President Donald Trump is traveling to Utah Monday to announce changes to the boundaries of two national monuments in the state: Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, The Salt Lake Tribune reports.
Trump will shrink the two monuments after reviewing recommendations from Secretary of 
the Interior Ryan Zinke.
In April, Trump ordered Zinke to conduct a review of all national monuments designated since 1996 covering more than 100,000 acres. Zinke completed the review and submitted his recommendations to the White House in August.
“The recommendations I sent to the president on national monuments will maintain federal ownership of all federal land and protect the land under federal environmental regulations, and also 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,” Zinke said in a statement after submitting his findings.
Environmentalists have sworn to sue as soon as Trump acts to roll back any designations, a power they believe does not exist under the Antiquities Act.
“This illegal action will cement Trump’s legacy as one of the worst presidents in modern history,” Center for Biological Diversity public lands program director Randi Spivak told The Salt Lake Tribune. “Trump has no clue how much people love these sacred and irreplaceable landscapes, but he’s about to find out. He’s shown his blatant disregard for public lands, Native Americans and the law. We look forward to seeing him in court.”
This article originally appeared in The Daily Caller
This Trump guy is looking like he knows what he is doing. He doesn’t just charge headlong into the fray–he knows how to sneak up on the bad guys from their unguarded flank.
Draining the swamp one ml at a time.
Looks like there are already law suits from scientific organizations (Vertebrate Paleoltological Society) due to this decision. Did you think this was an automatically done deal. Did you hear him claim that the forrest service recommended this, and then he got caught in this lie? Seeing as Trump’s vocabulary is getting more and more limited, and his grasp on reality lighter, there is a good possibility he is suffering from dementia, so I don’t want to poke fun at his mental disabilities, but I don’t know that you get the same excuse.
And Trump just won in court again for his travel band. And another regarding DACA. And Roy Moore is going to win in Alabama.
MAGA.
You’re support of sex offenders speaks volumes about your willingness to put morality aside.
So your support of Bill Clinton and his enabler, Hillary, doesn’t bother you? Bill was the champion sex offender/harasser/pervert of them all and the case against him was proven. The case against Moore is flimsier than your AGW evidence.
Who said I supported the Clintons? You really are trapped in your narrow world. I don’t like the sex offender Bill (Clinton nor Cosby), nor Franken, and I have no qualms finding sex offenders disgusting and unfit for leadership roles. You on the other hand . . . look deep while you raise your fist in the air for Moore.
I came here because I saw the name “fact” in the title. Much to my dismay, just another Chicken Little opinion piece devoid of facts and rationale. Just quotes from a bunch of loonies. Pathetic.
What is loony about it?
Uhm, try reading the entire last paragraph. Now read it again knowing that every line contains at least one piece of deliberate misinformation.
I’m not getting comments in my mail so it is taking time to respond. Umm, trying to read the entire last paragraph? Are you O.K.?
Now I see it.
Well, we set those up for all the rich fossil beds located there, and if you just turn that over to developers and drillers you loose all that knowledge, and that’s looney. This was done to make more fossil fuels available, but we can run our economy on cleaner sources of energy, and unless you deny the majority of climate science findings, you are only making a global problem worse with this. That too is looney. Denying climate science is looney. This is a host of looney.
Well let’s see, those rich fossil beds have been there for a long time and no one has drilled, right? I guess the site can now be used to get the bird killer turbines spread all over it and you will feel great about it. Denying man made climate change is not loony and you haven’t given any facts to support your argument. The cleaner sources of energy don’t work well…and they cost too much! The only people benefiting from cleaner energy are the billionaires living off the government teat doing the global warming crap. Oh, and the bureaucrats. And you being a prole, are fine with the rich scamming you and getting richer by it.
Turbines have been shown to not cause a significant bird death. Compare the rates to feral cats to get some perspective. Evidence for man made climate change has been presented by me on several threads here, sorry you missed it, but if you would like a quick one: the Troposphere has been warming, as have the oceans, and the mass of glaciers have been measured to be melting, sea levels have been measured to be rising, and the Stratosphere has been measured to be cooling. All are evidence of retaining heat, and specifically by a greenhouse forcing. The reason no one drilled the fossil beds is we were smart enough to protect them in the past. Interesting reasoning you have there.
cshorey, you’re actually wrong. The reason these oil reserves have not been drilled is because the amount available is insignificant. Meaning that the money it would cost to drill a well and truck the crude from this remote location to a pipeline facility would cost much more than the actual value of the oil itsself. If it wasn’t drilled when it could have been when oil was $110/bbl, so they sure as hell aren’t going to drill when oil has hit a plateau of $50/bbl. There are public records and notes from geologists stating this clearly.
