Chief Obama Bows to the Witch Doctors, Sacrifices Americans to the Climate Gods

On Friday, November 7, 2015, the United States government sacrificed America to the world’s climate. Put another way, President Obama rejected the Keystone XL Pipeline.

Obama gave no practical reason for killing this major industrial project that would have delivered crude oil from Canada to U.S Gulf Coast refineries, in the most safe and economical manner available, for years and decades to come. “[T]his pipeline would neither be a silver bullet for the economy, as was promised by some, nor the express lane to climate disaster proclaimed by others,” Obama said, reports Sean Cockerham.

So why did Obama reject it? Obama didn’t even pretend that stopping the pipeline would do anything to alter climate change, even breaking a 2013 promise that he would reject the Keystone pipeline only if it would "significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution." Obama’s own State Department “concluded that the 800,000-barrel-a-day pipeline would have little impact on greenhouse gas emissions. . .” He even implied that fossil fuels are still necessary. “[W]e’re going to have to keep some fossil fuels in the ground rather than burn them and release more dangerous pollution into the sky.” [my emphasis added] And it’s not like the Obama Administration is part of the radical environmentalists’ nationwide jihad against pipelines. After all, reports Cockerham, “Other pipelines have been approved [by the Obama Administration] in the seven years since the pipeline was first proposed.” No. It’s about something far more disturbing:

Obama’s decision represents a singular moment for the nation’s environmental movement, as what began as a fringe effort to stop a little-known project seized the international stage.

Obama rejected the Keystone Pipeline because, from Cockerham’s article:

• To “bolster his environmental legacy.”

• The decision was largely based on international politics, coming less than a month before the president goes to Paris for global climate talks. Obama has been pressing other nations to act on climate change and said approving the pipeline “would have undercut that global leadership.”

• concern for “international perception [about] U.S. leadership on climate change.”

• [Secretary of State John] Kerry said the critical factor in his determination that allowing the pipeline was not in the national interest was the consideration that “moving forward with this project would significantly undermine our ability to continue leading the world in combating climate change.”

• “[Obama’s announcement] gives him new stature as an environmental leader,” said Bill McKibben, [the anti-energy] founder of the climate group 350.org.

[All above emphasis was added.]

Obama’s “legacy.” “International politics” and “perception.” “U.S. Leadership” in “combating climate change.” Obama’s “stature” in the eyes radical anti-energy environmentalists. No mention of Americans’ interests—not even a nod to a very valid objection to the pipeline; that approval carries with it the power of eminent domain. No. In what must be considered an extraordinarily ominous precedent, Chief Obama has killed a major industrial project before the altar of personal and national “greatness.” How much more of America’s economic progress will be sacrificed to Obama’s (or the next president’s) grand utopian vision? Somewhere, Russia’s Vladimir Putin must be celebrating.

Russ Girling, the disappointed CEO of TransCanada, the company seeking the permit to build the pipeline, put it well in a statement, “Today, misplaced symbolism was chosen over merit and science – rhetoric won out over reason.”

Ancient witch doctors killed human beings as sacrifices during religious rituals to appease the gods, spirits, or other supernatural entities. To modern environmentalist witch doctors, that god is “climate change”—a stand-in for their moral standard that holds that any man-made alteration to the natural environment, no matter how benign or beneficial to human life such alterations  may be, is wrong. On the environmentalists’ standard of value, “living in harmony with nature” like an animal, rather than mastering nature through reason and productive work, is the ideal. Obama bowed to the modern environmentalist witchdoctors who believe that the investors, builders, and future customers of the Keystone XL Pipeline must be sacrificed to the climate gods.

Related Reading:

Epstein's ‘The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels’ Defangs the Anti-Industrial Revolutionaries

Fossil Fuels Are the Lifeblood of Civilization—FEE’s Review of Epstein’s The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels

America: A Nation of Sacrifice?

Environmentalists, Luddites, and Collectivism

The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution—Ayn Rand

Environmentalist Witch Doctors Not Concerned With Human Benefaction

Fossil Fuels and Climate Change: Remember Life Before Them

We Are Doomed Without, Not Because of, Fossil Fuel Use

Tuesday’s ‘Fight for $15’ is about Imposing Demands by Government Aggression

Milly Silva, “an executive vice president of 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, the largest union of health care workers in the United States,” posted a guest editorial in the 11/5/15 New Jersey Star-Ledger titled Why health care workers fight for $15. The op-ed focusses on the “often heart-wrenching” plight of low-wage healthcare workers, who face “a daily challenge . . . to pay the rent, eat and survive,” even as they “work all day caring for others but every day struggle to give that same level of care to” their own families.

