Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Friday September 01 2017, @10:56AM   Printer-friendly
from the monumental-decisions dept.

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

U.S. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said on Thursday he has sent recommendations from his review of more than two dozen national monuments to President Donald Trump, indicating that some could be scaled back to allow for more hunting and fishing and economic development.

The recommendations follow a 120-day study of 27 national monuments across the country, created by presidents since 1996, that Trump ordered in April as part of his broader effort to increase development on federal lands.

The review has cheered energy, mining, ranching and timber advocates but has drawn widespread criticism and threats of lawsuits from conservation groups and the outdoor recreation industry.

There were fears that Zinke would recommend the outright elimination of some of the monuments on the list, but on Thursday, speaking to the Associated Press in Billings, Montana, he said he will not recommend eliminating any.

Zinke said in a statement that the recommendations would "provide a much needed change for the local communities who border and rely on these lands for hunting and fishing, economic development, traditional uses, and recreation." He did not specify which monuments he plans to recommend be scaled back.

The Associated Press reported that Zinke said he would recommend changing the boundaries for a "handful" of sites.

If you're taking millions of acres off the table for one site, you fail at knowing the definition of a monument.

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-interior-monuments-idUSKCN1B41YA

Also at RT, CNN, The Washington Post and The Hill.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 01 2017, @05:40PM (2 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday September 01 2017, @05:40PM (#562615) Journal

    You're conflating conservation of energy with an economic model.

    Sorry, that's bogus. Let us note that "energy" was not mentioned at all and even if it were, no such conflation actually took place.

    • If a thing merely breaks even, then it's not likely to survive in the long-term.
    • If a thing is cannot even break even, then it will disappear.

    That is the nature of living in a Universe of finitely accessible resources.

    What is so difficult to grasp about that fact? It's virtually an axiom.

    Second, if the economic model doesn't follow laws of physics (eg, infinite energy generators and the like for conservation of energy), then it's a bad model. If your model of economics ignores that a vast amount of resources (there's a lot more conserved quantities out there than energy!) is conserved or nearly so (with high cost to create or remove said resources), then it's going to have a lot of built in fail to it. There is no conflation here, it's recognizing that activities consume scarce, mostly conserved resources and if they can't sustain themselves directly, then they need to have a means by which they can insure the transfer of resources in perpetuality say via trade or the support of enduring sponsors.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 01 2017, @06:19PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 01 2017, @06:19PM (#562632)

    Physics fail: That is the nature of living in a Universe of finitely accessible resources.

    Everything is energy, AC brought in the finite universe as support for their argument so blame them.

    You want economic models that include human activity to be on par with physical laws of the universe? Drink some more coffee, your brain is still dreaming.

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by khallow on Friday September 01 2017, @06:51PM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday September 01 2017, @06:51PM (#562664) Journal

      Physics fail: That is the nature of living in a Universe of finitely accessible resources.

      [...]

      You want economic models that include human activity to be on par with physical laws of the universe? Drink some more coffee, your brain is still dreaming.

      These are straw man arguments. No one has expressed anything that is relevant to your claims. In particular, economics models don't need to be as rigorous as physical law in order to work.

      Everything is energy, AC brought in the finite universe as support for their argument so blame them.

      And the fact of the finite universe is support for the AC's argument. As to everything being energy, you do realize that it takes considerable effort to transform between various forms of matter and energy? For example, we could transform sunlight directly into gold by particle-anti-particle creation, assembling the resulting simple particles into gold nuclei eventually. But no one will do that because the cost of doing so would be huge. Even using nuclear reactions to generate gold nuclei is grotesquely inefficient. Thus, the amount of gold in the present world is effectively conserved even though we can think of a variety of hard paths for creating or removing it.