Posted on 04/23/2014 5:20:03 AM PDT by Kaslin
On Good Friday, President Obama made a bad call. The State Department announced that it would delay its decision on the Keystone XL pipeline until after the Nebraska Supreme Court rules in a case involving the route. The administration insists the decision to punt has nothing to do with politics. Pretty much everyone else thinks otherwise.
Obama, who is rarely reluctant to act unilaterally when it benefits him politically, and who regularly brags about his red-tape cutting, is paralyzed by perhaps the only big shovel-ready jobs project he's been presented with.
He welcomes the Keystone red tape because he's trapped between an overwhelmingly popular initiative and an overwhelmingly powerful constituency within the Democratic Party opposed to it: obdurate rich environmentalists and the door-knocking minions they employ.
Obama's predicament is just the latest example of how climate change monomania has become a problem for environmentalists -- and the country.
The mark of a truly successful political constituency or lobby is clout in both parties. Since climate change started crowding out other concerns, the environmental movement at the national level has become little more than an adjunct of the left wing of the Democratic Party.
Conservation used to be a fairly bipartisan affair. Dubbed the "father of conservation" by the National Park Service, Republican Teddy Roosevelt did more than any other president to preserve large swaths of wilderness. Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency, expanded the Clean Air Act, signed the Marine Mammal Protection Act and proposed the Safe Drinking Water Act.
The relationship between environmentalists and Republicans soured under Ronald Reagan as he tried to pare back the excesses of the Carter and Nixon years. But the two sides truly broke up under George H.W. Bush. Actually, it was more like the GOP was dumped -- unfairly.
Bush fought for renewal and expansion of the landmark Clean Air Act, but most environmental groups wouldn't even attend the signing. He went to the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, and he signed the U.N. treaty on climate change that established the Kyoto Protocol process.
"So how many environmental groups endorsed Bush for reelection in 1992?" asked environmental analyst Steve Hayward in a 2010 Weekly Standard essay. "In round numbers: zero."
As this story suggests, the friction predates the rise of climate change as a concern, but climate change has made these problems worse because it has coincided with and exacerbated environmentalism's steady slide leftward. Greens already hated fossil fuels when scientists feared we were heading into a new Ice Age. But such hatred could be environmentally beneficial when it forced tougher safety standards on the industry. Now the hatred is categorical, even existential: All drilling is bad.
As the Keystone debacle shows, global warming hysteria provides an ideological rationale to be uncompromising and extreme. And Republicans don't need to worry about pleasing environmentalists because they know there is no pleasing them.
Contrary to what you may have heard, GOP politicians still care about the environment, but they take their cues from public opinion, not from the green lobby. This often means that when the green lobby denounces Republicans (or centrist Democrats) for supporting drilling or fracking, the greens are at odds with the majority of Americans. How does it help their cause to be seen as fringe? Frustrated by their inability to sway public opinion, environmentalists become ever more shrill about the issue.
Important work is being done on serious problems, such as ocean acidification, overfishing, elephant and rhino poaching and loss of habitat. None of these issues get a fraction of the coverage they deserve. That's because many environmental reporters think their beat begins and ends with climate change.
Of course, climate change activists think blame lies everywhere else, that the threat justifies just about any tactic. That's their right. But that stance comes at a steep price, for them and everybody else. Just ask Obama.
The Tyrant’s financial backer (the non al Qaeda
and non Iranian one) needs the pipeline CLOSED
for his rail line.
The Tyrant will comply because it hurts America
and Americans.
THE TREASON — abetted by the GAVE.OBAMA.POWER (GOP) Party
CONTINUES.
The Holy Bible warns us against serving two masters.
More to the point, he's confronted with the only action that has potential to provide a boost to THIS COUNTRY and its economy...
In primitive societies priests and shamans controlled their tribes by threatening natural disaster. They held onto power by requiring a wide range of payment to keep the rain coming and the sun shining. The same tactics are employed today by the same crowd for the same ends.
Why can't folks just call something what it is. There is no "delay" whatsoever. There *IS* a decision. That decision is "NO.". It is only the means to that end that causes confusion - that is, on the surface claiming it as a "delay".
Merkel outlawed it....so this is stabbing her in the back, too.
You can tell she's still p***** about Obama tapping her phone.
I am so tired living in a country run by idiots
Stole it.
Why not name names? That would be Pew Charitable Trusts (Sunoco), W. Alton Jones Foundation (Citgo), Rockefellers Brothers Fund (You know who), and the Hewlett and Packard Foundations (in big with Exxon/Mobil). These are the big donors to the environmental move-mint. Socialists all.
There's nothing quite like getting fatter margins on existing wells without having to pay for risky drilling and receiving thinner margins.
No, it's because these guys are candidates for jobs in the apparat of (they hope) an eventually all-triumphant, dystopian, totalitarian Communist regime.
Then they will make us pay all the prices for their victory, and for everything they did to get there.
I respectfully think your reasoning is doubtful there. There is nothing about margin-widening thinking with Red/Green ideologues. They will just take what they want. What margin? What's a margin? Here, gimme -- I need.
Interesting that you ignore the list in the first half of the post detailing those who FUND the "Red/Green ideologues." Consider my case for the assertion and get back to me.
Is that clearer?
Intentions of the grantor seldom matter, once the ink is dry, and the intermediaries can and do play fast, loose, and hard with OPM.
Is that clearer?
Clearer but wrong, both historically and ideologically. The donors are not the great industrialists who produced that wealth, but are products of the same educational institutions that produced the recipients. Said industrialists were too busy to raise their kids. The scions know damned well that they lack the ability of their forebears, depending instead upon smart lawyers in tow who rig the concentration of power as a form of one-stop shopping for regulatory favors.
Consider any number of particulars, whether the adoption of MTBE, low-particulate diesel with a 94% reduction when the industry could do 90% but for Exxon/Mobil's patent, or Carter's EO killing the nuclear industry by banning reprocessing. These were actions that benefited exclusively those same donors.
Moreover, there is no such disconnect between the likes of Ted Turner and his pathetic minions. He's the kind of guy who funds the Ruckus Society to protest at the globalist WTO meetings he attends. So, yes, I do think you've got it wrong.
Goldberg is, for some reason, avoiding the real reason for the rift between the environmental movement and the Republican party.
It is simply this: The environmental movement is no longer about the environment. Instead, it is about statist power.
The environmental watermelon has been turned inside out...
Pardon me if I don't agree, having been tutored on the subject of the perversion of whole tracts of governance by William F. Buckley, Jr., who wrote about the Left's engineered divorce of education from local electorates and state governance over pay raises in the 1950's, and James Q. Wilson, who wrote about the similar abuse of philanthropy by liberals and leftists in the 1950's and 1960's, to hijack municipal politicians and agenda from the voters.
These Leftists use similar tactics in similar ways in every era, with the idea always of collecting lines of illegitimate power and influence at the expense of the public, over every sphere of public life.
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