Not to trivialize the fact that many people and families struggle to make ends meet—although it’s easier in our modern industrial economy than ever before: Many do truly struggle and face tough choices. But Silva’s sob stories are window dressing for a statist political agenda. Her purpose is to plug the upcoming nationwide marches by workers organized by the so-called Fight for $15, and scheduled to “take to the streets in cities nationwide” on Tuesday, November 10. Silva opens her piece as follows:

The Fight for $15, the campaign to win a living wage and union rights for all low-wage workers, has captured the attention of millions across the country and spurred a renewed focus on growing income inequality. What began as a series of small protests by fast food workers in New York City three years ago has grown into a major national (and international) movement.

What Milly Silva evades is the nature of the “fight.”

So let me fill in the blanks.

The campaign is not for “union rights.” Willing workers have always had the right, under the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of association, to form unions. The alleged “right” that Silva demands is the power to force unwilling workers into unions, and force unwilling employers to recognize and “negotiate” with the union, by getting politicians to pass laws giving them that power.

The campaign is not about earning raises by persuading employers. It is a fight to force employers to pay wages higher than they would otherwise voluntarily agree to pay, by getting politicians to pass laws giving them that power.

The Fight for $15 is about trampling the rights of others to live by their own judgement. When you demand that government pass minimum wage and compulsory unionization laws, you are not “winning”—i.e., earning—a “living wage” fair and square, nor are you gaining union rights, which you already have. You are taking special privileges by engaging in gangster economics through government (legalized armed) aggression against people who have harmed no one. There is another name for this activity; political cronyism.

“The campaign to win a living wage and union rights” is literally a physical fight, with the government as the hired gun. Minimum wage and compulsory unionization laws are no different from the political cronyism that big business is routinely—and often rightly—accused of. And it is equally corrupt and immoral. That Silva would exploit human hardship to justify such a corrupt campaign disqualifies her and her ilk from any moral right to claim credit for caring about the plight of nursing home and home care workers, especially since success in this campaign will throw many of these people out of work by outlawing jobs that don’t warrant $15 bucks.

The Fight for $15 campaign also highlights the fact that reducing income inequality requires, in large part, waging aggression against success. The only way to artificially raise the lower end of the income scale—that is, to raise low incomes by methods other than merit and voluntary contract—is to tear down the upper end.

The proper purpose of the government is to protect the rights of all individuals to voluntarily associate and contract to mutual advantage, or go their separate ways. A government that uses its law-making powers—the power of the gun—to do the bidding of economic interests seeking to force their terms on other economic interests is more akin to a mob “godfather” than a legitimate government. This is what Tuesday's upcoming marches to Fight for $15 is all about.

Related Reading:

Fast-Food Workers Seek Government Guns to Back Demands

Free Market Champions Must Defend Economic Inequality

Minimum Wage Issue is Not "about what it’s like to live on $7.25 an hour"

Anti-Concept ‘Science Denier’ Exposes Climate Witch Doctors’ Fear of Rational Counter-Argumentation

President Obama’s new Clean Power Plan is designed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants in order to “take action on climate change.” Many people who oppose President Obama’s scheme argue against it based on the idea that America can’t effectively accomplish the goal of reining in anthropogenic climate change alone.

But the New Jersey Star-Ledger asks, now that China has announced a cap-and-trade system, What's the GOP excuse for climate inaction now? In answering that question, the Star-Ledger picks on U.S. Republican Representative from New Jersey Leonard Lance, who once supported cap-and-trade but now opposes it. The editors write:

But where does [China’s commitment] leave the vacillators [like Lance] – those not quite loopy enough to be comfortable being aligned with the science deniers, yet perfectly willing to enable them by voting against reforms?

Of course, opposing climate change policies of limiting carbon emissions until the world joins us is not a fundamental opposition to Obama’s anti-fossil fuel agenda. It’s true that such a go-it-alone policy will hamper American economic progress without having any meaningful effect on anthropogenic global warming. But the more fundamental question is: Should governments restrict reliable fossil fuel energy on any scale?

In my comments, I chose to pose that question within the context of attacking the environmentalist statists’ use of the smear term “science denier.”

