More outrageous legislation..”An Act To Establish Climate and Energy Planning in Maine”
I listened to the testimony on this bill today on the Legislative webcast. Speaker Hannah Pingree introduced the bill. “Decisions we make today will shape the future”. The bill essentially requires anyone thinking of putting a shovel in the ground to first analyze what impact the project will have on global warming and plan accordingly. It is very broad in its reach but hazy in its implementation. Maine is the first legislature in the country to propose such regulations, that basically make taking a breath an act of pollution.
Rep. Tom Saviello spoke against the bill, saying it was too much to expect Maine to penalize itself over other states if these measures made Maine uncompetitive for new development and said the bill was a “solution looking for a problem”.
DEP Commissioner David Littell suggested LURC and DEP were not fiscally capable of handling the additional work associated with such burdensome regulations.
Proponents of the bill then spoke first. Representatives from Efficiency Maine, Environment Northeast, Maine Audubon,Trout Unlimited, Maine Conservation Coalition and Maine Natural Resources Council echoed the theme that global warming is the biggest problem facing the world and Maine must accept the costs, whatever they may be, of combating climate change. Hurricane Katrina and the 1300 souls that were lost was mentioned several times as an example of the types of storms that will be common place in the warmer future. No mention of the tsunami in Indonesia that killed over a quarter of a million people on several continents after an undersea earthquake. A tax on carbon, wind turbines on the ridges, greenhouse gas computations for every construction project are nevertheless necessary to save the earth.
Also mentioned several times was the report “Maine’s Climate Future” from the Climate Change Institute at UM. My reading of this wide ranging report indicated that many assumptions were made even though many admitted “knowledge gaps” made credible conclusions impossible. Summarizing the report, global warming will provide a longer growing season, plenty of rainfall, healthy agriculture and forest production, and perhaps even striped bass off the Portland Light. What’s not to like folks? What are we supposed to be afraid of? The difference in climate that 1000 feet of elevation change makes is more extreme than the changes that global warming is expected to create.
It struck me that these people are paid to raise red flags and cry that the sky is falling. Without an urgent crisis in need of immediate action, these groups would have difficulty raising the funds they need to stay in business and these folks who testified today would be out of work, like the rest of us.
Ironically Maine Audubon and Natural Resources Council spokespersons decried the habitat fragmentation caused by building roads for second home developments in undeveloped areas. Both of these groups are in favor of sacrificing Maine’s mountains to the wind industry. All I could think of was the hundreds of miles of roads blasted up to the ridges that are needed to construct turbines on every suitable mountain in the state and the habitat destruction caused by the noise of these monstrous turbines.
Speaking against the bill were representatives from the Manufacturing, Real Estate, Mill Owners, Construction, Land Owner, Forest Management and Engineering trade groups, the Chamber of Commerce, and Maine Municipal Association. “Unworkable, expensive, burdensome, unnecessary, redundant,” were the keywords.
My favorite testimony was given by Michael White, sitework contractor. “No good will come of this, its the wrong way to skin a cat…..its social engineering with an underlying agenda of regulatory gridlock.” Citing the examples of the plans to grow “giant trees” and blast particles into the outer atmosphere to “mimic volcanoes” as the radical thinking of climate extremists, he said if there is a problem the world needs to solve it, not Maine. “Maine does not have walls around it that reach to the heavens”.
The work session on this bill will be held in the next week or two. It couldn’t hurt to read the bill and send testimony to the committee through the clerk Veronica Snow, at Veronica.Snow@legislature.maine.gov.
Steve
