"Earth Hour" an Event for Dim Bulbs

Americans take reliable and affordable energy so much for granted that they've developed a mindless contempt for the companies and people that provide it to them. They must think their homes are electrified and heated by magic, given the disdain they show for coal mines, drilling rigs, power plants, nuclear reactors, transmission towers and pipelines, and judging from the vilification they heap on evil energy companies, which routinely are portrayed as the murderers of Mother Earth.

One demonstration of that contempt comes Saturday, with the annual celebration of "Earth Hour," when "millions of people around the world" will turn off their lights for one hour in order "to make their stand against climate change." Energy use = global catastrophe: that's the dangerously simplistic equation touted by the dim bulbs who thought up Earth Hour. The only way we can "save the planet" is by turning off the lights, parking our cars and crawling back to the dank caves from whence we came, much to the planet's misfortune.

Light has always been synonymous with civilization. It was long believed to be a friend to humankind (thank you, Prometheus). Earth Hour turns it into the enemy of the planet.

Energy providers take this abuse in stride: they've been so badgered into submission by eco-Luddites that they can barely rise to their own defense. They seem apologetic and ashamed -- some probably even sponsor Earth Hour events and distribute pro-Earth Hour propaganda in an effort to placate their implacable critics.

But I have an idea that might help them turn public perceptions around.

I propose a counter-event called "Energy Hour," which would also occur once a year, but at a randomly-selected time. All at once, on cue, all the world's energy providers would suspend operations for an hour (maybe longer if you really want to make things interesting), plunging the planet into darkness, cold and immobility. The lights would go off. The computers would stop. Electric appliances would not work. Gas tanks would go dry. Streets would be gridlocked. Apprehension and uncertainly would grip most of the industrialized world, as the people waited anxiously and prayerfully for the light to return.

Maybe the worldwide standstill that would result -- maybe the disruptions, the danger, the discomfort and the desperation that would occur if civilization were for even an hour taken "off the grid" -- would remind disconnected moderns of the debt they owe to energy providers. Maybe they'll understand, once again, that electricity doesn't come from light switches, and that without drilling rigs, their cars become inanimate objects.

It probably won't take more than one or two Energy Hours before the Earth Hour movement loses its mojo, and before people take a more rational, balanced and appreciative view of the energy sector. Maybe we'll see a halt to the regulatory warfare waged on energy producers. Maybe we'll get a national energy policy based on realism, not pie-in-the-sky pipe dreams.

Happy "Energy Hour," everyone! Take a moment this weekend to savor all the comforts, conveniences and benefits that come from living in this gloriously energy-dependent society.

"Roadless" Radicals Have Gone Around the Bend

Just how extreme are the environmentalists who rallied in Denver yesterday for a restoration of the Clinton era-"roadless rule," and who reject a Colorado-tailored alternative that made some sensible modifications to the original? They're this extreme"

The Denver Post (italics added):

"Groups at a rally in downtown Denver on Thursday called for strong protection of Colorado's roadless areas. Critics argue the state proposal would leave the areas the least protected nationwide, because it would allow temporary roads for wildfire prevention, expansion of existing coal-mining and some utility infrastructure.

Some ski-area terrain would be permanently removed from the inventory of roadless areas."

These people don't even want temporary roads built in order to prevent wildfires.

They want to permanently put millions of acres of public land -- our land -- off limits to pipelines, transmission lines, etc. -- the infrastructure a growing West will need in order to thrive.

They want to close roads running to existing, operating, perfectly-legal mining operations -- which is a roundabout way of shutting these operations down.

They won't even make accommodation for the future expansion of ski resorts -- major job generators and economic engines for the state, which have long been accepted as a legitimate use of national forests.

And they want to impose these ironclad prohibitions and access limits on 4.4 million acres of federal forest in Colorado -- federal forests that are dying from beetle blight and prone to catastrophic wildfire. These are forests that need active management, aggressive management, not more benign neglect. This argues for more public access, not less.

But the roadless radicals are so far around the bend, and so blinkered by their fervor for access restrictions, that they can't see the forest for the trees. They have no common sense. They suffer from a psychological condition I call "environmental retardation."

Watch Your Behind . . .

The eco-prohibitionists are coming for your toilet paper now: Washington Post

Hunting for Sanity

A long-overdue culling of the federal wolf pack has begun in Idaho. Robert Millage of Kamiah was the first lucky hunter to turn in a tag, bagging an 80-pound female with a .243 rifle in the northern part of the state. "I guess it was the luck of the draw," Millage humbly said.

Though what he did was perfectly legal, and something that's necessary if the size of the burgeoning federal wolf pack is to be kept in check, Millage himself then became a target -- of loose-screw wolf-worshipers who live in a world of Disney-inspired nature fantasies, where man and beast happily coexist. But so it goes in the Rocky Mountain wolf wars. The only thing more vicious than wolves killing sheep is humans fighting over wolves.

