The United Nations seeks to dictate how we use our own land and water, and Kamala Harris is helping them do it.
Sounds shocking, yes, but it’s completely true. The U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change was ratified in 1994 and operates through annual meetings called the Conference of Parties, or COP. Within seven days of taking office, the Biden-Harris administration directed our federal agencies to determine steps “to achieve the goal of conserving at least 30% of our lands and waters by 2030.” This “30x30” plan, formally adopted by the UN at COP15, is ostensibly aimed at controlling “climate change,” but is actually nothing more than a land grab designed to undermine and weaken the U.S.
The goal is simple: place 30 percent of all land and water completely out of bounds for human use by 2030. Our federal government is no longer satisfied with dictating access to and management of the 640 million acres of land that it already owns, it now seeks to deny the use and development of millions of additional acres throughout the country, including our private property, to implement the U.N.’s 30x30 agenda.
The federal government claims that only 12 percent, or roughly 300 million acres of land, is currently “permanently protected” to qualify for the 30x30 designation. Through 30x30, they intend to lock down an additional 400 million acres, or the equivalent footprint of Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, Utah, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nevada combined. Using ambiguity and vagueness to disguise 30x30’s real target, Biden/Harris are largely looking to our private property and additional constrains on public lands to meet this goal.
Those who live in the western states understand the impact of the federal government controlling large swaths of land. Nevada is the most egregious example, with the federal government controlling a whopping 80.1 percent of its surface estate. The rest of the top six rounds out like this: Utah (63.1 percent), Idaho (61.9 percent), Alaska (60.9 percent), Oregon (52.3 percent), and Wyoming (46.7 percent). This level of federal control is more than just a nuisance; it suppresses economic development and forces western citizens to suffer the consequences of the government’s failed land use and resource management policies.
Again, as a westerner, it is bad enough that we must tolerate Washington, D.C.’s federal land mismanagement; the 30x30 plan is designed to also impose those same failed policies on our private property as well. One mechanism by which they seek to do so is through the UN sanctioned concept of “Natural Capital Accounting,” to quantify the value of the “natural assets” or “environmental benefits,” of such things as pollination or carbon sequestration.
Biden and Harris, in taking their marching orders directly from the U.N., intend to eventually place the estimated monetary value of these “assets” on the national balance sheet to offset and obscure the impact of their out-of-control spending. Their use of UN-created “natural asset accounting” principles then results in the invention of “collateral” out of whole cloth to fuel even more deficit spending.
Real property is often referred to as a “bundle of sticks,” with each stick representing a distinct part of the whole: water rights, the right to exclude, development rights, the right to make soil and vegetation management decisions, etc. These so-called “natural assets” are thus already one of the “sticks in the bundle” that are part and parcel of the underlying property right. To attempt to sever these rights, value them through a U.N.-created accounting system, and then allow the federal government to claim their value is not only a ridiculous concept but, to the extent that they seek to impose this on private property, is an unconstitutional taking in violation of the Fifth Amendment.
This administration also abuses the Endangered Species Act by refusing to delist species that have clearly recovered, such as the Greater Yellowstone Grizzly Bear, the population of which now exceeds recovery goals by over 100 percent. By refusing to delist, the Biden/Harris administration can continue to block the use of reasonable management techniques on species’ habitat, including on federal, state, and private lands.
The Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) recently announced its decision to set aside 31 million acres of land to build solar farms – one of our most expensive and unreliable forms of energy. Even the BLM admits that the industrialization of our western lands will eliminate important livestock grazing areas. We are thus converting beautiful open space and prairie into industrial wastelands, all in response to the UN’s hysteria over “climate change,” without regard to the damage to the environment.
The Biden/Harris administration has also furthered the U.N.’s bidding through their war on our traditional energy producers, blocking access to our most important mineral resources. Their anti-energy policies pose a national security threat, empower and enrich some of the world’s worst actors (Iran, Russia, Venezuela), and cause rampant inflation. Overall, oil and gas leases are trending starkly downward, falling by 12 percent between 2019 and 2023. New leases have fallen off a cliff, dropping by 92 percent between 2019 and 2023. In Wyoming, we now have over 2.1 million acres of leased lands blocked from oil and gas development without legal justification.
Kamala Harris is seeking the highest office in the land. She has shown herself to be a useful tool for the U.N. by implementing its radical anti-property rights, anti-energy, anti-freedom agenda. It is time to expose her record as compared to her rhetoric.
Rep. Harriet Hageman is the lone member of the U.S. House of Representatives from the state of Wyoming.