One of the hardest fought battle grounds of the culture war lies in environmental regulations. And in this battle, the Left wins virtually every time they step on to the killing fields. These are battles fought often in the obscure corners of government - courtrooms, administrative proceedings, subcommittee meeting - and away from the general public. The only ones who really care are the environmental activists, and they care a lot. ANY effort by a Republican administration to establish environmental regulations is met with cries that they are destroying the environment, selling out to Big Business, and etc. As if Republicans sit around breathing in deeply and say, "Nope, not sooty enough."
The Bush administration has tried to make a few changes. First, they have promulgated a reg, which would allow an agency to use its discretion to decide whether the environmental impact of a proposed development would be too trivial to require a full scale scientific analysis. Second, they had the temerity to suggest that global warming is not covered by the Endangered Species Act. This seems like a reasonable interpretation since the Act was passed in 1973 before the glitterati had discovered global warming, and everybody believed that the world was in danger of Global Cooling (it wasn't).
Predictably, the cries have gone across the land that the Evil Bush is "seeking to gut" the Act, and other unholy misdeeds. California's hard left Attorney General has now joined the grandstanding and is suing to contest the new regs. AG Brown is a genuinely decent man, and I am sure he is deeply concerned over global warming (he couldn't otherwise travel in the circles he does). But, he is acting to ensure that any development, including large scale public works projects, will be carried out slowly, if at all. While the P.R. arms of the Greens emphasize the "cute fuzzy animal" aspects of nature, their legal arms are dedicated to making sure that manufacturers, developers, and engineers - in other words, people with real jobs - have as little to do with their time as possible.
It has become fashionable to decry our state's crumbling infrastructure. But it is not crumbling because no one gives a damn. It's crumbling because you can't turn a spade without triggering years worth of environmental reviews by activists who use cry crocodile tears over a ravaged environment to accomplish their real goal: stifling any sort of economically productive development.
