President Obama's federal land grab continues, By Will Coggin, 6/27/16
“We’ve designated new monuments and historic sites that better
reflect the story of all our people,” President Obama recently boasted at
Yosemite National Park.
What he’s referring to is the White House’s authority to
classify large swaths of land as national monuments based on an obscure
provision in the 1906 Antiquities Act. With that designation, the federal
government can restrict all sorts of activities on the land, including
ranching, off-roading, and energy production — disregarding the wishes of local
communities. Obama can effectively rope off millions of acres of land in states
like California and Utah without congressional approval.
The Obama administration does so diligently: It has already set
aside over 265 million acres of land, more territory than any other president
in history. During his two terms, the president has added 22 sites to the
National Park System under the Antiquities Act.
But federal oversight of America’s lands leaves plenty to be
desired. A recent analysis from the Property and Environment Research Center
found that the federal government loses billions of dollars a year caring for
land under its control — now nearly 30 percent of the entire country. For every
dollar spent on land management, the federal government only recoups 73 cents
in revenue. Recent estimates show the National Park Service (NPS) has more than
$11 billion in deferred maintenance, while the U.S. Forest Service has more
than $300 million in backlogged trail repairs.
NPS is also under fire for allegations of mismanagement and
sexual harassment. The chief park ranger at Florida’s Canaveral National
Seashore, for instance, was accused of sexually harassing women on three
separate cases in two years; yet he still works at the park. “The department
does not do well in holding employees accountable who engage in misconduct,”
Interior Deputy Inspector General Mary Kendall explained. “Often, management
avoids discipline altogether.”
But the Obama administration continues plugging away with
monument declarations. It represents the president’s “keep it in the ground”
stance on fossil fuels, which has led to a decrease of production on federal
lands. While the country is in the midst of an energy revolution, the growth
has come almost exclusively on state and private land. According to the
nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, between 2009 and 2013, oil
production increased by 61 percent on state and private lands, but actually
dropped 6 percent on federal lands. Natural gas production rose by a third on
state and private land during that same time period, but plummeted on federal
lands by 28 percent.
Federal lands could provide a tremendous economic boon. A study
by Timothy Considine, a professor of energy economics at the University of
Wyoming, found opening federal lands could lead to $26.5 billion in annual
gross regional product, more than $5 billion in tax revenue and more than
200,000 jobs in the Rocky Mountain region alone. But a small contingent of
radical environmental groups blindly opposed to fossil fuels has convinced the
president to lock up these resources. And in an effort to drown out local
opposition, left-wing activists have gone to extreme lengths to cloak their
appearance.
A group called the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership
(TRCP) and a handful of other supposed hunter-advocate organizations recently
released a report extolling the virtues of the Antiquities Act as a powerful
conservation tool and praised Obama for his use of executive power.
In order to make up for lack of actual support among the
American people for federal land grabs, environmental and left-wing foundations
have dumped millions of dollars into groups that claim to represent hunters and
anglers, using them to create a false grassroots image behind the use — or
abuse — of presidential powers.
As an example, Backcountry Hunters and Anglers — one of the
report's supporters — receives the lion's share of its funding not from grassroots
sportsmen but from environmentalists such as Wyss Foundation, which also
donates heavily to radical activists at the Natural Resources Defense Council
and Earthjustice (the “law firm of the environment”) — which oppose affordable
energy development in favor of unreliable and expensive wind and solar energy.
TRCP, meanwhile, gets most of its money from environmentalists
and Big Labor, according to tax records. In 2010, leaked documents from the Obama administration
identified more than a dozen sites covering 13 million acres as potential new
targets for monument designation. In other words, the problem is only getting worse. And not much
can be done unless Congress rolls back President Obama’s overreaching executive
power.
Will Coggin is the research director
for the Environmental Policy Alliance.
See List on:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_proposed_National_Monuments_of_the_United_States
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