Obama picks Babbitt aide to run BLM
By Patty Henetz, Salt Lake Tribune, 06/10/2009 [here]
Bob Abbey, who helped former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt complete a Utah wilderness inventory 10 years ago, is President Barack Obama’s nominee to head up the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced the nomination Tuesday evening, calling Abbey a “consummate, professional natural-resource manager.”
Abbey has more than 32 years in state and federal public service, including eight years at the helm of the Nevada state BLM office until his retirement in 2005.
Early reactions indicated general approval of Abbey’s nomination from conservationists, off-roaders and oil and gas officials.
“I think he’d be a good director,” said Brian Hawthorne, public-lands policy director for the BlueRibbon Coalition, an OHV interest group. “He seemed to be well-liked by the [BLM] line officers and staff.”
Heidi McIntosh, an attorney and conservation director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, said Abbey was known as “a good guy” and not ideological in any direction.
“He’s willing to listen. I think he’s a good choice,” McIntosh said.
If the Senate confirms Abbey, she said, he ought to restore a balance to managing public lands after the Bush administration’s eight years of focusing on oil and gas development. … [more]
Taxing Cows
By Alan Caruba, Facts Not Fantasy Blog, June 9, 2009 [here]
Just how crazed is the Environmental Protection Agency? When I say “crazed”, I mean just how far out of touch with reality, with science, with the economy, with common sense, and with the American people is the EPA?
Ever since the Supreme Court made one of the greatest blunders since the Dred Scott case, declaring carbon dioxide (CO2) a “pollutant” that could be regulated by the EPA, that deranged agency has been pushing a tax on CO2 emissions from cows, pigs, and other farm animals on which we depend for milk and meat at the local supermarket.
According to Encarta, in 2005 there were an estimated 95,848,000 cows in the United States. Presumably, there are comparable numbers of pigs, goats, and other critters that emit belches and farts sufficient to destroy the Earth with the CO2 they emit. Nor should we overlook the six pounds of CO2 that the 307 million Americans exhale daily.
Since there is NO global warming and the Earth has been cooling for the past decade, the proposal that these farm animals be taxed constitutes a criminal act, devoid of any justification.
Since CO2 plays virtually no role whatever in so-called “climate change”, taxing farm animals is a violation of the known science and an assault on the economy in the name of the greatest hoax of the modern age.
It is not, however, a matter of “saving the Earth” so far as the EPA and the rest of the Obama administration is concerned. It is MONEY. And money is POWER. … [here]
Note: Not to criticize Alan or anything, but we posted this tale of flatulence emanating from the gooberment last November, together with the requisite tanked cow pic [here], and it has been the most popular post ever at W.I.S.E. News. Not sure why that is, but it might be the sonorous title, EPA Proposes Cow Fart Tax, that has attracted web visitors like flies to… honey.
TNC Given $9 Million to Buy Land in NorCal
Nine million taxpayers dollars are to be handed over to The Nature Conservancy to buy land north of Lake Tahoe. TNC will keep the land.
Reclamation Announces Decision on Independence Lake Land Acquisition
Bureau of Reclamation News Release, June 2, 2009, [here]The Bureau of Reclamation has signed a Finding of No Significant Impact (FONSI) for the Environmental Assessment (EA) on the impacts of Reclamation’s action to provide Federal funding to The Nature Conservancy (TNC) for acquisition of land around Independence Lake, located north of Truckee, California. In addition to acquisition dollars, funding will be provided for administrative management and to continue the existing fishery research and monitoring.
Public Law 110-161 directs Reclamation to provide $9 million in funding for acquisition of the land and protection of both the native fishery and the water quality of Independence Lake. TNC is exploring potential land management activities for future implementation, including forest management to minimize wildfire hazards, and public recreation management. Once the acquisition is completed, future management of the land will be decided and implemented by TNC as called for in the Public Law.
TNC also enjoyed over a billion dollars in income last year, including $100 million in government grants. They hold over $5.6 billion in assets, principally real property.
Hank Paulson, Sec of the Teasury who engineered the collapse of the US and world financial markets is a former President and CEO of TNC. Current President and CEO is Mark Tercek, formerly a managing director of Goldman Sachs, (as was Paulson).
Lynx habitat at risk as clear-cutting fades
By Murray Carpenter, The Boston Globe, April 27, 2009 [here]
The good news is that Canada lynx are thriving in Maine. Hundreds of the leggy, snow-loving cats are breeding in the state’s vast north woods, perhaps a historic high.
The bad news is that the population is heading for a crash, and logging industry clear-cut practices seem to be the reason.
Strangely, it’s not an excess of clear-cutting that is the problem; this time, it’s a lack of clear-cutting that is creating environmental worries.
Environmentalists may hate clear-cutting, but lynx love it - because when trees are cleared away, a dense spruce-fir thicket often crops up in their place, and those thickets attract snowshoe hares, the lynx’s primary prey.
Biologists say lynx are thriving in Maine because massive industrial clear-cuts following a spruce budworm epidemic 30 years ago have grown into hare-rich thickets. But regulations reducing the size of clear-cuts in the Maine woods - products of state legislation passed in 1989 and amended after a divisive environmental campaign in the late 1990s - are now eliminating those thickets, and eventually, the hares that live in them.
Over the next decade, the unintended chain reaction is expected to dramatically reduce the number of Maine lynx - the only lynx in the Eastern states, and listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.
“The prognosis for future habitat for lynx is not terribly good,” said Mark McCullough, a US Fish and Wildlife Service biologist.
William Krohn, a University of Maine professor who has been studying the state’s wildlife for decades, said that with recent reductions in clear-cutting, “We’ve created something that isn’t the optimum for lynx habitat.” … [more]