Saving the planet from Republican money no easy task

After the Soviet Union fell Republicans began their war on the environment substituting a new Green Scare for the old Red Scare. 

Today, the Center for Western Priorities found 92% of 10,000 comments encouraged the Interior Department to adopt the US Bureau of Land Management's Public Lands Rule as written or even strengthen its conservation measures. 

The US Environmental Protection Agency currently prices the social cost of carbon at $51 per ton.

With governments of the world facing a 2025 deadline for new and stronger plans to curb carbon pollution, nearly half of the world's populations voting in elections this year, and crucial global finance meetings later this month in Washington, United Nations executive climate secretary Simon Stiell said Wednesday he knows his warning may sound melodramatic. But he said action over the next two years is “essential.” If emissions of carbon dioxide and methane from burning of coal, oil and natural gas continue to rise or don't start a sharp decline, Stiell said it “will further entrench the gross inequalities between the world’s richest and poorest countries and communities" that are being worsened by climate change. And behind it all is money. [UN climate chief presses for faster action, says humans have 2 years left 'to save the world']

Margaret Byfield is the daughter of a couple with ties to the so-called Sagebrush Rebellion and in Nevada they grazed their cattle without permits on federal land. In 2022 her group, American Stewards of Liberty or ASL presented anti-Earth resolutions to a receptive Otero County Commission and the San Juan County Commission heard two resolutions dealing with land use issues after watching Byfield's dog and pony show. Her husband, Dan has been a lobbyist for the Texas Farm Bureau. 

Charging as much as $225 a head Mrs. Byfield recently spoke to the Great Lakes Timber Professionals Association "alleging that environmentalists are atheists and casting conservation efforts as a plan by the federal government to take power from property owners."

Alfredo Herrera is kinder, and softer-spoken, a young rancher whose ancestors first homesteaded their family plot in northern New Mexico 100 years ago. All weekend long, there has been talk of “grassroots.” At the time, ASL’s website declares that 54 percent of its hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual revenue comes from small donors. (The vast majority of that money is spent on the couple’s salaries.) The group’s 990s tell a different story: “Service fees”—money that comes presumably from their county-level consulting and, lately, their summits—make up more than two-thirds of ASL’s revenue. Who do they want to own this country? If I squint a bit, this conference starts to look like a front on behalf of the oligarchs who pay the bills—the people who, if our public lands are ever privatized, will wind up the new owners. [This Land Is My Land: Inside the Growing Movement to Fight Conservation]

Learn more at the Wisconsin Examiner.