Watching a new paradigm about energy and climate change grabbing
hold in the U.S. Congress is a fascinating sight, even if the
process is still agonizingly slow in comparison to the rate at which
the world is changing.
The paradigm change is not uniformly
partisan; members of both parties sit there squirming at hearing
after hearing, as witnesses explain that all of us must come to
understand the world in a new and different way. The long-cherished,
fossil-fuel based, “markets know all” paradigm has broken down,
while the outlines of a new paradigm are visible but still tenuous.
This paradigm shift was on sharper display than usual at a hearing on "the evolving West” on Wednesday,
Februrary 28, before the House Natural Resources
Committee.
In the good old days, this House committee went by
a more no-nonsense name: the House Resources
Committee. And resources it was, the committee that for decades
presided over various and sundry sweetheart deals for the country’s
extractive industries, industries that in turn created the boom-and-bust cycles in mining and logging which
have characterized the Rocky Mountain state economies since the late
19th century.
Now under the chairmanship of West Virginia
Democrat Nick J. Rahall, II, the Natural Resources Committee is
somewhat of an odd duck these days. The committee has jurisdiction
over the federal lands that make up 50% or more of most of the Rocky
Mountain States, but despite the Democrat’s recent surge, there are
only 2 Democratic members from the region on the committee.
For those of you whose memories stretch back to the glory
days of the Reagan Revolution, you may recall that one of the
principal ingredients in that not-so-savory stew was the so-called Sagebrush Rebellion.
The rebels
objected to the federal government’s huge landholdings, arguing that
the feds should butt out and turn these lands over to the states to
regulate and administer (i.e., more mines, more logging, more cattle
grazing, etc.) The rebels thought they had won when Reagan was
elected and installed James Watt as the Secretary of Interior, but
in the end Watt was ousted without coming close to meeting the
rebels’ objectives.
Things have changed a great deal in the
West since the early 1980s. Chairman Rahall deftly avoided the
question of whether there was a “new West” that had replaced the
“old West” by titling the hearing “the evolving West.”
For
any objective observer, things in the West have definitely evolved
since 1980, with huge inflows of people and vast numbers of new jobs
based on services, tourism, and high-tech industry, displacing
extractive industries in many areas.
The Republican Time
Machine: Back to Reagan and Watt
But listening to some of
the Republican members from the region at Wednesday’s hearing, you
would have thought you were in a time machine taking you back to a
hearing with James Watt testifying in 1981 or 1982.
Take
Utah Representative Rob Bishop, the senior Republican on the
committee, whose remarks echoed the Sagebrush Rebellion, with an
interesting education twist. According to Bishop, if the federal
lands in Utah were taxed at the lowest Utah rate, the state would
get $214 million in additional revenues, of which $116 million would
go, under state law, to public education.
The additional
money, Bishop (a former teacher, by the way) said, “could pay decent
salaries to teachers….and we could tell the federal government to
take ‘No Child Left Behind’ and shove it.” Bishop argued that the
enabling acts that brought most of the mountain states into
existence had been altered by Congress in the 1950s in such a way as
to “condemn my fellow teachers to a life of poverty.”
He
then cited as an example a new copper mine that paid total taxes of
$13.1 million in 2006, or $131 million if the mine had a ten-year
life span. Wages at the mine ranged from $12-21/hour, which he said
was more than twice the going range for jobs in the tourism
industry, and the mine paid benefits, while tourism jobs did
not.
Bishop was quite bitter: “Our land policies hurt kids.”
As for relying on tourism, Bishop had nothing but contempt: “Tourism
will not fund education in the West.”
Looking at the
scheduled witnesses, Bishop challenged the “presenters to recognize
that the West is more than a recreational playground for the
East.”
Other Republican members echoed Bishop’s caustic
analysis and added other themes, especially the need to “thin” the
nation’s forests to reduce the danger of forest fires. There were
repeated references to a legacy of increased fire danger because of
decades of federal fire suppression policies, which allowed brush to
build up and trees to crowd together so that fires now roared out of
control, burning down entire forests, instead of just cleaning out
the understory.
