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Walcher: Breaking China’s grip on rare earth minerals begins with real mining at home
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GregWalcher.com, Approved, Commentary, National

Walcher: Breaking China’s grip on rare earth minerals begins with real mining at home

By Greg Walcher | Commentary, GregWalcher.com Energy Secretary Chris Wright went to Wyoming last week to cut the ribbon on the first new rare earth mine in the U.S. since the 1950s. Telling the assembled guests and reporters that the “Brook Mine” is critical to breaking China’s “stranglehold on rare earth processing,” he hinted that it might be the first of several. It should be. A few years ago, I visited Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar and when discussing the need for domestic production of vital minerals, he picked up a dark brown rock from the Mojave Desert, explaining that it was mostly composed of a “rare earth” element. He said millions of such rocks littered the desert in his district, yet the United States imported 100 percent of the mineral it contains. That situation has no...
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Walcher: How the ‘Roadless Rule’ fuels forest destruction
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GregWalcher.com, Approved, Commentary, National

Walcher: How the ‘Roadless Rule’ fuels forest destruction

By Greg Walcher | Commentary, GregWalcher.com Gertrude Stein wrote her oft-repeated line “A rose is a rose is a rose…” in a 1913 poem. She explained it as meaning “things are what they are.” But what if it’s called something else? That was Juliet’s question to Romeo: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet.” Shakespeare argued that whatever we call something, it is still what it is. Would that such common sense had been applied during 30 years of political arguments over which national forest lands were “roadless.” And what exactly should be considered a road. Anyone who thought that issue long since resolved got a wakeup call with this year’s catastrophic California wildfires that killed 24 people, destroyed 1,400 homes, and refocused ...
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Walcher: Colorado River drought studies blame climate change, not federal land mismanagement
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GregWalcher.com

Walcher: Colorado River drought studies blame climate change, not federal land mismanagement

By Greg Walcher | Commentary, GregWalcher.com Here is a late-breaking flash from a new study released last month at the University of Arizona: westerners use too much water. Pete Seeger’s 1960s folk standard, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” is in the Grammy Hall of Fame, made a genuine classic through cover versions by the Kingston Trio; Peter, Paul and Mary; Joan Baez; and at least 50 others. It is often quoted, generally out of context, as will be the case here, because of the line closing each stanza, “When will they ever learn.” I hear it occasionally in arguments about endangered species, as in, “Where have all the flowers gone, young girls picked them, every one.” I think of it more in connection with these never-ending “studies” about the Colorado River, how much more wa...
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Walcher: Supreme Court ruling is a first step in restoring balance to NEPA
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GregWalcher.com, Commentary, National

Walcher: Supreme Court ruling is a first step in restoring balance to NEPA

By Greg Walcher | Commentary, GregWalcher.com Supreme Court decisions occasionally have far-reaching impacts, but the recent ruling in Utah’s Uintah Basin Railway case was a Doozy, in which the Justices unanimously hinted that Eagle County, Colorado should mind its own business. County Commissioners there had challenged the Surface Transportation Board’s approval of the 88-mile rail line, proposed by seven Utah counties as a vital transportation connection from the oil-rich region to the national rail network. Eagle County joined several environmental industry groups fighting the rail line, marginally suggesting it could impact traffic in Eagle County, which the oil trains might pass through on their way to Denver. But the real objection, highlighted in all the opponents’ legal filin...
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Walcher: Who decides what species come back from extinction?
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Approved, Commentary, GregWalcher.com, National

Walcher: Who decides what species come back from extinction?

By Greg Walcher | Commentary, GregWalcher.com A British biologist named John Gurdon won a Nobel Prize for discovering that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become “pluripotent.” That means mature cells can be converted into stem cells, so brain cells can be changed into heart, foot, or skin cells. That enabled Gurdon in 1962 to clone the first vertebrate in his lab, an African clawed frog, now considered an invasive species in most of Europe, China, and the U.S. This was interesting mainly to scientists until 1996 when a Scottish lab cloned the first mammal, a sheep named Dolly, an overnight global media sensation. It proved that the nucleus from an adult cell, transferred into an unfertilized egg, can divide and develop in the same mysterious way it does in a real womb. ...
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Walcher: It’s not just Chinese farmland—it’s unchecked federal control over 700 million acres
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Approved, GregWalcher.com, National, Rocky Mountain Voice, Top Stories

Walcher: It’s not just Chinese farmland—it’s unchecked federal control over 700 million acres

By Greg Walcher | Commentary, GregWalcher.com An article BBC Science Focus highlights the difficulties of “multi-tasking,” handling several things at a time, which apparently most of us don’t do very well. “In an ideal world, we’d focus on one task at a time, get it finished and only then move onto something else.” But in real life, “It’s all too common for you to be making great progress on one thing, when… BAM! You suddenly need to deal with something else.” That is common, not only in our personal lives, but also in government. In the decade I worked on Capitol Hill, no crisis happened on any Monday morning. Instead, whenever we were winding down some big project, a new crisis would appear, usually at 4:00 pm on Friday. Multi-tasking wasn’t a popular term back then, but it apt...
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Walcher: Want to fix Congress? Break the budget process first
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Approved, Commentary, GregWalcher.com, National

Walcher: Want to fix Congress? Break the budget process first

By Greg Walcher | Commentary, GregWalcher.com A popular blogger called Taylor Cone gave some great advice for budding inventors, discussing the process of prototyping: build it, then break it, then fix it. That’s a strategy Congress ought to try. The House Appropriations Committee, Congress’s most powerful panel, has 63 members, only 8 of whom have ever voted to do what the law requires of them, namely, to pass 12 appropriation bills to fund government agencies and programs. In fact, Congress has passed the required bills on time only 4 times in the last 40 years, the last time 26 years ago. Only 25 of the 435 House members and 8 of the 100 Senators were even in Congress then, all of them now in their 70s, 80s, and 90s. They may not even remember how it was supposed to work. The b...
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Walcher: The “sky is falling” water narrative doesn’t hold water
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Walcher: The “sky is falling” water narrative doesn’t hold water

By Greg Walcher | Commentary, GregWalcher.com Every year for the past 25, at least, negotiating teams for the seven states on the Colorado River have worked to overcome a new crisis, invariably driven by two entities: the State of California and the federal Bureau of Reclamation (BOR). For a quarter-century, those teams have responded to federal pressure based on the dubious theory that an ongoing drought, and a resulting decline in the river’s flow, somehow changed the law and gave BOR authority to ignore the Interstate Compact. Not once has the federal agency ever acknowledged the government’s own role in reducing the river’s flow, by neglecting to manage thirsty invasive species like tamarisk, and especially by allowing national forests to become so overgrown that much of...
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Walcher: We built it, and they still won’t come
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Approved, GregWalcher.com, Rocky Mountain Voice

Walcher: We built it, and they still won’t come

By Greg Walcher | Commentary, GregWalcher.com Building a new subdivision is complicated. Almost every city and county in America have master plans dictating “conforming uses” of land. Most specify lot and home sizes, rules for vehicle access, water supply, sewage disposal, flood control, affordable housing, and park space. Those are addressed in lengthy application processes and public hearings, all preceding building the infrastructure, and then the homes. The National Association of Home Builders says government regulations account for 24 percent of the final price of new homes. Sixty percent of that comes during planning and development, only 40 percent during actual construction. Those costs are many times higher when building businesses or industries. So, how much cheape...
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