ANOTHER GREENIE FAILURE

The Endangered Species Act (ESA) has failed and will continue to fail so long as private property owners are penalized for good environmental stewardship, The National Center for Public Policy Research and 52 other leading national and grassroots organizations say in a letter sent to House Resources Committee Chairman Richard Pombo.

The ESA, which is on the fast track for reform and reauthorization this year, has by most accounts been a stunning failure.

Since it became law over 30 years ago, only nine of the close to 1,300 species given special protection under the ESA - or 0.6 percent of the total - have recovered.

Despite its poor performance, some on Capitol Hill are calling for more of the same.

Signatories to the letter to Chairman Pombo, however, strongly disagree.

"You can not fix an already poisonous law by increasing its dosage," said David Ridenour, vice president of The National Center for Public Policy Research and one of the coalition letter's organizers. "The ESA hasn't failed because it isn't strong enough. It has failed because it has the incentives all wrong."

Today, private landowners live in fear of the ESA. Those who harbor endangered species on their property or merely own land suitable for them often find themselves subject to severe land use restrictions. To avoid such restrictions and the losses in property values that accompany them, many have been forced to preemptively sterilize their land to keep rare species away.

"Such pre-emptive sterilization benefits no one - least of all the species the ESA was meant to protect. The good news is that this practice can be stopped by compensating landowners for their losses," said Ridenour. "But make no mistake: If Americans continue to be penalized for good stewardship practices, they will cease such practices and even more rare species will be condemned to extinction.

Source.

A longer article on the same subject is here. Excerpt:

"The Endangered Species Act has been a remarkable failure since its inception in 1973. According to the House Resources Committee, in its 32-year existence the law has failed to recover over 99% of the roughly 1,300 species it lists as threatened or endangered.

The cost of this failure to Americans has been enormous. For example, when the Spotted Owl was dubiously listed under the ESA in 1990, tens of thousands of Americans lost their jobs and their livelihoods. In 2001, four firefighters in the state of Washington lost their lives due to bureaucratic fumbling over the Act. And all across America, countless property owners have fallen victim to the menace of radicals who use the ESA to pillage property.

"How many more lives must be ruined before Congress finally stops cowering before the radical green lobby?" asked DeWeese. "Congress should not reauthorize the ESA unless complete and total property rights protections are given to landowners."

In a 2003 critique of the ESA, Congressman Pombo wrote: "It is no secret the ESA has been used by extremists to restrict, seize and devalue property rights, as well as halt important government projects. In fact, this is what most ‘green’ obstructionists groups relish most about the Act.""






WHERE THE GREENIE MONEY COMES FROM

They have their snouts in just about every trough imaginable

Too often the media portrays environmental groups as selfless do-gooders and their opponents as greedy corporate polluters and the Bush Administration. But the press rarely mentions that moneyed interests are also behind environmental groups. Just take a look at who's funding the environmental groups that are trying to attach global warming regulations to the energy bill now before Congress.

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and Environmental Defense are two of the noisiest groups that want the U.S. Senate to adopt what's called the McCain-Lieberman bill, named after its two sponsors. In a stream of seemingly endless emails, they are imploring their members to pressure Congress to support McCain-Lieberman. This bill, officially called the Climate Stewardship and Innovation Act, would seriously harm our economy by requiring American businesses to cut their current output of carbon dioxide to 2000 levels by the year 2010. Yet none of the news stories about this bill mentions how much money the NRDC and Environmental Defense have raised -- much of it from government -- to promote this job-destroying legislation.

From 2000-2002 the NRDC and Environmental Defense were among the top recipients of almost $125 million in grants that federal government agencies gave for climate change-related projects. According to a recent report from the George C. Marshall Institute, NRDC took in $6.7 million in grants from left-leaning foundations and government agencies. Environmental Defense garnered just over $5 million.

Does the Bush Administration know that its agencies are spending taxpayer money to fund groups opposed to its own policies? In 2004 the NRDC received over $390,000 from the Environmental Protection Agency to study how to reduce gas emissions. So not only does the NRDC lobby for legislation that will hurt American taxpayers, but the American taxpayer gets the pleasure of helping it do so.

The NRDC and Environmental Defense also raise money from a Who's Who of private U.S. foundations. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation gave $300,000 to both groups to maintain the "momentum" for imposing global warming regulations. Ted Turner's foundation handed the NRDC $800,000 and Environmental Defense $100,000. The Public Welfare Foundation gave the NRDC a cool $1 million, while a more reticent Energy Foundation gave a mere $970,000 to Environmental Defense for global warming.

