own generation plants that the state can regulate ... [utility customers are] at the mercy of what comes out of those wholesale energy markets," said Bill Fields, an attorney for the state Office of the People's Counsel, which represents utility customers.

This is just one more reason why oldstyleliberal has come to wonder whether strong government involvements in economic markets doesn't do more harm than good.

Even though Maryland has "deregulated" its electrical power marketplace, no real competition among BGE and various potential alternatives has materialized. Customers like me who live in locations where BGE once had a state-protected monopoly still don't have viable alternative providers of electrical power to buy from, eight years later. Moral: even when governments deregulate, they bungle the job.

This is something oldstyleliberal hates to admit. He is, after all, a liberal, and liberals believe that government programs help, no? Yet, time and again, government "solutions" just make bigger problems.

"O'Malley to offer energy package" | Baltimore Sun

This morning's Baltimore Sun has a front page article about how Maryland's recently elected governor, Martin O'Malley, is responding to looming energy and electrical power shortages in the state. The headline is "O'Malley to offer energy package." The article says that among the measures the governor's energy administration contemplates submitting to the legislature is a bill to have the state's power companies contribute money to a "strategic energy investment fund." The fund in turn would "invest in energy-efficient technologies and promote nonpolluting power alternatives."

oldstyleliberal lives in a suburb of Baltimore, Maryland, and buys his electrical power from Baltimore Gas & Electric, a part of the Constellation Energy Group. BGE and companies competing with it to sell electrical power in Maryland in 2006 ruffled consumers' feathers mightily by announcing steep price hikes. The rate increases were softened somewhat when politicos in the state legislature objected and threatened to take severe action — see New Electricity Rates on Tap for Maryland.

Since then, now-Governor O'Malley, a Democrat who was Baltimore's mayor at the time, ran against and defeated a Republican incumbent, Governor Robert L. Ehrlich. O'Malley, says today's article, "campaigned on the unfulfilled promise of undoing a 72 percent electricity rate increase for 1.2 million Baltimore Gas & Electric customers." This set of new proposals floated by the O'Malley administration instead "appears likely to ... further increase consumer costs in the short term."


The energy fund portion of the proposed legislative package — which also eyes laws "reducing overall electricity consumption by 15 percent by 2015" and "requiring utility companies to buy 20 percent of their power from wind, solar or other renewable sources by 2022" — would "not rely on tax revenue. Instead, the governor is banking on proceeds from the auction of "pollution credits" under an initiative of 10 states to voluntarily reduce carbon dioxide emissions." CO₂ emissions are a major part of the "greenhouse gases" that are said to promote global warming.

The O'Malley brain trust is banking on a regional "cap-and-trade" system, just getting under way, to generate something like $100 million in windfall revenues that would wind up in Maryland's energy fund. The Sun article is not totally clear on how this would work; it says, "Maryland expects to receive about $100 million a year from the sale of its pollution credits." This has to do with the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, under which power plants in ten voluntarily participating Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic states, including Maryland, "must keep emissions below a downward-sliding limit, or buy credits from cleaner power plants."

The assumption here may be — it's not perfectly clear to oldstyleliberal — that power plants in other RGGI states, because they emit more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than Maryland plants do, would have to buy up some of the permits issued to the (relatively clean) Maryland plants. The money the Maryland power utilities would receive would, under the O'Malley plan, wind up in the energy fund. That way, Maryland utilities would supposedly not have to pass along the costs of filling the fund to their customers in the form of higher electric bills.

At least, there is that hope. O'Malley's political opponents are, however, skeptical:

Del. Warren E. Miller, a Howard County Republican on the [Maryland House of Delegates] Economic Matters Committee, said he doubted that the "cap and trade" system would create even a $100 million windfall, and that added costs borne by power plants would probably show up on consumers' electrical bills.

The dollar size of the permits windfall is in doubt in part because "the yield won't be known until the first [RGGI] auction this summer." But Maryland Public Service Commission Chairman Steven B. Larsen, an O'Malley appointee, said (according to the article) that he expects "the amount could be twice as high."

There is also this consideration: " ... recent tax increases and economic uncertainty might spur a fight in the legislature this session if lawmakers prefer to give all or some of the $100 million back to consumers."

It sounds to oldstyleliberal as if the O'Malley people want to make sure one of two things happens:

1. If Maryland's power producers do reap an RGGI windfall, it (because the money goes right into the new fund) won't wind up reducing consumers' electric bills. Lowering electric rates would give consumers no incentive to conserve energy. That would wind up exacerbating global warming.
   
2. If by chance there is no such windfall, utilities would still have to pay the required money into the new fund, which would cause electric rates to go up as the utilities pass some or all of these costs on to consumers. Higher rates would encourage even more conservation.
   

Either way, the recently boosted Maryland electricity rates would tend not to go down, as O'Malley suggested on the campaign trail that he wanted, and might well go up. No matter where the money to be injected into the new energy fund comes from — from an RGGI windfall or from Maryland power companies' general revenues — it will ultimately come from energy consumers in Maryland, and/or those in other states participating in RGGI.

So the proposed fund would encourage energy conservation and ameliorate global warming in two ways. It would invest in sustainable, environment-friendly energy technologies. And it would encourage energy conservation by in effect adding a hidden surcharge on electric power consumption in Maryland, or elsewhere, to pay for the fund.