Terms like “science denier” (or “climate change denier” or “global warming denier”) are catch phrases intended to stifle legitimate debate. Such terms, or anti-concepts, lump two different factions into one—irrationalists who actually do oppose science and facts about climate change and people who have rational counterpoints about the state of climate science and what the facts tell us about what, if anything, government should do about it.

The purpose of the slingers of these slogans is obvious; to discredit rational dissenting arguments by conflating them in people’s minds with the irrationalists, thus intimidating dissenters into silence and shutting down debate. Why? Because the dissenters have good arguments against the statists’ agenda to shackle and destroy fossil fuel energy production. Notice that Lance is condemned as a “vacillator” and science denier “enabler” because he opposes the political agenda of the Left, such as cap & trade. No need to concern ourselves about his reasons. The smear mongers equate science with their political agenda, much like the early “progressives” linked their political agenda to the “science” of eugenics a century ago. But the science of climate change and the Left’s statist political agenda are two very different things.

Legitimate questions raised by rational dissenters include:

• How much does human activity contribute to climate change?
• Is climate change bad?
• If climate change is producing negative effects, is it really catastrophic?
• What are the benefits of global warming, and why shouldn’t those benefits be considered?
• If humans contribute significantly, why does that fact outweigh the benefits of fossil fuels?
• Since predictions of climate change catastrophe have been wrong for decades—and in fact all measures of human well-being from access to clean water to food production to incomes to life expectancies have instead improved along with increasing fossil fuel use—why should we believe the catastrophe predictions being peddled now?
• What scientific evidence is there that so-called “renewable energy” can become an economical source of primary, industrial scale energy, and what if fossil fuels are drastically reduced and renewables can’t pick up the slack, as fossils enemies quasi-religiously hope? What will be the costs to human well-being if they’re wrong?
• Why aren’t CO2-free nuclear and hydro key parts of the environmentalists energy agenda, rather than part of their energy deprivation agenda?

And underlying the whole climate and environmental debate is a fundamental question: What is the standard of value from which to weigh climate change policies and, more broadly, environmental concerns—non-impact on nature or human well-being? Human beings survive and thrive by altering nature to human benefit. Since the environmentalists’ standard is non-impact—the idea that altering “pristine” nature is by definition intrinsically bad—then human survival and flourishing is the enemy of the environment. So which standard do we choose, the anti-humanism of the environmentalists’ anti-industrial, anti-development agenda or the humanism and industrial/technological advance that man’s well-being depends on?

These kinds of questions are being asked by rational dissenters of the Left’s climate change policies, yet all they get is to be smeared and lumped in with “science deniers.” Why? People who are confident about their position not only don’t seek to silence dissenters, but welcome the chance to rebut the dissenters. The anti-fossil fringe is not confident.

Related Reading:

Ad Hominem No Substitute for Reasoned Criticism

Call for "Carbon Fee" is a Call for a Tax on Human Well-Being

The Secret History of Fossil Fuels—Chapter One, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels by Alex Epstein

Climate Change Science vs. the Left's Statist Political Agenda

In the comment section of the New Jersey Star-Ledger guest column A better way for N.J. to cut greenhouse gas emissions by Bob Narus, the New Jersey Issues Coordinator of Citizens' Climate Lobby (see my 11/3/15 post), correspondent jfreed27 offered quite a bit of red meat for rational rebuttal. I chose to confront a common ad hominem tactic of the climate witch doctors. jfreed27 wrote, “To those who reject the science: perhaps nothing will change your mind. I don't even bother with the paid deniers. . .”

I left these comments:

“To those who reject the science: perhaps nothing will change your mind.”

Translation: “If you reject my political agenda, you’re rejecting the science.” This is a common refrain of statists.

The idea that what science says about human influence on climate leads automatically to a Left-statist agenda, such as a carbon tax, is a monumental non sequitur. In fact, the science tells you nothing about what, if anything, the government should do about climate change—especially since, contrary to dogma, the science is far from “settled.” Climate scientists are not physicists, or energy experts, or political philosophy experts, or oceanographers, or experts on anything other than their one narrow field. An objective assessment requires looking well beyond climate to encompass full context.

Leftists accuse political opponents of rejecting the science in order to intimidate their opponents. But the smear only exposes the Left’s cowardice. Climate science is only one piece of the energy puzzle. Anti-fossil ideologues focus only on climate, and then irresponsibly draw from that a political (i.e., coercive) agenda without ever considering the consequences of their policies.