If I seem to take delight in the kill, don't get me wrong. I'm not some bloodthirsty, kill-everything-that-moves nut, or a woodsman out to rescue Little Red Riding Hood. It's just that Idaho's wolf hunt signals the triumph of sanity over insanity, reason over unreasonableness, in the decade-long debate over how "wild" the "new West" can be. It means that against long odds, and an army of screaming green weenies, Western states are poised to begin responsibly managing wolf packs that were foist upon them by Washington against their will. And not a minute too soon, given the growing toll these animals are taking on Westerners.

From a recent edition of The Idaho Statesman:

"Kathy Konen has lost guard dogs to wolves in the past, but nothing prepared the Dillon (Montana) rancher for the killing of 120 buck sheep on their ranch last week. "They were in the sagebrush, on the creek bottom — just all over the pasture," Konen said Thursday during a telephone interview before heading up to check cattle. "It's a terrible loss to our livestock program . . .

. . . The total included 82 confirmed kills and 40 carcasses that were classified as probable kills, including some that had been eaten by bears. The attack occurred on private land the Konens own. "That's a lot all in one incident," Sime said.The sheep were just killed and yet the carcasses were almost all intact, Konen said. "They didn't eat what they killed, most of them were just brought down," she said. "I don't know whether they were teaching their pups or what."

It's not the first attack that the Konens have had this summer. They lost 26 sheep to wolves in the same pasture in July, she said. After that attack FWP authorized federal trappers to remove three wolves that had been observed in the area. Trappers shot and killed a gray coated wolf and shot another black one that got away but was believed to be mortally wounded. The third wolf, another black one, got away."

Here's another recent wolf kill story, in this case from Oregon. Such reports used to be rare. Today they appear regularly.

I'm not anti-wolf. I'm not opposed to "re-wilding" efforts when and where they make sense. But the federal wolf reintroduction program has gone from a laudable success to a looming menace, with wolf populations -- which are spilling over state borders and increasing by 20 percent per annum -- growing unmanageable. Livestock kills are steadily rising. Federal workers are running around the countryside, trying to babysit the animals. The effort to restore some textbook "natural balance" teeters in some places toward imbalance, as the wolves begin to eat their way through elk and deer herds. The "experiment" has gotten out of hand.

But rather than acknowledge a success and be reasonable, wildlife advocates have fought every effort to bring some sanity and discipline to the re-wilding effort. States have had to fight to get wolves delisted, fight to win the right to manage the animals, fight for the right to hold hunts. As program benchmarks have been reached and exceeded, animal activists have shifted the goal posts or attempted to change the rules, as in New Mexico and Arizona, where backers of the less-successful effort to reintroduce Mexican wolves (that's another blog post) are trying to end the three strikes rule on livestock-killers.

States that have (sometimes reluctantly) done their parts to make this effort work are now feeling double-crossed by animal advocates, who keep changing the rules of the game. I know most environmentalists are hopeless pessimists. But surely some of them must have given thought to what might happen if wolf numbers grew larger than what's practical in today's more densely-populated, heavily-recreated "new West."

Surely they knew that wolves would at some point have to be managed, just as deer, elk, bear, cougar and other species are managed, in order to keep the populations healthy while minimizing human-animal conflicts. Surely they don't really believe that managing the pack opens the door to another "war on the wolf," or that the feds would passively stand by as the states wipe the animals out?

This is the moment that separates reasonable and responsible wildlife advocates from the environmentally retarded and the complete kooks. And it's clear that the kooks are setting the agenda.

The Spokane (Wash.) Spokesman-Review had a balanced editorial on the subject, which included the following points:

"The hunting period opened Tuesday in the first two of Idaho’s 12 wolf management zones, and although more than 11,000 tags were sold, only three animals had been taken as the weekend approached. That’s hardly a slaughter, and it’s no indication that the impressive gains of the past 14 years are likely to be reversed.

Consider that the restoration effort began in Idaho with the import of 35 wolves. By 2007, the population was about 650; it’s now up to some 1,000. Federal authorities say that the wolf population throughout the Northern Rockies has exceeded the law’s goals every year since 2002.

Now that the animal has been delisted and its management turned over to the states, the law requires that the population be managed to stay above an absolute minimum of 100 animals with 10 breeding pairs, although the feds would start talking about relisting when the numbers dropped to 150 animals and 15 breeding pairs.

Even if all 220 allowed wolf kills happen this season, the surviving wolf numbers will be well above those figures, and Idaho officials know from experience that if they get careless in their duty, the feds won’t hesitate to step back in."

"It’s not the hunting that needs to come to an end now," the newspaper concludes, "it’s the litigation."

