The Cliven Bundy School of Land Management

When Cliven Bundy and his ragtag posse of supporters staged that showdown with the Federal government last April, most Americans just didn’t get it. I’m talking here about all those folks out there in Boston or Akron or Tallahassee or Petaluma or wherever who regularly put quarters in parking meters or pay bridge tolls or send tuition checks off to the state university, apparently in the belief that when they get something of value they should expect to pay for it.

This point appears to have been lost on all the Sage Brush Rebels, County Movement Enthusiasts, Shovel Brigadiers, Tea Partiers, and Federal Land Seizers who grabbed their guns and rushed off to Nevada to defend Bundy, who for years had grazed his cattle on Federal land and refused to pay for it. In other words, although he dreamed up some cockamamie legal theory about how the land didn’t really belong to the Federal government, Bundy was a deadbeat pure and simple. But that just didn’t seem to bother the folks who rallied around him, ready to shoot it out with the Federales. It was only when Bundy turned out to be a racist as well as a deadbeat that they started to back away.

Now at first blush it might seem a little strange that Bundy’s pals were willing to overlook the fact that he was stiffing the Federal government. After all, these are the people who never tire of telling us what a bang up job they would do managing public lands, but now in the next breath are saying they’re willing to ignore the receivables. How does that work?

On the other hand, of course, these are also the people who have been trying for years to get their hands on public lands and resources with the fewest restrictions and at the lowest prices possible. And if that’s their aim, they’ve gotta love Bundy, who’s the poster child for exploiting Federal land at rock bottom prices. In his case, zero.

So there’s the dilemma: how do people (including a slew of state legislators) who want to take over Federal land get to claim, on the one hand, that they can do a much better job managing it than the Federal government does, and then on the other hand seem ready to rent, sell or lease it at fire sale prices?

The answer, of course, revolves around money and jobs. The takeover artists claim that they want public land management to be “economically productive,” by which they mean that public lands should produce a flow of cash revenue and be exploited in a way that provides jobs and stimulates local economies.

Now nobody’s going to argue that more revenue and more jobs are a bad thing, but using public lands to generate them does not necessarily constitute sound land management. Economically productive management puts land to its highest and best use – the one that creates the greatest net benefits – and that’s not always, or even usually, the use that creates the most jobs or generates the highest cash flow.

That may seem to defy common sense when it comes to what government should do with its resources – surely job creation is a worthy public goal – but think about it another way.  Public land managers could no doubt put an awful lot of people to work if they made access to land and the resources on it really cheap. But whether or not all that work made the land productive would depend on the economic value of what the workers were producing. And if people are only willing to work on the land if they can get access for next to nothing, it’s a safe bet that their use of the land is not going to produce much. It might be tempting to think that at least use of the land has produced a lot of jobs, but as I’ve pointed out before, jobs are not what’s produced, but the cost of production, and efficient management means keeping those costs as low as possible.

When it comes to the demand that they generate revenue, public land managers face another dilemma, because public lands can produce public services for which there is no market but that are nevertheless economically valuable. Think watershed protection or conservation of wildlife habitat: these services have economic value – in fact, a lot of economic value - precisely because they confer material benefits on the public,  just like private services like medical care or a Paul McCartney concert. The only difference is that nobody has to pay in order to get them. Nevertheless, the false notion that commercial values are economic (because they have a dollar sign attached to them) and environmental values are uneconomic (because there is no dollar sign) is remarkably durable.

Opponents of taking over Federal lands – Jon Tester, for example – worry out loud about how takeover would ultimately result in the public lands being “sold to the highest bidder.” I’m with the opponents, but I don’t think that’s the problem. The problem is that in the name of job creation and revenue generation, access to public land would be sold at rock bottom prices, and the land would end up wasting away in high cost, low valued uses.

Profound Irresponsibility

If he didn’t know it already, Steve Daines has obviously learned since going to Washington that “all politics are local,” and that he should keep his gaze firmly fixed on what’s happening inside Montana’s borders. But really, just how myopic can the guy get?

Danes recently announced that he has introduced something called the “Coal Jobs and Affordable Energy Protection Act,” which would prohibit the EPA’s newly proposed carbon emission regulations from taking effect unless various Federal agencies could certify that the regulations would not result in any loss of jobs or gross domestic product, would not raise electricity rates and would not affect the reliability of electricity delivery.

Now all that may sound sensible and prudent (certainly the Congressman wants you to think so), but understand what it really means: Daines apparently believes that there is no cost, of any kind and however small, that it is worth incurring to secure the benefits of reducing carbon emissions and slowing climate change. None. Zip. Zero.