And there is a huge danger in merging science with politics, for the same reason it is dangerous to merge religion with politics. Consider that Marx wrapped his communism in a veneer of “scientific socialism,” and mankind got a tyranny whose brutality had never before seen on Earth, leaving 100 million corpses in the wake of the utopian pursuit of a scientifically perfect society. The science of eugenics was all the progressive rage a hundred years ago, until Hitler embraced eugenics theory to pursue a genetically perfect race; and mankind got the Holocaust and WW II. They, too, thought that “any effort and expense” was “worth it.”

Just as the Communists and Nazis did before them, today’s Left is wrapping its anti-fossil fuel political agenda in a scientific veneer. Carried to its logical extreme, the resulting energy privation will be just as devastating to mankind as communism and Nazism, because billions of people, including Americans but also newly industrializing countries, rely on fossil fuels for their lives. Well, I have concluded that global warming is real and man is likely contributing to it. So what? I reject the Left’s policies of energy privation anyway. Human well-being trumps unaltered nature, so the effort and cost of stopping climate change is just too great.

--------------------------------

The last sentence should have read, “Human well-being trumps unaltered nature, so the effort and cost of the policies designed to stop human contributions to climate change, whatever those contributions may be, is just too great.”

Ayn Rand identified the nature of terms like “climate denier.” She called such terms anti-concepts; “an unnecessary and rationally unusable term designed to replace and obliterate some legitimate concept.” The legitimate concept to be obliterated by the denier charge is a rational rebuttal or counter-argument to the premise of catastrophic climate change requiring drastic action against fossil fuels.

Related Reading:

The Convoluted Logic of the “Climate Lobby”

Call for "Carbon Fee" is a Call for a Tax on Human Well-Being

The Secret History of Fossil Fuels—Chapter One, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels by Alex Epstein

Reject a “Dividend” Tax on Climate Safety

There are many statist tools that “clean energy,” fossil fuel-hating environmentalists advocate as a means to compel a transition away from “dirty” energy to the allegedly cleaner “renewable” alternatives. The Citizens Climate Lobby has been beating the drum for its pet scheme—a redistributionist tax on carbon-emitting fuels.  

Bob Narus, the New Jersey Issues Coordinator of Citizens' Climate Lobby, continued that drumbeat in a guest column for the New Jersey Star-Ledger. In A better way for N.J. to cut greenhouse gas emissions, Narus complains that New Jersey is failing in its supposed political commitment “to cutting greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by the year 2050.” Narus asks, “Why the backsliding and lack of progress?” And thinks he has the answer:

Some blame politics, and particularly Gov. Christie's national ambitions. But a deeper problem is economics. The state's primary tool for reducing our fossil fuel use is to subsidize efficiency and renewable energy, but somebody has to pay for those subsidies, and politicians don't like asking their constituents (meaning you, Dear Ratepayer) to pay for things.

Narus acknowledges that state-imposed efficiency and solar and wind energy are not economically viable. So he details a solution:

There's a more effective, more economical and fairer way to promote clean energy: Don't subsidize the good stuff. Raise the price on the bad stuff. And that's where we're going to need some help from the Feds.

Imagine we assessed a fee on every ton of carbon the fossil fuel companies pulled out of the ground. That would raise their prices and move the whole market away from the fuels producing all that carbon dioxide. New Jersey cannot impose a stiff price increase itself without jeopardizing our economic competitiveness. But the federal government could implement one nationally, and protect domestic manufacturers by slapping an equivalent tariff on imported goods.

A steadily rising price on carbon would avoid the seesaw we experienced with solar subsidies. It would make the payback period for investments in efficiency and renewables much shorter. And our utilities, which buy their power at auction, would use more clean energy and less carbon-based power.

But wait. Didn’t he just argue that we constituents don’t like paying for the subsidies for the “good stuff?” Why would we want to pay extra for the “bad stuff?” Narus has the answer:

But wouldn't that carbon price trickle down to price increases for everything in our economy? Yes. And wouldn't that hurt all of us, just the way state subsidies for clean energy fall on the backs of all ratepayers? That depends on what you do with the money.

The best thing to do with the money is give it all back--return 100 percent of the proceeds of the carbon fee to all American households in the form of equal monthly dividend checks. Most households would get back at least as much in dividends as they pay in higher prices. Even those with larger carbon footprints (who tend to be the wealthy, because they spend more) would get a substantial dividend. And everyone would have an incentive to reduce their carbon footprint further and "cut their taxes."

