Author Archive:

After watching federal officials with the U.S. Department of the Interior unilaterally rewrite regulatory rules without state input in what was supposed to be a joint venture, West Virginia has joined with five other states to withdraw from a cooperative agreement they say the Interior Department has violated.

In 2010, the Interior Department’s Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement entered into a memorandum of understanding with nine states under the National Environmental Policy Act.

The idea was for state agencies to work with the Interior Department’s surface mining office in the development of environmental impact statements as they relate to a new rule regarding surface coal mining. The participating states signed the memoranda as the Interior Department began to rewrite the Stream Buffer Zone Rule as a replacement for an older rule that dates back to 2008.

But instead of drawing on state expertise and welcoming state input to help craft an environmental impact statement in step with National Environmental Policy Act requirements, the Interior Department declined to provide its state counterparts with critical pieces of information and restricted the opportunity for comment and review.

That’s what state officials told the House Natural Resources Committee at a May 20 hearing on “State …read more

To hear Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia tell it, America’s freedoms don’t come from freedom of speech or freedom of the press.

It’s not the right to bear arms that keeps us free, nor is it the right to “be secure … against unreasonable search and seizure” or to a “speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury.”

The reason America’s basic freedom has endured for more than 200 years, Scalia said Friday in a speech to the Federalist Society in Morristown, N.J., is not the amendments to the Constitution but the Constitution itself.

“Every tin horn dictator in the world today, every president for life, has a Bill of Rights,” said Scalia, author of the recently released “Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts.” “That’s not what makes us free; if it did, you would rather live in Zimbabwe. But you wouldn’t want to live in most countries in the world that have a Bill of Rights. What has made us free is our Constitution. Think of the word ‘constitution;’ it means structure.”

That’s why America’s framers debated not the Bill of Rights during the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia, he said, but rather the structure of the federal government.

“The …read more

It may seem like one of the smaller, less consequential clashes as environmental fights go, but the battle taking shape over a pipeline that would take natural gas from eastern Pennsylvania to the Trenton, N.J., area is fast becoming a proxy war for larger forces that could threaten the shale revolution on the East Coast and beyond.

The proposed PennEast pipeline would move natural gas from Dallas, Pa., in the Poconos, to Hopewell Township in Mercer County, N.J. Construction on the 36-inch-wide, 114-mile pipeline would begin in spring 2017 if the project can gain approval from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Five other pipelines now carry gas over roughly the same route—indeed, the proposed path for the PennEast project was altered so 50 percent of the pipeline could be co-located with existing rights of way, according to project officials.

But those other lines are operating at full capacity because of the dramatic growth of energy exploration in the Marcellus Shale region, which has made addition of another line necessary, project officials say.

Studies show the pipeline would produce economic benefits. According to a new study from Concentric Energy Advisors, New Jersey ratepayers would have saved $900 million last winter if the pipeline had …read more

Is big money dangerously and improperly compromising environmental policy?

Climate change advocates have long asserted that the fossil fuel industry “bought” science—i.e., paid scientists for favorable findings—to strengthen its efforts to defend techniques such as offshore drilling and, in recent years, hydraulic fracturing or fracking.

The latest example of this is the case of Willie Soon, an astrophysicist with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who made enemies when he published a peer-reviewed paper in January that questioned the mathematical models the International Panel on Climate Change uses to predict climate change.

The ink had barely dried on Soon’s paper, which found the panel’s models had mathematical errors that overstate the impact of carbon dioxide on the climate, when the trouble began.

First, it was The New York Times with a report that raised questions not about Soon’s conclusions but about conflicts of interest in his research because he had received more than $1.2 million from the fossil fuel industry that he had not disclosed.

Greenpeace went a step further with a “case study” that showed Soon “has received substantial funding from the fossil fuel industry for most of his scientific career.”

Soon received less than $60,000 per year from Smithsonian.

According to a <a target="_blank" …read more

Few people in either party in Washington are happy with the current tax code, so what if we simply started over?

That is at the root of a proposal to sunset the current tax code on Dec. 31, 2019. Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., has introduced the Tax Code Termination Act (HR 27), which would do exactly that.

“Even though tax reform has been discussed for many years, we have yet to see any major actions to simplify the tax code,” Goodlatte said in a press release.

“We must force Congress to tackle tax reform head on. The best way forward is to scrap the current tax code and start fresh. This legislation would allow us, as a nation, to collectively decide what the new tax system should look like. There are many competing alternatives, but having a set date to end the current tax code will force the issue and the debate to the top of the national agenda.”