Saying that drilling or producing oil contributes to global warming is a dishonest argument. Breathing also contributes to global warming, so if you REALLY cared about the environment you’d stop driving, stop repopulating, kill your pet that creates unnecessary CO2, and would live as a hermit. Unless you have invested in an electric car and live off of solar energy, you have no right to use that argument and deflect responsibility for global warming onto oil companies, when you (the consumer) are the one who burns the fueld and actually causes the problem.
There has definitely been a ban on drilling and mining there since 1996 when Clinton imposed that rule. I agree that the economics on this site are not that good, but that doesn’t keep people from stealing claims and then access can be restricted. Not only is the Association of Vertebrate Paleontologists suing over this, so are native people in the area who’s ancestors are buried there. A last point to note is that this present move does not release land to the public as this CFACT article claims, but remains in Federal control, and just allows the mining claims to be submitted.
Stealing claims? If it’s land that belongs to the State OR Fed, nobody is going to be able to “steal” it. The Assoc of Vertibrate Paleontologists do not own the land, just like the Native Americans don’t own the land. That battle was settled centuries ago. claiming a site as “sacred” is just another method of getting what you want. Ask New Zealanders, it has made their government system a living hell. The Maori are starting to claim literally everything as a “sacred site” costing tax payers millions of dollars. I digress. Mining claims are just that: claims or request for permit. At some point you have to acknowledge that we live in a world that is dependant on natural resources for energy. Want to drive your car? You’ll need oil. Want to drive an electric car? You’ll need lithium. If over 2 million acres of desert land is not an acceptable place to acquire natural resources, then we might as well hang it up and start preparing to go back to the dark ages.
Must have been an autocorrect, I sure meant to type staking claims, not stealing as that, as you point out makes no sense. As it turns out though, it is not really the fossil fuel companies that are so interested in these areas, but the Uranium mining industry. Of course everything around us (except my meteorite collection) either grew or was mined out of the Earth. And we can digress into a discussion on preservation vs. conservation, but even with conservation there are more and less valuable uses of land, and I would say the fossil knowledge should be put first above more Uranium extraction. The Uranium boom ended decades ago.
There are maps on the web where you may look up oil wells and gas deposits. It seems Utah is already a player along with many states in the U.S. But now it’s the troposphere you are worried about… The U.S. government believes in man made global warming and agrees with you, but can’t really prove any of their “facts.” There’s a village in Alaska needing to be moved and the only people who think it isn’t normal for permafrost to be unstable are in the government… Wind and water erode land during the erosion cycle. Erosion and sedimentation are complementary processes. You might look into this. And the world has gone through drastic changes long before man showed up on its surface. And the world has gone through drastic changes since man has been it, like the 300 year drought experienced in North America after approximately 1130AD. And it is believed a 25 year drought during that same time caused the Anasazi to disappear in New Mexico. So we have erosion and massive weather changes without people being the cause of any of it. “The Age of Global Warming,” by Rupert Darwall, 2013, is a history of global warming alarmism… Alarmism is the new thing. It seems the ambulance chasers, fortune tellers, third world dictators and others have found a new way of making money off of the American taxpayer. Maybe you have as well.
Oh dear, the government is not in the business of proving climate change. That is the job of scientists and the proof is in the peer reviewed papers. I suggest you start with the work of John Tyndall.
1859 Tyndall discovers that some gases block infrared radiation. He suggests that changes in the concentration of greenhouse gases could bring climate change.
1896 Arrhenius publishes the first calculation of global warming from human emissions of CO2.
1930s A global warming trend since the late nineteenth century is reported. Milankovitch proposes orbital changes as the cause of ice ages.
1938 Callendar argues that CO2 greenhouse global warming is under way, reviving interest in the question.
1945 The U.S. Office of Naval Research begins generous funding of many fields of science, some of which happen to be useful for understanding climate change.
1956 Phillips produces a somewhat realistic computer model of the global atmosphere. Plass calculates that adding CO2 to the atmosphere will have a significant effect on the radiation balance.
1957 Revelle finds that CO2 produced by humans is not readily absorbed by the oceans.
1958 Telescope studies show a greenhouse effect raises the temperature of the atmosphere of Venus far above the boiling point of water.
1960 Keeling accurately measures CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere and detects an annual rise. The level is 315 ppm. The mean global temperature (a five-year average) is 13.9°C.
1963 Calculations suggest that feedback with water vapor could make the climate acutely sensitive to changes in the CO2 level.
1965 At a Boulder, Colo., meeting on the causes of climate change, Lorenz and others point out the chaotic nature of the climate system and the possiblity of sudden shifts.
1966 Emiliani’s analysis of deep-sea cores shows the timing of ice ages was set by small orbital shifts, suggesting that the climate system is sensitive to small changes.
