by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow As appearing in the Daily Sentinel Last week we considered the Biden Administration’s 10-year, $50 billion strategy for addressing the national forest fire crisis. That would more than double the budget of the U.S. Forest Service (USFS), to reduce wildfires and restore health to 20 million acres [...]
by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow As appearing in the Daily Sentinel Imagine how much good we could do in this life if we had unlimited resources. If money were no object, we could cure nearly all the world’s ills and create better lives for everybody, right? Fifty-seven years ago, President Lyndon Johnson [...]
by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow As appearing in the Daily Sentinel President Biden travelled to Pittsburgh last week to push his proposed $1.2 trillion “Build Back Better Act.” In one of the great coincidences in the annals of political strategy, a major bridge collapsed just before his arrival, sending a bus and [...]
by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow As appearing in the Daily Sentinel The forest health crisis in America has reached such staggering proportions, it is no exaggeration to say, that one generation of national leaders has squandered the greatest legacy of the conservation movement — our national forests. During the last 20 years, [...]
by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow As appearing in the Daily Sentinel Harry Truman was famous for the simple instruction, “Say what you mean, mean what you say.” He was talking about personal communication, not differing interpretations of law. In his day, the law was generally clear about what was legal and what [...]
by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow As appearing in the Daily Sentinel When I open Google or any other search engine, I not only get the search box, but also a host of suggested articles that some algorithm thinks I might care about. I rarely open any of them, but this morning one [...]
by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow As appearing in the Daily Sentinel When different branches of the same organization work at cross purposes, it is often said that the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. One seemingly unrelated pair of current political initiatives illustrates the point. Several times over [...]
by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow As appearing in the Daily Sentinel Julius Caesar is said to have coined the phrase “divide et impera,” which means divide and conquer. It was his successful war strategy against the Gauls, and it has been working for military generals, and for political opponents, ever since. On [...]
by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow As appearing in the Daily Sentinel In 1998 the government added “Preble’s Meadow Jumping Mouse” to the endangered species list, a decision that has cost Front Range communities millions. The state argued that this “subspecies” is no different than ordinary field mice everywhere. A respected geneticist at [...]
by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow As appearing in the Daily Sentinel Willy Sutton famously told a reporter that he robbed banks for one simple reason: “That’s where the money is.” Now, it is as if someone said to him, “You can go ahead and steal money, but not from banks.” There have [...]