The problem with this argument is that one
person’s “thinning” has all too often turned into nothing more than
blatant clear-cutting, removing the forest just as thoroughly as any
fire, albeit with more direct economic gain to the timber industry.
It took some creativity to inject terrorism into this
hearing, but one Representative managed. Talking about the
difficulties of getting permission to remove dead trees (another
aspect of “thinning”), he proclaimed, “Let us not defend a system so
complicated that it takes 3 times longer to remove a dead tree than
to rebuild the Pentagon.”
And in another twist that had to
have been dreamed up at some K-Street public relations firm, we
learned that our failure to cut American forests faster was making
global warming worse because the lumber was coming instead from the
destruction of the Brazilian rain forest.
The fearsome
salmon, a danger to people everywhere, raised its scaly head a few
times. Why did the federal government “elevate salmon over the
livelihood of my constituents?” one member asked. There were the
usual salvos at “someone who reads about the West in the New York
Times, or works in an environmental law office in—you can guess,
right?—Washington, DC. Those “radical environmentalists” and
“extremist activist groups” were spearheading opposition to all
kinds of things that benefit Americans, like more coal plants and
dams.
Not the Old West, not the New West, the Evolving
West
The first two panelists gutted the Republicans’ dark and
pessimistic view of life in the Rocky Mountain states. First up was
Montana Governor Brian
Schweitzer, the first Democratic governor of Montana since 1988.
Schweitzer put on a show that demonstrated why he has been running
circles around his opponents with his consensus-building approach to
politics.
Dressed casually in an open-throated shirt with a
very loose cowboy tie, Schweitzer quickly laid out his vision of how
environmental restoration of the sins of the past and resource
conservation in the present were the keys to a vibrant state economy
that would bring in new people and new businesses and keep them in
the state.
Schweitzer cited what he called Theodore
Roosevelt’s “greatest legacy,” the commitment to offering the next
generation clean air, clean water, and open spaces. He explained
that when Lewis and Clark first reached Montana, they found Indian
tribes who had been living sustainably on these lands for 10,000
years because their elders thought about the consequences of their
decisions for the next 7 generations. (Schweitzer’s praise for the
Native Americans’ 7-generation planning horizon, which was repeated
by several witnesses during the morning, stands in sharp contrast to
the obsession of stock market investors with profits in the most
recent quarter.)
But the miners came to hit it rich and go
home, Schweitzer said, so it was no surprise that there were plenty
of examples of mining done the wrong way. As governor, he’d been to
some 30 countries, many of which were making these same mining
mistakes. Montanans could make money by developing technologies to
clean up their own mistakes, and then exporting those
technologies.
“One hundred years ago, Montana was called ‘the
treasure state’ because of the gold, silver, platinum, palladium,
coal, oil, and gas,” Schweitzer said. “But the real treasure wasn’t
the minerals contained in the mountains, it was the mountains
themselves.” [RB—my emphasis] Montana’s economy was thriving
because people wanted safe communities, good schools, and abundant
opportunities for hunting, fishing, and camping. Mining was still
going on, and the state was one of only two that increased oil
production last year.
The next witness was former Montana
Congressman Pat Williams, who had served on the Resources Committee.
Williams reinforced Schweitzer’s analysis, but as a former elected
official who now works the think tank circuit, Williams was more
blunt about the shape of the evolving West.
Williams made
short shrift of the Republicans’ complaints: “The good Republicans
who preceded me today talked about a West that I don’t recognize
now. The West they were talking about is the West people were
talking about twenty years ago on the committee. I note the title of
this hearing, the evolving West. We all need to evolve with it. The
West has undergone a significant transition. The West is no longer
what it was. Nor are we who live there what we once were. We live in
an evolving West.”
