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, theWallace 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 Rocky 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
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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.