1967 The International Global Atmospheric Research Program is established, mainly to gather data for better short-range weather prediction, but climate research is included.
1968 Studies suggest a possiblity of collapse of Antarctic ice sheets, which would raise sea levels catastrophically.
1969 Budyko and Sellers present models of catastrophic ice-albedo feedbacks. The Nimbus 3 satellite begins to provide comprehensive global atmospheric temperature measurements.
1971 An SMIC conference of leading scientists reports a danger of rapid and serious global climate change caused by humans, and calls for an organized research effort.
1972 Ice cores and other evidence shows big climate shifts in the past between relatively stable modes in the space of a thousand years or so.
1974 Serious droughts since 1972 increase concern about climate; cooling from aerosols is suspected to be as likely as warming; journalists talk of a new ice age.
1975 Manabe and his collaborators produce complex but plausible computer models that show a temperature rise of several degrees for doubled CO2.
1976 Studies find that CFCs (1975) and methane and ozone (1976) can make a serious contribution to the greenhouse effect. Deep-sea cores show a dominating influence from 100,000-year Milankovitch orbital changes, which emphasizes the role of feedbacks.
1977 Scientific opinion tends to converge on global warming as the biggest climate risk in the next century.
1979 A U.S. National Academy of Sciences report finds it highly credible that doubling CO2 will bring about global warming of 1.5°C – 4.5°C. (*This represents the scientific consensus on the issue ever since; without the fossil fuel industry’s PR pushback, this would have been the point where it was clear humans had to stop burning fossil fuels or accept severe climate disruption).
1981 Hansen and others show that sulfate aerosols can significantly cool the climate, a finding that raises confidence in models showing future greenhouse warming.
1982 Greenland ice cores reveal dramatic temperature oscillations in the space of a century in the distant past. Stong global warming since mid-1970s is reported; 1981 was the warmest year on record.
1985 Ramanathan and his collaborators announce that global warming may come twice as fast as expected, from a rise of methane and other trace greenhouse gases.
1988 Ice-core and biology studies confirm that living ecosystems make climate feedback by way of methane, which could accelerate global warming. The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is established.
1989 Fossil-fuel and other U.S. industries form the Global Climate Coalition to tell politicians and the public that climate science is too uncertain to justify action. (*Exxon internal documents later show Exxon knew that global warming projections were good science in 1978)
1990 The first IPCC report says the world has been warming and future warming seems likely.
1991 Mt. Pinatubo erupts; climate scientists predict a cooling pattern, which will validate (*by 1995) computer models of aerosol effects (*and of the water vapor feedback effect). Studies from 55 million years ago show a possiblity that the eruption of methane from the seabed could intensify enormous self-sustained warming.
1992 The study of ancient climates reveals climate sensitivity in the same range as that predicted independently by computer models.
1993 Greenland ice cores suggest that great climate changes (at least on a regional scale) can occur in the space of a single decade.
1995 The second IPCC report detects a ‘signature’ of human-caused greenhouse-effect warming; it declares that serious warming is likely in the coming century. Reports of the breakup of Antarctic ice shelves and other signs of actual current warming in polar regions begin to affect public opinion.
1998 A “Super El Niño” causes weather disasters and the warmest year on record (approximately matched by 2005 and 2007). Borehole data confirm an extraordinary warming trend. Qualms about arbitrariness in computer models diminish as teams model ice-age climate and dispense with special adjustments to reproduce current climate.
2000 The Global Climate Coalition dissolves as many corporations grapple with the threat of warming, but the oil lobby convinces the U.S. administration to deny a problem exists.
2001 Debate effectively ends among all but a few scientists. Warming is observed in ocean basins; the match with computer models gives a clear signature of greenhouse-effect warming.
2003 Numerous observations raise concern that collapse of ice sheets (in West Antarctica and Greenland) can raise sea levels faster than most had believed. A deadly summer heat wave in Europe accelerates the divergence between European and U.S. public opinion.
2007 The level of CO2 in the atmosphere reaches 392 ppm. The mean global temperature a five-year average) is 14.5°C, the warmest in hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years.
2015 and 2016 are the warmest years on record. Atmospheric CO2 is now 410 ppm.
The government pays scientists to come up with climate change reports. And, at least you are aware of the science which has been ongoing and has not proved manmade climate change. The “warmest year on record,” as if the records go back really far. Keep writing!
“The government” paid John Tyndall to “come up with” data on IR absorption in 1859? Well, nice talking to you.
They believed in climate alarmism in 1859? Ha-ha-ha! Nice talking to you!
Blah, blah, blah. Typical nonsense. CO2 is insignificant at these levels. Correlation is not causation.
I see you are truly stupid over here as well.
Here is additional research that shows far more than correlation:
http://newscenter.lbl.gov/2015/02/25/co2-greenhouse-effect-increase/