Where I Stand — Mike O’Callaghan: Some good news, some bad news

Tuesday, Feb. 2, 1999 | 12:20 p.m.

EVERY YEAR since 1995 this column has discussed the suggestions of the Green Scissors Report produced by a coalition led by the National Taxpayers Union and Friends of the Earth. I've made special note of the problems affecting Nevada directly such as Yucca Mountain, mining and grazing. So let's take a look at where those problems are today in the 1999 Green Scissors Report. Yes, they are still there because Congress continues down its own stubborn path and refuses to listen and learn.

Sure enough, the Department of Energy's plan for bringing nuke waste to nearby Yucca Mountain calls for the expenditure of $358 million during Fiscal Year 1999. Green Scissors calls for a stop to the project pending an external review because there are new findings that suggest it won't qualify for a high-level nuclear waste repository. Seismic activity and new evidence of water traveling through the mountain much faster than initially believed are two of the latest environmental threats the waste dump could cause.

What the Green Scissor's people call the "Granddaddy of Subsidies" is also directed at Nevada, Utah, Arizona and other states in the West. The 1999 report again stresses that the Mining Law of 1872 continues to give away public lands to mining companies. This law has granted more than $41 billion of mineral giveaways here in Nevada since it was passed.

The report says, "Since the law was enacted, the U.S. government has given away more than $245 billion of mineral reserves through patenting or royalty-free mining, according to the Mineral Policy Center. The subsidies embedded in public lands mining, along with the percentage depletion tax allowance, create false incentives for miners and hinder sound land management. Free-market advocates might favor a competitive-bid leasing system, which would be one way to recover a fair return to taxpayers."

The page on "Cash Cows" again puts forth the problems the taxpayers and the environment have with grazing of cattle on federal lands. Audubon magazine writer Ted Williams is quoted as saying, "Although cattle grazing in the West has polluted more water, eroded more topsoil, killed more fish, displaced more wildlife and destroyed more vegetation than any other land use, the American public pays ranchers to do it."

Williams may be exceptionally critical of grazing, but the report lays it all out as follows:

The elimination of the Purchaser Road Credit saves $50 million a year. The 1999 report tells us, "After many years of reform efforts by the Green Scissors Coalition, the 105th Congress agreed to eliminate the wasteful Purchaser Road Credit (PRC) program. This subsidy allowed the U.S. Forest Service to trade public trees to timber corporations to offset the corporations' cost of building roads to logging projects. The PRC program cost taxpayers an average of $50 million a year and exacerbated the expensive and destructive subsidized logging road program. With enough logging roads to circle the planet 17 times, and a maintenance backlog of well over $10 billion, taxpayers and conservationists are glad to see this subsidy ended."

So the Green Scissors Report has done much good during the past year and even more since it was first published. I'm going to continue reading it and using it for a basis to ask legislators questions. Someday the country may be able to read that the plans for the transportation of deadly nuke waste across it to an unsafe dump in Nevada has also been stopped.

Incidentally, all taxpayers are warned by Green Scissors that the nuclear power industry is already ripping them off by not paying nuke waste fund fees that increase with the inflation index. Also taxpayers are paying $4.2 million yearly for the promotion of low-level nuke waste dumpsites. Linda Lynch, a Texas public official, tells us that the "only things 'low-level' about 'low-level' radioactive wastes are the tactics used by dump-pushers to get new dumps in place."

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