Loving the Forests to Death

A report in today's Helena Independent Record highlights one of the great ironies, and great outrages, of our time: that the groups who claim to love our forests the most are doing everything in their power to destroy them, by obstructing any federal mitigation efforts that involve the harvesting of trees.

Our Western forests are in crisis, with beetles and wildfires destroying vastly more trees every year than the timber industry ever could, even in its heyday. Yet as the story below illustrates, litigious "tree-huggers" are the single biggest obstacle to saving the trees. Bigger than budget constraints. Bigger than bureaucratic inertia. Bigger than "analysis paralysis."

The story pretty much speaks for itself, but it's not an isolated case. Many a national forest has been stymied in its efforts to respond to the crisis, by extremists who would rather see the forests die en masse, and go up in flames, than see a single tree removed by human hands.

Managers of the Helena National Forest had a plan to counter invading mountain pine beetles and buffer nearby communities from the wildfire threat, which involved culling parts of the overly-dense forest in an effort to reduce "fuel loads" and cut out the cancer. That was in 2003. But because there was a commercial element to the plan -- because some of the logs could be milled and put to productive and profitable uses -- the zero-cut crowd, true to form, went running to the federal courts, demanding it be stopped.

Six years later, the plan has been upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. But at this point the damage has been done, and there's not much forest left to save.

It's outrageous. It's criminal. It's madness. But it's typical of how knee-jerk obstructionism by gang green is helping to wipe out the very forests they claim to love -- and explains why federal agencies have been so ineffectual in countering the forest health crisis. The 3 groups that helped kill this forest, just for the record, are Alliance of the Wild Rockies, Native Ecosystems Council and the Wildwest Institute. An army of rampaging loggers couldn't have done this forest more harm.

Here's the story:

Court rules in favor of logging project

By Eve Byron

Three environmental groups couldn’t quash a project on national forest lands meant to lessen the threat of wildfires near Clancy and Unionville southwest of Helena, but it appears that the tiny mountain pine beetle has made the Helena National Forest rethink its plan.

In a decision issued Tuesday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the Helena forest’s 2003 plan to undertake commercial thinning and other efforts to remove small trees and vegetation on about 1,500 acres. However, Helena District Ranger Duane Harp said the prescription is only good now for about 100 acres containing Douglas fir trees, since about 90 percent of the trees on the remaining 1,400 acres — mainly lodgepole pines — are now dead.

“We are obviously extremely pleased that the Ninth Circuit has found in our favor. But it’s bittersweet news because with the current beetle epidemic, the vast majority of the project area, which was proposed for timber harvest, is now dead,” Harp said. “You can’t use the prescription for green trees on dead trees.

“So I guess we’ve implemented the no-action alternative.”

Mike Garrity, executive director of the Alliance of the Wild Rockies, said that if the Helena forest had worked with his organization and the two others that began appealing the lawsuit in 2004 — Native Ecosystems Council and the Wildwest Institute — that some compromise might have been reached to allow the project to move forward. He said the groups did agree with the forest that some thinning should be done on forest lands near homes while the lawsuit was under way, and that his group has worked with the Helena forest and others in the past to craft projects that wouldn’t be litigated.

“Our main focus was that the forest’s own five-year review of its forest plan showed that it was failing to ensure the viability of species,” Garrity said. “The forest service never disclosed that report to public, as originally planned, and has never addressed that concern even though it continues to implement the same flawed forest plan.”

He added that the appeals court’s decision wasn’t “published,” meaning it can’t be used as precedent, and that they disagree with the findings of the three-member judicial panel that issued the ruling. Garrity said they’re considering whether to ask for an opinion involving more of the appeals court’s judges.

Planning for what became known as the Clancy/Unionville Project began in 1997, because the forest service and some of the neighbors in the area thought this might reduce the threat of large-scale catastrophic wildfire. Harp said he also hoped thinning the forest here would also create a habitat less conducive to mountain pine beetles.

A final Environmental Impact Statement and Record of Decision for the project was issued in 2000, but was successfully appealed and sent back to then-forest Supervisor Tom Clifford by the regional forester. Additional analysis was conducted and a new decision issued in February 2003. It’s that decision that’s been in litigation until this week’s Ninth Circuit Court ruling.

Garrity and others have long disputed that logging is good for reducing the threat of wildfire forestwide; they’d rather see it implemented only near homes for that purpose. They also argue that it’s impossible for the forest to “log its way out of the beetle epidemic.”

“British Columbia has a huge beetle infestation, and they log like crazy in Canada,” Garrity said. “There aren’t any scientific, peer-reviewed papers that say you can log your way out of a beetle infestation.

He adds that once the needles fall off of the dead trees after a year or two, the fire hazard actually is reduced. The danger increases, however, when those trees eventually fall to the forest floor, creating ladder fuels that fires use to creep up a tree from the ground into the crowns of trees.

