'Green' Fixes Minus the Grift and the Graft

What should concern us regarding the “climate change” hoax is not so much the grift but the actions of governments and (unaccountable) NGOs to reduce our nation based on that grift. Would I mind having an E.V.? Maybe - if I could “refill” its tank in a few minutes, and it would stay charged for another 400 miles, wherever I decide to travel (even in the winter). Maybe not. But if the point of the E.V. scheme is to kill fossil fuels, that irks me. Especially since most of the electricity to charge the battery would itself come from fossil fuels.

Do I mind shutting down coal-fired power plants? If there is a sufficient replacement, then no. Living in Arizona, I visit the Grand Canyon often and have hiked to the bottom and back and across, winter and spring. The (now-closed) coal plant in northern Arizona would sometimes reduce visibility within this beautiful canyon. Coal is abundant and cheap, which is why it has historically been so popular, but all else being equal I’d much rather have electricity generated by clean nuclear power than have my view of the Grand Canyon dimmed. And our widespread transition from coal to natural gas is the reason the U.S. has led the world in carbon emissions reduction over the past quarter century.

And it's worth noting that there's nothing wrong with emissions reductions. Our problem shouldn't be the reductions, but the authoritarian approach to it. Especially because the benefits are overstated, the costs are underplayed, and the whole discussion takes place in an atmosphere of hysteria. The grifters don’t own the air – and they don’t own the water or the land. We the People do.

That's a fact worth noting. We often read of oil exploration being prohibited on “federal” lands. Solar farms are springing up on “federal” lands, as are wind and geothermal farms. President Biden has announced new details to his earlier executive order to add to “federal” lands and waters via confiscation:

The Secretary of the Interior… shall submit a report to the Task Force within 90 days of the date of this order recommending steps that the United States should take… to achieve the goal of conserving at least 30 percent of our lands and waters by 2030.

So how much land are we talking about?

…the public estate totals more than 609 million acres, or roughly 27 percent of the land area of the U.S.—enough land nearly equal to the land mass of California, Texas and Alaska combined.

There are good scholarly arguments which contend that the concept of any land belonging to the federal government, above and beyond what is required to execute its enumerated powers – the only powers it has – is fallacious. Former Montana state senator Casey Emerson offered this view:

Title to the land in Montana should have gone to the state as soon as Montana became a state in 1889. And the only real question is: Does the federal government owe us rent on that land since then?

After all, per the Enclave Clause (Article 1, Section 8), the states delegated to the federal government they were creating to serve them the authority “to exercise like authority over all places purchased by the consent of the legislature of the state…,” and the Property Clause (Article 4, Section 3) delegates the “power to dispose of” land. No authority exists to take or keep land other than for enumerated purposes – forts, magazines, dockyards, post roads, etc.

The feds, with questionable constitutional authority, lay claim to over one-quarter of our land and want to increase that to one-third. They want to confiscate our land in order to save us from… “climate change.” And enrich their friends and cronies in the bargain.