American Stewards | CAP Pushes Biden to Accelerate Use of Executive Powers to Reach 30×30

The Center for American Progress (CAP) has released a new article pressing the Biden Administration to increase the use of his executive authority to achieve 30×30. “With existing protections for U.S. lands still hovering around 13 percent, meeting Biden’s 2030 goal will require quickly accelerating the pace of conservation measures for public and private lands…” the report states.

Environmentalists will have diminished control over the U.S. Congress once the lame duck session is completed. This is one reason CAP has identified eight key actions the President can take to remove more land from productive use without Congress or the people’s approval. At the top of the list is calling on the President to designate more National Monuments.

They criticize the President for designating only one monument to date, although he has enlarged several monuments reduced by the Trump Administration. They have identified several key areas to be permanently removed from productive use, including a three million acre site in Nevada.

Other actions include “conserve high-value Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands through rulemaking and planning,” “issue a national forest climate rule and conserve old forests across public lands,” and “withdraw sensitive and sacred lands from future drilling and mining.”

Other environmental organizations have followed CAP’s lead and added their own special projects to their demands. The Wildlife News wants the president to enact the “Rewilding the American West” proposal. They also call for creating “a Northern Great Plains National Monument “ which would combine currently protected areas including BLM lands and the American Prairie Preserve to “reintroduce wild bison from Yellowstone National Park as a Buffalo Commons.”

But the most agenda-revealing action called for by the Wildlife News is “mandate a voluntary grazing permit retirement for all federal lands.” It is only in a socialist nation that the government can “mandate” an action to be “voluntary.” As of today, America is still a free Republic where the people have the right to own property and the constitutional protection that it not be taken for public use.

But this socialist vision is the agenda CAP has been working towards since its founding by John Podesta in 2003. Mr. Podesta is the former Chief of Staff for President Obama and campaign manager for Hillary Clinton. Now he is the newly appointed head of the Biden Administration’s climate policies, brought in to help the administration pivot from working with Congress to implementing edicts through executive action.

Supporters of 30×30 expect Podesta to move quickly given his past White House experience, and the numerous former employees of CAP already installed in the Administration. This includes Matt Lee-Ashley, the current Chief of Staff for Brenda Mallory, Chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality. Ashley is the author of CAP’s “How Much Nature Should America Keep,” the report that set the stage for permanently protecting at least 30 percent of America’s land by 2030.