There might be some coal under there
Demon Trump is going ahead with giving part of Bears Ears National Monument to industry to develop.
U.S. President Donald Trump will shrink the size of two national monuments in Utah, Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah said on Friday, a change that will open the areas to drilling and mining but which Democrats, environmental groups and Native Americans are vowing to fight.
The two Utah sites, Bears Ears National Monument and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument are among several that U.S. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke recommended reducing in size in order to make way for more industrial activity on the land they occupy.
Former President Barack Obama designated Bears Ears as a national monument during his final days in office.
So naturally Trump is doing the opposite.
Sadly for Trump, it won’t do any good – he’ll still be an ignorant hateful toad of a man, and Obama will still be better than he is in pretty much every way you can think of.
Industry groups like the oil lobbying organization the American Petroleum Institute have said in the past that both monuments were unfairly designated and needed to be reviewed.
Green groups and scientists condemned the move to reduce their size.
“Despite demands from millions of Americans, Native American Tribes, elected officials across the nation, scientists and legal scholars, President Trump continues to move down a path that puts the future of America’s treasured lands at risk,” said Jamie Williams, president of The Wilderness Society, in a statement on Friday. “Any efforts to take away protections for America’s lands and waters will be met by deep opposition and with the law on our side.”
The Navajo Nation’s top lawyer said in September the tribe would sue the Trump administration for violating the Antiquities Act, a century-old law that protects sacred sites, cultural artifacts and other historical objects, if it tried to reduce the size of Bears Ears, which the Navajo consider sacred ground.
In an email to Reuters on Friday, the lawyer, Navajo Nation Attorney General Ethel Branch, said: “The Navajo Nation stands ready to defend the Bears Ears National Monument. We have a complaint ready to file upon official action by the President.”
Good luck to them.
https://www.facebook.com/144310995587370/photos/a.271728576178944.71555.144310995587370/1701069566578164/?type=3&theater
Once a national park is gone, it is gone forever. Once wilderness is built over, that’s that.
The American national park system set up by President Teddy Roosevelt has been a lighthouse for the rest of the world, and the system here in Australia is based on it.
As Trump might say in other contexts: sad. But not in this one.
If he had half a brain and half a soul he would say that in this one, but he won’t.
Because he hasn’t.
In the 1980s Reagan’s forgettable Secretary of the Interior held that the national parks should all be strip-mined, because Jesus would be returning soon, and so it wouldn’t matter. (The signs were all there!!!)
That would be James Watt? I wish I could forget him…the damage he did is still with us, and the entire legacy of the Reagan administration led first to Bush 43 and now the giant toddler who is willing to trash the entire place just for fun. (I wish he could understand it really isn’t fun).
For everyone out there who doesn’t understand the problem, I have a message for you: The economy is man-made. The environment is not. Which one do you think we could manage to remake if they conflict? And which one can we absolutely not live without?
Or as the economist JK Galbraith put it, “the economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment.”
Exactly. Beautifully formulated. Or to paraphrase Bill McKibben, as difficult as may be to change the economic system, it’s almost certainly going to be easier than persuading the laws of physics to change their minds. My first question to anyone who argues that protecting the environment is going to harm the economy is “Compared to what?” After all, there can be no prospering economy on an uninhabitable planet. If doing whatever it takes to keep the planet habitable means the economy is screwed, then it’s screwed either way, and all the covfefe in the world is never going to save it.
I’ve been reading up on things like degrowth and steady state economic models lately, and, historically speaking, the all-destroying perpetual growth model has only been with us for the blink of an eye. If people could live without it in the past they can live without it today. Of course modern technologies and standards of living haven’t been with us for very long either, but there is no law of nature that says technology can only be used to keep the economy growing for ever. Imagine if increased efficiency meant we got to work less rather than produce more. Sounds great to me. And to those who argue that perpetual growth is necessary to lift people out of poverty, I can’t resist sharing the following quote from the book Enough Is Enough by Rob Dietz and Dan O’Neill:
Order decreases and chaos increases in just about every sphere. For example, iron ore deposits are mined, the ore reduced and steel made, which becomes cars, steel cans etc, which rust and finish up in rubbish tips all over the countryside, which can never be 100% restored back to the original ore mountains as found say in the Hammersley Range of Western Australia, feeding into the coffers of iron ore magnates. From there it will trickle down to the descendants of those magnates, who will thus become an (hereditary) aristocracy. Entropy thus increases.
And actually human wealth is concentrating. It was possibly more diffused when in say the Anglosphere when new territory was being expanded into, but that phase is over.
“Countries with very high inequality are clustered in South America and southern Africa. Countries with low inequality are mostly in Europe. Both Canada and the U.S. have medium income inequality.”
History knows no peaceful method for making unequal countries more equal, save for that used in France in 1789 (partly successful) Russia in 1917 (less so still.) and China 1949: back to huge inequality.
http://www.conferenceboard.ca/hcp/hot-topics/worldinequality.aspx
[…] a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on There might be some coal under […]
Ophelia, interesting that you spend your time “demonizing” Trump on an ATHEIST website for undoing some “This makes me look important! ” pencilwork Obama whipped out without necessary legislation, I might add, during one of his last minute White House tantrums over Killary’s loss. There’s a REASON TRUMP is president and Hillary has a pile of 1star books in her basements, along with a “Get out of Jail Quick” pack!
Hi, Buah, welcome to B&W. I look forward to having you as a regular commentator, as soon as you learn the difference between your own point of view and factually supported information.
There must be a random Yam-Supporter-Speak Generator online somewhere.
“Buah” I have been told is the original nom de blog used by Trump himself in one of his early tweeting frenzies. In these latter-day frenzies, I have been told, he is more cagey.
But that could well be fake news.