Yesterday several interesting discussions took place at the Public Lands Steering Committee of the National Association of Counties in Washington, D.C.  A disturbing trend I’m seeing is that a subject that increasingly comes up in meetings involving federal land managers is Global Warm- er … I mean ‘Climate Change’ (which is the term that attributes any change in the weather to greenhouse-gas emitting – read breathing – human beings).

One speaker, Tom Tidwell, Chief of the USDA Forest Service, claimed that climate change has increased wildfire seasons by a month, and that it has caused more frequent and severe fires and droughts.  When a county commissioner asked him whether the lack of proper forest management resulting in overgrowth had anything to do with the fire problems, he didn’t seem as convinced of that possibility even though intellectually it makes more sense to a lot of people.

Later in the discussion a resolution was introduced to oppose the federal government’s plans to establish a "cap and trade" system for controlling greenhouse gases.  I was quite pleased to see the resolution pass.  However, it faces an uncertain future as the Public Lands Committee tends to be dominated by western rural counties like ours while the full membership of NACo includes most of the country’s 1,800 counties including the urban ones like Los Angeles and New York.

While traveling to the meeting I read an email that had been forwarded to me this past week that included a memo from U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to all of his department’s employees announcing the formation of eight regional Climate Science Centers and a network of Landscape Conservation Cooperatives.

The memo reads like hypnosis:

"As employees of the Department of the Interior, many of you are witnessing firsthand one of our Nation’s most significant challenges to resource stewardship – climate change:

"As land managers, you are confronting longer and hotter fire seasons, new incursions of invasive species, and the early impacts of sea rise." (Question: what are ‘early impacts of sea rise’?)

"As water managers, you are experiencing new precipitation patterns, diminished snowpacks, and more extreme wet and dry periods.

"As wildlife managers, you are dealing with climate-change-induced impacts on wildlife migration habits, habitat availability, and species interactions.

"As scientists, you are observing droughts that are drier and longer, floods that are more dangerous, and hurricanes that are more severe."

… YOU ARE GETTING SLEEEEPY …

The purpose of the cooperatives and centers that are the subject of the memo is to provide access to scientific information to help manage the effects of climate change from a land-management standpoint. 

But my question is, why is science so important in this case?  Why doesn’t it matter when people unflinchingly attribute every change in the weather or anything that is undesirably hot or dry or wet to human-caused climate change?  What ever happened to skepticism?

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has a pamphlet that I saw for the first time yesterday that claims the oceans will rise six to eight feet in this century.  Really?  As a result of a supposed 1-degree increase in temperature?

Frankly, I am very tempted to challenge Chief Tidwell and Secretary Salazar and others to say that when they make such claims we want them to do the math to back up their claims – and to show their work.  Where are the data to support that conclusion?  I mean, how many years of fire and weather data would it take to prove a statistically sound cause-and-effect hypothesis establishing a nexus between my Ford Expedition and a forest fire in Idaho?

It’s like George Will recently wrote: Science doesn’t seem to matter when it comes to climate change because it is more like a government-established religion.  So in that case I would like to take this opportunity to challenge the ACLU to get involved and stop these government officials from violating the constitutional doctrine of a separation of church and state.

Some people on this side of the debate call this behavior "drinking the Kool-Aid", likening it to the tragic Jonestown mass-suicide/murder of the 1970s.

Speaking of Kool-Aid, let’s turn our attention for a moment to California – the Central Valley to be precise.  It is a place with some severe air-quality problems.  Some farmers there have complied with increased regulations by putting their cow manure into digesters where it is broken down by bacteria, releasing methane, which is then burned to produce electricity. This is a model example of protecting the environment and using resources efficiently, especially since manure – which is untreated or raw sewage – can cause groundwater contamination, and methane is a powerful greenhouse gas so it needs to be gotten rid of, right? 

But hold on a minute.  Burning methane creates oxides of nitrogen, a regulated pollutant, and the regulators are now requiring expensive retrofits to farmers’ equipment to deal with the NOx.  Farmers who invested in being environmentally responsible are now being punished.

Imagine that kind of maddening regulatory collision happening everywhere throughout the state.  The California Air Resources Board has already developed an implementation plan for AB 32, including a state cap-and-trade program. Consider the impact that will have on our economy as businesses flee to Arizona or Nevada or even overseas to get away from the requirements.

Unemployment in California is 12.4 percent. In the Inland Empire it is 14 percent and in the High Desert it’s close to 17 percent. That means one in six workers in the district I represent is out of work. And now we’re facing a regulatory regime that is certain to drive even more people into the unemployment line. 

One of the highest tax-revenue-producing and job-providing industries in our region – cement manufacturing – could easily be driven out of the state due to the combined costs of disposing of their CO2 emissions (nobody knows how to do it yet) while reducing their use of coal and modernizing their equipment and truck engines to reduce diesel particulates.

We have made incredible progress in cleaning the air in Southern California in the past two decades, and that progress will continue.  But if greenhouse gases are to be regulated, it needs to be at the federal level or even better at the international level to create a level playing field.  Conflicting regulations need to be considered and overall regulations standardized and tempered by consideration of their economic impacts.

I am encouraging all local governments to demand an analysis of all existing and pending state and federal regulations and how they will interact, and for a credible economic analysis of the impacts.

And now back to the original point of this article.  The Endangered Species Act has been a job killer for decades, but Congress has proven unwilling to reform it to make it either more effective or more economically workable or scientifically sound.  Over a billion dollars has been spent restricting activities in the Mojave desert to protect the desert tortoise and it continues to decline in population because the Fish and Wildlife Service won’t attack the root causes – raven and coyote predation and respiratory disease – and instead have banned livestock grazing which drove out the ranchers which actually truly has led to more and bigger fires due to excessive vegetation and a lack of people to look out for fires or maintain water sources, or to help keep coyotes in check.

But now the people who have failed to save the tortoise by refusing to attack the real threats to it have been distracted by the climate-change dogma.  They talk about it like it is an imminent threat.  So now we have another example of an environmental law that will be circumvented by regulatory actions or inaction caused by the new fixation on climate change.  At this rate the desert tortoise will go extinct by the time a single true impact of climate change is actually proven to exist or affect a single tortoise negatively or even by the time the whole theory is finally debunked.

Finally, the silver lining to this cloud.  California and our region in particular will be leaders in renewable energy.  We have the sun, we have the wind, and we have a willing and competent workforce.  And even if large-scale solar plants aren’t economically viable, the federal and state governments are determined to subsidize them.  We do need energy independence and jobs, and since they drank the Kool-Aid on climate change they’re willing to throw money at this industry.  So we might as well take advantage.  And we will.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 8th, 2010 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.