There is something admirable about the old guard of the environmental movement. They saw pollution in the air and waters, and worked to stop anything they deemed as a culprit. They saw animals truly on the brink of extinction, and acted to protect them from human danger. Their actions, while creating a regime that would necessarily infringe upon the rights and constitutional traditions of our nation, were nevertheless founded on a core set of principles. As they have been weaponized, those principles have come to fly in the face of American ideals and led to government overgrowth. Nevertheless, the old guard’s fervor to protect the environment had integrity. They had a vision of what the right thing was, and worked consistently to achieve it.
The new environmentalists of today, however, are not like the old guard. The likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger and President Biden’s senior energy advisor John Podesta are “green builder” environmentalists, and come bearing a dangerous idea.
The Good
On the surface, the green builders seem like a positive thing. After nearly 50 years of radical environmentalists hell-bent on thwarting any human growth or prosperity, the green builders claim they want to reform the movement to become more hospitable to energy development and major construction projects. They see the federal permitting process as catastrophic to American leadership.
The Terminator actor said, “We need a new environmentalism based on building and growing and common sense. Old environmentalism was afraid of growth. It hated building.” Podesta argued along a similar vein: “We have to start building things again in America. We got too good at stopping things, and not good enough at building things.”
We here at Mountain States couldn’t be more excited to hear those words, but we are wary. We’ve been saying for decades that laws such as the Endangered Species Act and Clean Water Act, while of noble origins and intentions, have been weaponized by a litigation-research industrial complex. Where the laws’ authors sought to conserve and properly use nature, today’s actors benefit not from saving animals, but from suing, receiving research grants for federal studies, and litigation settlements (part of the sue-and-settle scheme). It is well past the day where either the courts must rein in the frivolous lawsuits or Congress must engage in wholesale reform.
The Bad
So, it is nice to hear that these green builders are ready to put America back into a position of industrial strength. The unfortunate reality, however, is that is not the whole story. As it turns out, the green builders want to reform the federal permitting and leasing process to make it easier only for their desired projects. They know that the courts are clogged with lawsuits and that the bureaucracies are wound up in impossible red tape. While they rightfully want to undo such harmful practices, the green builders have no interest in doing that for all Americans.
Read again the former California governor’s comments at a summit: “That’s why, today, I call on every government around the world to clear the path for green projects, start the building, and terminate pollution.” Green builders aren’t really interested in prosperity or ending bureaucratic strangulation—they are only concerned about helping their own gang of businesses. They’ll happily keep their perceived enemies in regulatory purgatory forever.
Green builders don’t have the consistent principles of old guard environmentalists, but they have all the hallmarks of cronyism and regulatory capture. The pattern is as old as time.
- The government erects a new agency to achieve some goal, hopefully noble.
- Over time, that agency staffs itself with people from the industry or area it is charged with regulating.
- Those individuals grow from being the experts in their fields to experts in regulation, retaining all the agendas of political actors.
- The agency becomes a hub of grift, wheeling and dealing regulations in favor of its allies.
In real-world application, we have seen organizations like the Bureau of Land Management, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Fish and Wildlife Service become the fiefdoms of environmentalists. They’ll do anything to get in the way of productive uses of land, but they’ll bend over backwards to invent new interpretations of federal statutes to lock up huge swaths of land from ever being touched.
The Ugly
Should green builders fully get their way, they will turn those agencies into discriminatory brokers, where only “tolerated” energy and “acceptable” development is fast-tracked for permits and leases. If you’re not in with the cool kids, you don’t get a seat at the table. That’s the basic definition of cronyism and corruption of power. Far from being the old guard, the green builders will simply be another class of friends in high places.
This is why Mountain States for the past 46 years has made public lands and natural resources our cornerstone practice. It is also why we are launching a new MSLF center for energy and environment dedicated exclusively to fighting for the property rights of all Americans, and guard against an ever-growing administrative state that touches almost every aspect of daily American life. We’re proud of the work we’ve done on this front. More is needed as green builders become bolder in their agenda, but Mountain States is answering the call.