But Harp said that at this point, the fire hazard has significantly increased in the Clancy and Unionville areas due to the standing dead trees.

Harp said they plan to remove “hazard trees” lining roads in the area that are at risk of falling on vehicles or people. They also may try to sell the dead trees as part of a commercial harvest plan, but will have to do additional studies to look at the impacts. He doesn’t expect any logging, other than possibly for hazard trees, in the area this year, but he wants to proceed as quickly as possible because the longer the dead trees stand in the forest, the less value they have to sawmills.

“We now have to decide if we will do any harvest at all under the Clancy Unionville decision,” Harp said. “We will however, move forward with the prescribed burning and other treatments that are outside the timber harvest units.”

Environmental Retardation

Tim DeChristopher succeeded in monkey-wrenching a controversial Utah oil and gas auction late last week, when he bid on $1.7 million in drilling leases with no intention of paying. He thus pioneered a new form of protest that's bound to breed copy-cats, and became an overnight folk hero to wackos the world over – ensuring that he’ll have a well paid position as a professional activist waiting for him after graduation, with Environmental Anxiety, Inc.

Whether he'll face criminal charges has yet to be determined. But he "tainted the entire auction," according to one official with the Bureau of Land Management. "We were hosed," added a bona fide bidder who lost out to DeChristopher. “It's very frustrating. I hope the guy is prosecuted."

I, too, would like to see him prosecuted. But that will only prolong his time in the limelight and make him a martyr, which is just what he wants. The coverage has been glowing: He couldn’t have scripted it better, had he written it himself. Check out the excerpt below, written by an obviously fan with The Salt Lake Tribune:

"Tim DeChristopher stood alone Friday when he placed bogus bids on drilling parcels near two Utah national parks, single-handedly sabotaging an oil- and gas-lease sale that caught the attention of Congress and the incoming Obama administration. Now, the 27-year-old University of Utah economics student stands with powerful new friends, including Pat Shea, former head of the Bureau of Land Management; Utah's most prominent defense attorney, Ron Yengich; and hundreds of supporters promising to contribute to his legal-defense fund.

Others led him to this point, inspiring DeChristopher to oppose a government he fears is leading the world to climate disaster. His mother, Christine, helped start the West Virginia chapter of the Sierra Club and took him as a small child to anti-coal rallies. Terry Root, a Stanford University scientist who worked with Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, put her hand on DeChristopher's shoulder and apologized for being too late to avert the worst effects of global warming. And Gore called on young people to commit acts of civil disobedience to stop greenhouse-gas belching coal-fired power plants."

Some who wrote responses to the story -- no kidding -- likened DeChristopher to the Rev. Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi. At least one mild rebuke could be found, on the editorial pages of The Grand Junction Sentinel:

"DeChristopher evidently considers himself a populist hero for his efforts Friday. But what he did wasn’t heroic. It was simply arrogant and thoughtless. Disagreement over a government decision is not a legitimate reason for dishonesty.

Here’s hoping the BLM goes after DeChristopher enthusiastically and forces him to pay with whatever assets he has, to show others such behavior won’t be accepted."

But the episode raises another question.

If Robert Redford and other drilling opponents place such high value on the lands in question, why don’t they put their money where their mouths are, become actual bidders and pay the fair market price for the minerals they want to deny the rest of us? It’s not as if the organizations who reflexively oppose drilling are lacking in resources – environmentalism is today an “industry” as big and powerful as those it uses as foils -- or lack supporters with deep pockets (like Redford). If Americans place a higher value on protecting "pristine" landscapes than they do on making productive uses of what’s underneath, the market is one way of determining that.

But greens can obstruct on the cheap simply by protesting, litigating and monkey-wrenching a process that’s supposed to serve the general welfare, by balancing economic and ecological ends, but which is too frequently hijacked by radicals. At present, all the costs of their knee-jerk obstructionism are borne by the rest of us, in a false scarcity of energy supplies, which leads to higher prices; in our growing dependence on foreign energy imports; in the limited utility of public lands that belong to energy consumers as much as they do to nature worshipers.

Having to pay for the oil and gas leases they want to idle would make them a little more discriminating -- at present, they simply oppose everything, everywhere, all the time, so they're blithely unaware of the need to make trade-offs, or of the economic hardships they are causing the rest of us.

Yes, I know these are environmentalists -- making them ignorant of, if not hostile to, economic concepts like markets, trade-offs and opportunity costs. Such utilitarian concepts don't compute in their simplistic world, where you're either a "saver" or a "destroyer" of the planet, and where the end ("saving the planet") justifies any means. They're suffering from a syndrome that might be called Environmental Retardation (or Enviro-mental Retardation). But if we could inject a little realism into their world, and a little economic awareness, the chances that reason might prevail over emotion in the energy debate might be improved, at least just a bit.