It is hard to imagine how a politician who never tires of telling us about his background as a successful businessman can take such a short sighted position. What halfway competent businessman would pass up the opportunity to make a modest investment today that will protect his company from catastrophic damages in the future? What businessman worth his salt simply assumes that there is no insurance policy worth paying for?

And it is hard to imagine how a man who claims he cares about families is willing to be so utterly cavalier about the state of the world we are going to hand over to our children and grandchildren. How can a politician who agonizes endlessly about the Federal debt we will leave to our kids believe that we should not inconvenience ourselves one iota to protect the environment we will be leaving them at the same time?

The fact is that for Daines, who apparently can’t see beyond the end of his nose, the EPA regulations are there to wage a “war on coal,” not to arrest, in any minimal way they can, the pace of climate change. In a constituent email Daines quotes Michael Grunwald, writing in Time, to the effect that the EPA regulations “take the war on coal to the next level.” But Daines ignores the rest of Grunwald’s piece, which makes it clear that “In the 21^st. century, any national leader that takes environmental protection and the fate of the planet seriously will need to launch a war on coal.” Grunwald’s rhetoric is a little over the top, but I take his point, which Daines should have taken as well: arresting climate change will require us to substantially reduce our dependence on coal and we need to be prepared to make the transition to other energy sources. There’s no future in throwing ourselves on the ground kicking and screaming and shouting “never!”

Of course it could be that Daines, with his eyes fixed firmly on the November elections, doesn’t really take his own bill seriously. Maybe it’s just a sop to throw to the folks back home, to try to convince us he cares. Or maybe Daines is just a climate change denier. We know, after all, that his grasp on science is a little tenuous.

Either way, Daines owes us an explanation for his profound irresponsibility and short sightedness in responding to the threat of climate change. And if he can’t do any better than he’s done so far, we’d better remember that in November.

Figures Don't Lie, But...

As I pointed out in my last post, while a recent US Chamber of Commerce report on the economic impacts of cutting carbon emissions is open to wildly conflicting interpretations, one thing about it is clear: it doesn’t tell us anything very useful about the carbon standards the EPA wants to apply to existing power plants. That’s because the Chamber analyzed the impacts of a substantially bigger cut in emissions than the EPA is actually aiming for, so naturally the impacts are bigger too, although arguably still pretty modest.

This point apparently plumb evades Rick Hill. Hill, a former Republican Congressman, has a column in today’s Missoulian, pumping up Steve Daines for opposing the EPA regulations and bashing John Walsh for supporting them.  Hill is obviously thinking about next November here, and not much else, because he drags in the irrelevant Chamber study to make his case.

And it gets worse. Here’s Hill:

“The U.S. Chamber of Commerce estimates the regulation will decrease the average household’s disposable income by $3,400 as a result of higher prices for energy and a slowdown to the economy. Those income reductions come in addition to an average of a quarter million jobs estimated to be lost each year through 2030.”

What Hill doesn’t say – aside from the fact that the Chamber’s numbers are not really based on “the regulation” proposed by the EPA - is that that $3,400 reduction in household disposable income is the total reduction over the 2014-2030 period; annually, that amounts to an average of about $200, or about one third of one percent of current median household income. So our former Congressman has taken an irrelevant number and presented it in the most deceptive and frightening way possible, all with the hope, apparently, of putting a little positive spin on Steve Daines. He should be ashamed of himself.

I know I don’t have any right to expect Hill to believe me when I say the Chamber study is not really applicable to the EPA standards, but it turns out that I’m not the only one who says so. In fact, the Chamber has taken so much flak on that front that it posted a defense of its study’s relevance on its blog. You can read it here, but really, there’s not much of substance to read. There’s a lot of explanation about why the Chamber and EPA emissions reduction targets don’t match, and the odd speculation that since the EPA proposal is only a draft, the agency might at some point bring its target up to the Chamber’s level (and resounding silence on the possibility that it might take its target down). There’s an even odder suggestion that the Chamber study might somehow be relevant because the EPA proposal requires a handful of states to achieve emission reductions as great as those the Chamber analyzed for the nation as a whole.

But in the end, as the Chamber itself says, the “jury is still out.” Maybe, someday, somehow, it will make sense to use the Chamber’s numbers to assess the impact of what the EPA is proposing to do. But that day isn’t here yet, and politicians like Hill should know that, and stop trying to pull the wool over eyes of Montana voters.