To get around the Administration's opposition to taxing Americans for an unproven theory, many foundations also fund state-level climate change initiatives. Last year, the Pew Charitable Trusts -- one of the most aggressive foundations on climate change -- gave $550,000 to the NRDC to promote global warming initiatives in the West and Northeast. Environmental Defense received grants from the Dyson Foundation ($25,000 in 2002) and the Wallace Global Fund ($10,000 in 2002) for state climate-change campaigns; The NRDC got money from the Bullit Foundation for this effort ($110,000 in 2001). The Energy Foundation of San Francisco is a cash cow for state-level climate change. Since 2001 it has given five grants totaling more than $610,000 to NRDC and four grants worth $520,000 to Environmental Defense for climate-change programs in places like California.

The NRDC raises money by playing the national security card on global warming, and then raises more money by opposing other national security measures. On global warming, the NRDC raises the specter of Middle East oil. "Global warming pollution and dependence on foreign oil are urgent problems," the NRDC's website warns. Yet the group opposes a national missile defense and has raised money fighting it: $50,000 from the John Merck Fund and $400,000 from the Turner Foundation.

Grants to environmental groups like the NRDC and Environmental Defense would soar if global warming regulations were added to the current energy bill. Green groups would go hat-in-hand to private foundations and the federal government requesting money to "study implementation" of the regulation and "monitor compliance" with its provisions for reducing so-called greenhouse gases.

Climate change regulation is potentially a huge economic burden on the United States (but not on India, Russia or Brazil). The debate should not go forward without acknowledging that the environmental lobby has a financial stake in promoting global warming hype.

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NATURE WORSHIP

It is almost impossible to overstate how radically different the Jewish Bible thought was from the thought of the rest of its contemporary world. And it continues to be, given how few societies affirm Judeo-Christian values and how much opposition to them exists in American society, the society that has most incorporated these values. Among the most radical of these differences was the incredible declaration that G-d is outside of nature and is its creator.

In every society on earth, people venerated nature and worshipped nature gods. There were gods of thunder and gods of rain. Mountains were worshipped, as were rivers, animals and every natural force known to man. In ancient Egypt, for example, gods included the Nile River, the frog, sun, wind, gazelle, bull, cow, serpent, moon and crocodile. Then came Genesis, which announced that a supernatural G-d, i.e., a g-d who existed outside of nature, created nature. Nothing about nature was divine.

Professor Nahum Sarna, the author of what I consider one of the two most important commentaries on Genesis and Exodus, puts it this way: "The revolutionary Israelite concept of G-d entails His being wholly separate from the world of His creation and wholly other than what the human mind can conceive or the human imagination depict."

The other magisterial commentary on Genesis was written by the late Italian Jewish scholar Umberto Cassuto, professor of Bible at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: "Relative to the ideas prevailing among the peoples of the ancient East, we are confronted here with a basically new conception and a spiritual revolution . . . The basically new conception consists in the completely transcendental view of the Godhead . . . the G-d of Israel is outside and above nature, and the whole of nature, the sun, and the moon, and all the hosts of heaven, and the earth beneath, and the sea that is under the earth, and all that is in them - they are all His creatures which He created according to His will."

This was extremely difficult for men to assimilate then. And as society drifts from Judeo-Christian values, it is becoming difficult to assimilate again today. Major elements in secular Western society are returning to a form of nature worship. Animals are elevated to equality with people, and the natural environment is increasingly regarded as sacred. The most extreme expressions of nature worship actually view human beings as essentially blights on nature.

Even among some who consider themselves religious, and especially among those who consider themselves "spiritual" rather than religious, nature is regarded as divine, and G-d is deemed as dwelling within it.

It is quite understandable that people who rely on feelings more than reason to form their spiritual beliefs would deify nature. It is easier - indeed more natural - to worship natural beauty than an invisible and morally demanding G-d.

What is puzzling is that many people who claim to rely more on reason would do so. Nature is unworthy of worship. Nature, after all, is always amoral and usually cruel. Nature has no moral laws, only the amoral law of survival of the fittest.

Why would people who value compassion, kindness or justice venerate nature? The notions of justice and caring for the weak are unique to humanity. In the rest of nature, the weak are to be killed. The individual means nothing in nature; the individual is everything to humans. A hospital, for example, is a profoundly unnatural, indeed antinatural, creation; to expend precious resources on keeping the most frail alive is simply against nature.

The romanticizing of nature, let alone the ascribing of divinity to it, involves ignoring what really happens in nature. I doubt that those American schoolchildren who conducted a campaign on behalf of freeing a killer whale (the whale in the film "Free Willy") ever saw films of actual killer whale behavior. There are National Geographic videos that show, among other things, killer whales tossing a terrified baby seal back and forth before finally killing it. Perhaps American schoolchildren should see those films and then petition killer whales not to treat baby seals sadistically. If you care about good and evil, you cannot worship nature. And since that is what G-d most cares about, nature worship is antithetical to Judeo-Christian values

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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