Colin Hanna, president of Let Freedom Ring, a conservative organization that supports the proposal, said the sunset date was chosen so the question of whether to scrap the system and start over could be part of the 2016 presidential campaign but the debate …read more

Instead of filing the same version of the conservation easement that was signed by its president and a Virginia farmer, the Piedmont Environmental Council pulled a “bait and switch” that dramatically altered the document’s terms and conditions.

That’s one of several revelations that have come to light in the past few days as Martha Boneta, the owner of Liberty Farm in Fauquier County, Va., prepares to initiate a new round of litigation against Piedmont Environmental Council, a non-profit land trust.

Boneta refiled a lawsuit Wednesday in Fauquier County Circuit Court that says the environmental group colluded with realtors and government officials to issue zoning citations against her property. This was done to force Boneta into selling her farm, she alleges in the suit.

Boneta also is considering filing a second lawsuit at the federal level against Piedmont Environmental Council.

That suit would be based on the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act, commonly known as RICO.

The environmental group’s inspectors and officers have overstepped their authority under the easement to the point where they have trespassed across Liberty Farm and interfered with her farming activities, Boneta alleges.

Moreover, an analysis of the discrepancies that exist between the documents underpinning the easements …read more

After clashing with a non-profit land trust over the terms and conditions of a conservation easement that sits on her property, Martha Boneta saw no alternative to litigation.

That’s because the Piedmont Environmental Council, which serves as a co-holder of the easement, had overstepped its authority to the point where it was trespassing across her property without any meaningful oversight, Boneta alleged in an interview with The Daily Signal.

But thanks to new legislation that Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe is set to sign into law, property owners can ask the Virginia Land Conservation Foundation to step in and mediate disputes with land trusts like the PEC. The idea behind conservation easement is for property owners to receive tax breaks in exchange for agreeing to set aside a portion of their property for conservation.

The Conservation Transparency Act, which has been dubbed Boneta Bill 2, passed in the General Assembly earlier this month.

“Until we had this legislation, there was no transparency, accountability or standards placed on land trusts,” said Boneta, who owns and operates Liberty Farm in Fauquier County, Va. “As a result, groups like the PEC were making decisions acting like prosecutor, judge and jury, leaving the landowner with no alternative to …read more

Did the New York Attorney General’s Office collude with a local union leader to develop the basis for a lawsuit against a Papa John’s Pizza franchisee?

If not — if the union leader was not involved in the investigation of the pizza franchises’ pay and employee practices before it became public– why was the union leader quoted in a press release announcing the lawsuit had been filed?

And why won’t the New York Attorney General’s Office turn over documents relevant to the matter?

In response to a Freedom of Information request from a free-market group known as Americans for Limited Government, the attorney general’s office contended that it has no records showing union collusion in the Papa John’s lawsuit.

Last Oct. 16, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman filed suit against the Papa John’s pizza franchises in the state’s supreme court over alleged labor law violations. Schneiderman’s suit seeks more than $2 million for more than 400 delivery workers in restitution, damages and interest from New Majority Holdings LLC, which operates five Papa John’s restaurants in Manhattan.

>>>Union, Prosecutor Team to Push Papa John’s to Pay More

In the press release announcing the lawsuit, Kendall Fells, organizing director of Fast Food Forward, a union-backed …read more

For more than 15 years, the Environmental Protection Agency has resisted releasing data from two key studies to the general public and members of Congress. Government regulators used those studies to craft some of the most expensive environmental rules in U.S. history.

When skeptics within the federal government questioned and challenged the integrity of the studies—the Harvard Six Cities Study and an American Cancer Society study known as ACS II—they were silenced and muzzled.

That’s when the Republican staff on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee stepped in to shine light on the situation, revealing the scope of the scandal in in a report titled, “EPA’s Playbook Unveiled: A Story of Fraud, Deceit and Secret Science.”

>>> This is the second of a two-part series. Read the first part: How This Phony CIA Agent Pulled Off a ‘Scam’ to Impose Environmental Regulations on Americans

The key player in the scandal is John Beale, who was sentenced to serve 32 months in federal prison on Dec. 18, 2013, after pleading guilty to stealing almost $900,000 from U.S. taxpayers.

It was in 1994 that Beale first began to beguile EPA employees and supervisors into believing he worked for the CIA. When he failed to …read more

The saga of Martha Boneta’s abuse at the hands of an environmental group gets worse …read more