All will become clear momentarily.
If you read your major dailies over the last couple weeks you’ve read about the BLM shutting down large solar projects.
And also the subsequent cries of despair from the fossil fuel denier crowd towards “the neocon Bush Administration†etc.
They would do better to look to their left and right, as well as into the mirror, before making such claims.
The Bureau of Land Management quietly decided in May that the development of solar plants in 119 million sun-soaked, federally owned acres in the western states of Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah would have to wait at least two years while bureaucrats sorted out their environmental impact.
For decades environmental groups have been pushing the government and private sector to develop more alternative sources of energy. But that campaign is beginning to look like a sham to cover the groups’ BANANA — Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything — activism.
To be fair, it appears the BLM acted without being forced by an environmentalist-filed lawsuit or activist pressure. And so far, the media are reporting that only a single group — the Wilderness Society — has expressed support for the moratorium.
Make no mistake, though. The environmental groups are the reason the BLM made its decision. Had they not spent the past 30 years rabidly crusading against development, reflexively defending wildlife habitats from minor and imaginary threats and demonizing economic progress, the solar projects would not have been interrupted.
Washington has become so overly sensitive to the possibility of vocal opposition on anything that has an environmental impact that it feels it must inoculate itself from the radicals — even when the project is one they should support without reservation.
Environmental groups at one time served a noble purpose. We are a cleaner nation and world now than we were in the groups’ formative years because they helped the West understand that it needed to clean up the mess from the Industrial Revolution.
But now they have become BANANA’s and CAVE — Citizens Against Virtually Everything — people. They are more interested in choking capitalism and imposing on the world a future without energy than they are with a clean planet.
True Dat!
True, but it ignores politics, in this case, G.W. Bush’s politics. “The Kinder, Gentler conservative” failed to purge the “BANANA” and “CAVE” people from the Dept of Interior, and they have been throwing monkey wrenches into the gears of conservative reform ever since the Clintons stole the furniture from the White House and left it to Bush.
Gale Norton has done an admirable job, but when you change out only the top position, and leave ingrained layers of “BANANAs” and “CAVEs” below her, you can’t expect much.
When the Obamanation takes over on 1-20-09, it will be so easy for him as he only will have to replace a couple of people and he will have his lock-up-the-West program fully in place.
Don’t plan on taking that Jeep into the woods again after 1-20-09, Phil, the woods will be REALLY locked up tight (except to the Mexican ganja farmers) when Obama takes the reins of power.
Yeah, I saw this a few days ago.
You’d think the President, the guy in charge of the BLM, would be able to wake up and tell them to cut this shit out.
Mmmmm watermelon!
CAVE is the new gun control. Since that didn’t work other areas are in the socialistic crosshairs.