6 thoughts on “2018 Farm Bill clears Congress”

  1. Jon, thanks for finding this. I still would like more specifics, but oh well. It’s a good gig… House Republicans propose things unlikely to succeed as a negotiating ploy. Groups use that as a donation and outrage generation tool. R’s make their points, groups make their money and we go on to the next thing.
    News is that people made a deal and ecosystems will not unravel (again). Time to move on to the next outrage. Collateral damage.. people who believe groups’ hype and never hear the end of the story think that the worst is going on.

    As reported, this seems kind of silly..
    “They argue that Republican solutions to combat wildfires cannot be taken seriously if GOP lawmakers and the Trump administration don’t also appreciate the role of hotter and drier weather caused by climate change for making fire seasons longer and fires more destructive.”
    Appreciation… how is it measured? $ to research on renewable technologies? Public statements? Seems kind of vague to me…

    Reply
    • I’m a bit mystified every time I hear this attribution of financial motive to the groups who oppose bad ideas. If the bad ideas weren’t so roundly opposed, they wouldn’t look so “unlikely to succeed.” I assure you that we would all be glad to miss out on outrage donations if the people entrusted with our lands would stop making harmful decisions.

      Appreciate in this context means understand. This is the rub of it: If land managers could demonstrate that they understand the the issues and needs *by making good decisions* then we’d all trust them with more discretion. Until then, bad ideas for increasing discretion with less public accountability will be opposed, donations or no.

      Reply
      • Sam, I only made the connection because I get emails that have a high degree of hype and donation requests in the same note.
        Could you be more specific about “harmful decisions?” Also, I’ve been asking for someone to come forward with examples of where the previous Farm Bill CE’s have led to less public accountability, or to bad decisions.

        Reply
  2. Will a D House play the game the same way? (They’ve only been in charge for four of the last 18 years, and I don’t remember 2007-11.)

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    • Jon, I am so much not a political scientist, but my guess from serving a D Congresswoman in the 90’s and observations.. is that the mass of D’s don’t care enough about these issues to become extreme, or they don’t want to spend the political capital that they could use for something more important to them. But we shall see.
      Another thought is that it’s difficult to imagine extremes on the D side.. no tree cutting on NFs for any reason including fuel treatment? Revoking ski area permits due to impacts on water and carbon impacts of travel to ski resorts until the FS can do an EIS? Changing statutes so that oil and gas drilling and pipelines are not allowed on federal lands?

      Reply

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