Posted on 11/01/2013 10:08:17 AM PDT by thackney
President Barack Obama will use his executive powers to protect more mountains, rivers and forests from development if Congress does not act to preserve such wild spaces, the U.S. Interior Secretary said on Thursday.
Portions of the Grand Canyon, Redwood forests in California and Caribbean seascapes have been protected under the 1906 Antiquities Act, which gives the president broad authority to put natural terrain and historic sites under federal protection.
Such preservation efforts can also come through Congress but presidents in a second term have typically felt freer to designate such spaces unilaterally.
On Thursday, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said that the president was ready to move ahead.
"There's no question that if Congress doesn't act, we will act," Jewell said at a luncheon at the National Press Club in Washington.
Lawmakers have proposed roughly two dozen sites for federal protection, but partisan divisions have helped stall many of those plans.
Jewell, the former chief executive of outdoor gear and clothing retailer REI, said proposals that have backing in Congress - including planned designation of coastal regions of California and Maine as well as a swath of the Arizona desert - are among the first that could be considered.
"I'll be understanding why these places are special before we go ahead with any action," Jewell said of her plans to visit parts of the country in the coming weeks where there is a public groundswell for putting land under federal stewardship.
(Excerpt) Read more at rigzone.com ...
Conserve them for what the Chineese ?
If Congress doesn’t act.....now where have I heard this before? And we all know what happens when the government takes over land and memorials, don’t we?
Yup. No drillin’ in eastern Nevada where there’s a whole bunch of petroleum. Energy prices gotta necessarily skyrocket and finding more product won’t help that happen.
You didn’t think those democrats were actually human, did you?
Aliens Are After Our Oil
http://blog.trutv.com/conspiracy/2013/01/10/aliens-are-after-our-oil/index.html
This is Agenda 21 bullsh!t.
The single party Dems here in this part of Maryland never heard of land conservation here, more housing developments = more Democrat sheep voters and higher taxes.
The building is endless.
its why the deer are such a problem.
Schools and roads crowded.
Federal land confiscation. Plain and simple.
They’ve always held over 85% of the land in the state. Something to do with what “they” “owned” when it was still a territory. Most of the west fell under that scam and had to agree to it to become states. Must be plenty of depots and garrisons out there cloaked in invisibility. And, yes agenda 21 is BS. The gang-green bunch try to coat it with sugar but it still stinks. Zoning restrictions, green belts, community “standards”, etc., etc.
Hussein golfs, but the RATS never sleep.
Florida is ate up with this Agenda 21 BS.
They call them green corridors and are owned by conservation trusts. I am surrounded by them!
Blue Turtle: “If Congress doesn’t act...”
I haven’t read the laws governing this, but I don’t doubt Congress gave the president the ability to put “natural terrain and historic sites” under federal protection. They probably never imagined a president who would use his executive authority so expansively, but that’s irrelevant. President Obama can get away with it—legally—because Congress abdicated their power.
A classic example is the 16th Amendment. When some said they should put a percentage limit, like 10%, on the amount of income tax that could be charged, others said it was unnecessary, because government would never charge that much. I don’t know if the progressives/liberals/statists intentionally left the income tax unlimited in order to subsequently abuse it, but the idiots who reasonably wanted to limit it should have never cooperated otherwise.
It’s also pretty foolish to rely on the Supreme Court to reign in bad law, btw. We have all witnessed how well that works for us, a la the (un)Affordable Care Act.
Trying to change the subject away from Benghazi, IRS scandals, Fast & Furious gun running ...
Plus continuing the Marxist agenda of destroying freedom, the rule of law, and ...
Here is the problem that LIVs don’t get. All property in the continental US is “owned”. Property that is not owned by a private citizen or company is owned by the state.
It needs to be purchased by the Fed, not “designated” and restricted.
Coastal regions of Maine? There’s already one national park there and at least 15 State parks plus a lot of other protected areas. Drive along route 1, and it looks like a lot of nice little towns with a lot of woods. There’s not a lot of unihabited space that isn’t already protected. Is Obama going to start shutting all those beach houses and closing down those fishing towns? That would be madness.
But no drilling or fracking in the western part of MD.
If you like your property, you can keep your property, period.
Why bother having a Congress.
Most of those states west of the Mississippi started as Federal Territory before it became a state. Significant amounts of acreage were never released to the new state but held by the Feds from before it even was a state.
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