Williams said that the “Old West was the
stuff of myth, inaccurate but comfortable.” He told the story of famous Western
movie director John Ford, who was once asked whether he showed
the West the way it was. “Hell no,” Ford replied, “I showed it the
way it should have been.”
Williams chastised those who rail
against the role of government: "We have to set aside paranoia and
intolerance and recognize that government at all levels can be an
asset.” He cited five organizations that he said reflected “a
flourishing, prospering, maturing region.” (The Sonoran
Institute, the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy at the
University of Arizona, the Wallace
Stegner Center at the University of Utah, the Center for the Rocky Mountain
West at the University of Montana, and the newly-formed think
tank, Western Progress.) The personal income of people around
western cities is growing much faster than in the rest of the
country. There has been 10% population growth in these states,
versus only 5.5% nationally. Access to natural beauty was drawing
people to the region’s mid-sized and smaller cities.
Williams said there were two key concepts to understanding
the evolving West. First, we were moving to an “amenities” economy,
one in which natural resources were still important, but this time
as “unscarred” resources. And he cited what he called “footloose
jobs,” a phenomenon in which jobs follow people, rather than people
moving to where the jobs were.
In a statement that appeared
to shock some of the Representatives, Williams suggested that it
might be time for a new mantra in the West: “Don’t build it, and
they
will come.” [RB—my emphasis]
Far from being the enemy of progress, Williams argued, the
federal government was failing to strike an adequate balance in
supporting the evolving economy. The national parks, which he said
were “still America’s best idea….world class assets”, were hurting.
The GAO estimated that the backlog for repairs in the parks $6
billion.
Williams reminded the committee of its
responsibilities for working with Native Americans, who suffered
from the lowest income of any ethic group, with high unemployment
and infant morality rates. And he decried what he said was the
Bureau of Land Management’s effort to lease as much federal land as
possible, leases that would wreak havoc on the region’s fish and
wildlife for decades to come. He said the BLM was under direct
orders to “lease the West” before Bush left office. In a plea-ful
voice, Williams exorted the committee to act: “Won’t you please at
least consider a congressional moratorium on the headline leasing in
fRocky Mountain West.”
Asked what he had learned that would
help other regions in the West that were not doing as well as
Montana, Schweitzer had a concise come-back. How far away was the nearest good trout stream? “If you’re more
than a half hour from great trout fishing,” he said, “your community
is probably shrinking.” He also included great public schools, and
broadband connections to allow businesses to conduct their affairs
worldwide.
Schweitzer was enthusiastic but hard-headed about
the prospects of coal. Montana has 32% of the nation’s coal, and 8%
of the entire world’s reserves. He was very hopeful that the
technologies for sequestering CO2 from burning coal to generate
electricity, or from coal-to-gas or coal-to-liquid processes. But he
concluded: “Coal will not be the energy of the future if we cannot
sequester CO2.”
The next panel of witnesses—see below—was
largely supportive of the views that Schweitzer and Williams
expressed, particularly Luther Propst, Executive Director of The
Sonoran Institute. He said his organization’s studies showed that
the access to wild lands so close to economically developed areas in
the West was the region’s “most important competitive advantage in
the global economy.”
In looking at public lands, the
Institute had found that countries with more public land were more
prosperous than those with less, and that counties with a diverse
economic base performed better economically than those based on only
a single activity, whether that be extractive industries, tourism,
or the knowledge economy.
“Jobs versus the environment is no
longer the paradigm,” Propst concluded. “The environment provides
the foundation for economic prosperity.”
2nd Panel of
Witnesses
Clifford Lyle Marshall, Chairman, Hoopa Valley
Tribe
Matthew Box, Vice Chairman, Southern Ute
Tribe
Luther Propst, Executive Director, The Sonoran
Institute
Russell Vaagen, Vice President, Vaagen Brothers
Lumber Company
There continue to be numerous hearings in the House and the Senate on energy and climate change.
The Cunctator on Daily Kos has been posting schedules and witness lists for many of these hearings.