Put a noose around the neck of our primary energy source, and pull it tighter and tighter. As this crushing economic burden escalates, what will happen to our “dividend” checks? Won’t the fact that a monthly carbon “dividend” will give us all an incentive not to cut fossil fuel use, lest those “dividends” shrink? But if our carbon taxes really are cut due to due to less demand across the economy arising from the higher prices for everything we buy, won’t that save us money? No. The shrinking share of our income that goes to carbon taxes resulting from a shrinking fossil fuel industry will just be shifted to the higher costs for the uneconomical “renewable” energy, which Narus acknowledges is not economically competitive with cheaper fossil fuels. So we’ll be stuck with shrinking “dividend” checks and higher prices across the board due to a higher-priced energy infrastructure.

This is to say nothing about the unreliability and unscalability of solar and wind. The detrimental effects on our standard of living of a government-imposed “steadily rising price on carbon” would be catastrophic, if the quasi-religious hope of the anti-fossil fuel crowd that unforeseen technological breakthroughs will enable renewables to somehow take up the slack doesn’t pan out. Narus might counter that, if renewables don’t live up to the task, fossils will still be available. There would be no forced shutdown of fossil fuels. But then what’s the point? Narus’s answer is, then we continue to receive our “dividend” checks. But the “dividends” would be skewed toward low-income folks, which means we all get higher prices for everything that uses energy—which is virtually everything—and another immoral tax-and-redistribution scheme.

Then there is the matter of assuming that the “dividend” checks will continue for any length of time. In New Jersey, the state raised taxes to fund annual property tax rebates to offset NJ’s high local levies, only to see the rebates disappear for most of us and the taxes stay in place. We’re supposed to trust the politicians to keep their promises? That’s a laugh.

This “dividend” tax idea is immoral and rooted in faulty premises. I left these comments:

“Don't subsidize the good stuff. Raise the price on the bad stuff.”

This begs the question: Are fossil fuels “bad stuff?” The answer is an emphatic NO! Fossil fuels are a human-life serving benefit—and the facts back it up. Fossil fuels are by far the best energy technology mankind has today. Cheap, reliable, plentiful energy is vital, and has made our lives longer, healthier, cleaner, safer, and more pleasurable than ever before—and fossil fuels are the main source of that energy. Fossil fuels have not been a detriment. They have enabled man to transform an inherently dangerous natural environment into a much more livable one for humans.

This includes climate. For most of human history, man faced a real climate crisis. Earth’s climate has always been full of dangers—droughts, storms, heat waves, cold waves, floods. Today, thanks to plentiful energy, of which 87% comes from fossil fuels, the climate crisis for man is over. Everywhere fossil fuel use is plentiful, life keeps getting better, cleaner, and safer. This is backed up by every measure of human well-being, from rising life expectancies, to steadily expanding access to clean water, to rising per-capita income, to transportation safety, to shelter from heat and cold, to a better fed world. Weather extremes have by and large been reduced from life-threatening to nuisances. Tellingly, given the mission of the Citizens Climate Lobby and its ilk, climate-related deaths have plunged 98% worldwide in the last century, the very era of fossil fuel use and global warming that’s supposed to be bad.  Everywhere in the world where fossil fuel use is on the rise, life is getting better for people. To maintain that virtuous trend, we need more, not less, fossil fuel use.

Given these facts, it is downright cruel to make this life-giving, vital energy more expensive. Whatever the effects of man-made greenhouse gases on climate—and the effects are moderate and often good, such as higher crop yields because of more atmospheric co2—the war against fossil fuels is demonstrably bad for man. Regardless of climate change or global warming or whatever—and so far, all of the computer model predictions of climate catastrophe have been dead wrong—one thing is certain: Without reliable energy on demand, life in any climate is miserable and deadly to man. Imagine no regular source of clean water; no safe human and industrial waste disposal facilities; no clean indoor central heating and cooling; no electricity; no safe means of transportation to move people and goods over short or long distances; no modern medicine; no modern agriculture; no modern communications; no sturdy structures; no ability to quickly remediate disaster consequences; and none of the myriad other aspects of safe, clean, and prosperous modern living that we take for granted.

Our modern, life-giving industrial society requires monumental amounts of reliable energy, most of which is currently provided by fossil fuels. Nowhere on Earth has anyone yet proved that so-called “renewable” energy can be the primary source of energy. It would be cruel, immoral, and downright insane to suppress and block fossil fuel development, by imposing a carbon tax or by any other method, merely on the quasi-religious hope that something will come along to replace it.

At least the author acknowledges that wind and solar are uneconomical (not to mention unreliable). But that’s no reason to impose yet another tax-and-redistribution scheme that transfers money forcibly taken from those who earned it to those who didn’t. That won’t make wind or solar any more economical. If that is ever to happen, it’ll only happen in free and open market competition. A carbon tax will just make energy more expensive and life for average Americans harder. And it’s dumb even by the intended goal of reducing fossil fuel use, as the recipients of the “dividend” will get a vested interest in more, not less, fossil fuel use.

Anyway, it’s dishonest to call the proposed carbon tax a “fee,” and dishonest to call the carbon-tax handouts a “dividend.” If you want a real dividend, buy stock in a great company that makes its money by making its customers’ lives better—e.g., ExxonMobil.

Related Reading:

The Convoluted Logic of the “Climate Lobby”

Call for "Carbon Fee" is a Call for a Tax on Human Well-Being

The Secret History of Fossil Fuels—Chapter One, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels by Alex Epstein

'Preserved land' is a Form of Eminent Domain

In a Hunterdon County Democrat article, Don't let 'flawed' pipeline process allow land condemnation, Michele S. Byers, Executive Director New Jersey Conservation Foundation, argues against the PennEast Pipeline company’s proposed natural gas pipeline through portions of Pennsylvania and New Jersey because on grounds that, as the title suggests, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) approval would carry with it eminent domain powers granted to PennEast. (On September 24, 2015, PennEast formally submitted its FERC application to build the pipe.)

On the face of it, liberty advocates certainly could agree with Byers on this. But the issue is not that simple. I left these comments:

Most of the reasons for opposing the PennEast pipeline are rationalizations and double standards used by opponents as tactics to support a broader anti-energy agenda against pipelines specifically and, more generally, fossil fuels. But this column highlights one of the few valid—and, in my view, the most serious—arguments against the pipeline.

As I’ve argued before in letters to the Democrat concerning the Solberg Airport condemnation proceedings in Readington, eminent domain is immoral and un-American, even if for a so-called “public purpose.” My arguments regarding Solberg relate also to the PennEast pipeline. Easements between PennEast and landowners should be negotiated on a level legal playing field; meaning, by voluntary contract to mutual benefit. While I strongly support PennEast’s right to build the pipeline and market the gas to willing consumers, wherever they may live, without coercive impediments from their fellow man or government—and to leave it up to producers and consumers to determine what is “needed”—condemnation powers should not be part of the approval process. PennEast should have to engage in legitimate negotiations with landowners, in which the landowner would not have the legalized gun of eminent domain hanging over their heads. This would commit PennEast to take full account of landowners’ concerns, and make offers based on those concerns, including regarding compensation. This is as it should be. This is the free market way. This is the American way.

Having said that, my argument applies only to fully private land. Their is a hidden double standard regarding so-called “preserved land” or  “taxpayer-protected open space.” The argument against the pipeline relating to condemnation of “preserved” land begs the question: Is the method of preserving land just? No.

Eminent domain, as the author observes, involves the forcible taking of private land, against the owner’s consent, leaving the owner with a pile of coercively imposed “just compensation.” But how is the land preservation program funded? By forcibly taking monetary property, in the form of taxes, from people across the state against their will. How is monetary taking different from eminent domain taking? In an important sense, farmland preservation funding is worse than eminent domain.  At least victims of eminent domain have some constitutional protection—they must be compensated. But there’s no such protection for nonconsenting taxpayers, who get nothing in compensation for funding the “preserved” land the money forcibly seized from them pays for. (Majority approval of preservation taxation doesn’t mitigate the fundamental injustice. Citizens are free to voluntarily pool their money to preserve land. But they have no “democratic right” to force unwilling citizens to pay also. Those who vote no to open space taxation—who don’t consent—are victims of an uncompensated taking.)

It’s ironic, and hypocritical, that people who complain about preserved farmland being taken for the pipeline through eminent domain ignore the taking from the taxpayer. Private landowners who exchange development rights for taxpayer money in order to “preserve” their land have no moral right to object to eminent domain exercised by PennEast, and neither do other pipeline opponents. The same goes for so-called public lands. You can’t at once oppose eminent domain and support tax-funded preservation/open space with any credibility whatsoever. The “preserved land” argument against the PennEast pipeline is just one more double standard added to the tactics employed by pipeline opponents.

Related Reading:

Non-Objective Law and the Malignant Nature of Eminent Domain

Eminent Domain- Always an Abuse