Idaho Joins Federal Climate-change Scheme

Earlier this month, Idaho’s government announced water-rights restrictions that are impacting farmers during the critical growing season.

According to the Idaho Capital Sun on June 4, “Idaho Department of Water Resources Director Mathew Weaver issued a curtailment order that requires 6,400 junior groundwater rights holders who pump off the Eastern Snake Plain Aquifer to shut off their water” due to water mitigation practices.

Farmers are asking why this order was instituted during the growing season when businesses stand to lose millions of dollars from crop failures.

It appears the Idaho Department of Water Resources has overreached. However, was this simple negligence or by design?

This could be a symptom of a much bigger problem. Water mitigation is one thing, but climate-change greenhouse-gas mitigation is another.

People in states that have signed on to the EPA/State Climate Action Plan program can no longer say “it’s only happening in California,” because California is the UN blueprint for the entire United States.

EPA State “Climate Action Plan” Program

On September 20, 2023, the Biden administration attended the Sustainable Development Summit in New York with the goal of recommitting to the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). A White House fact sheet stated, “The United States is committed to the full implementation of 2030 Agenda and the SDGs, at home and abroad.”

The document explained, “At their core, the SDGs seek to expand economic opportunity, advance social justice, care for our planet, promote good governance, and ensure no one is left behind.” What do these catchphrases mean?

• “Expand economic opportunity”: This means public-private partnerships, which is crony capitalism. In this scheme, government picks winners and losers. Profits are privatized and losses are socialized on the backs of middle-class Americans.

• “Advance social justice”: This means placating and advancing people based on their skin color. At its core, it is discriminatory.

• “Promote good governance”: This skirts our elected form of government and injects unelected special-interest initiatives into our lives, where no one gets to vote.

• “Ensure no one is left behind”: This means catering to protected classes and minorities in order to create “capacity building” for initiatives and redistributive wealth schemes. Under Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), these classes are awarded “equity” and “inclusion” based on skin color.

The EPA/State Climate Action Plan program is run through cooperative grants (Climate Pollution Reduction Grants, or CPRG), which have “take it or leave it” terms and conditions. These agreements bind states and localities into creating Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Inventories to reduce emissions, which eventually wind their way into administrative law, constraining property and individual rights. These grants force UN-style Sustainable Communities Strategies (SCS) that address the Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), to which the Biden administration is committed.

The EPA pitches climate action plans as voluntary. This is not true. Once a state agrees to take grant money, it signs on to mandatory elements in the grant terms-and-conditions contract. They are now in the UN-California club.

The EPA/State Climate Action Plan program is between the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and unelected state agencies. Therefore, the entire process is being implemented without the consent of citizens or oversight of state legislatures. Essentially, most states, including supposedly conservative states, are selling out for bribes, aka. grant money.

According to the EPA, states submitted climate action plans under Section 60114 of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. In 2023, under the first phase of the $5 billion program, the EPA made a total of $250 million in grants available to states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, 80 Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSAs), four territories, and over 200 tribes and tribal consortia to develop ambitious climate action plans that address greenhouse gas emissions.

Forty-five states are now covered by a climate action plan. Only five states — Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, South Dakota, and Wyoming — decided not to participate.

The program is a two-phase federal grant program that allows the state to develop and implement ongoing community-driven projects that reduce ambient air pollution:

• Phase 1 (Priority Climate Action Plan) provided $250 million for noncompetitive planning grants, of which states were eligible for $3 million each to support the development of a climate action plan. Under this phase, states must create an inventory of their primary GHG generators.

• Phase 2 (Comprehensive Climate Action Plan) includes $4.6 billion in competitive implementation grants to execute the projects identified in the climate action plan. This is the implementation phase, and states are required to create plans to cut pollution statewide targeting sectors of the economy.

The deadlines for submission of PCAPs are:

• Phase 1: Due March 1, 2024 (states and MSAs) or April 1, 2024 (tribes, tribal consortia, and territories).

• Phase 2: Due approximately mid-2025, two years after the planning grant award (states and MSAs), or at the close of the grant period (tribes, tribal consortia, and territories).

The EPA/State Climate Action Plan program seeks to create arbitrary GHG emission reductions in order to install unconstitutional hidden fees and taxes on hard-working Americans. This is accomplished by doing a greenhouse gas inventory for carbon dioxide and methane.

Once inventories for GHGs have been established, reduction goals can be set. Taxes and fees follow, including GHG pricing mechanisms like cap-and-trade programs for energy producers; congestion pricing and vehicle mileage taxes for cars, trucks and farming vehicles; mandatory retrofitting of commercial and existing residential homes to “green” building standards; zero emission vehicle requirements; and increased gasoline, natural gas, and heating oil prices.

Case Study: Idaho’s Climate Action Plan

The EPA provides states a template — the “Priority Climate Action Plan Guidance: An Outline for States and MSAs” — to follow when developing their PCAPs. Therefore, the state PCAPs are very similar in their presentation. For example, Idaho’s Gem State Air Quality Initiative includes several elements listed as requirements in the template document:

• GHG emissions inventory,

• Priority measures and reduction estimates,

• Benefits analysis,

• Low-income and disadvantaged communities’ benefits analysis,

• Review of authority to implement,

• Intersection with other funding availability, and

• Coordination and engagement.

Key categories for emission controls required in the template document, and included in Idaho’s PCAP, are “industry, electricity generation/use, transportation, commercial and residential buildings, agriculture, natural and working lands, and waste and materials management.”

State legislatures did not pass PCAPs. It all happened through interagency coordination between the federal EPA and state agencies, which are under the control of governors.

The Idaho Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) is the lead agency for the development of Idaho’s PCAP. With the assistance of the University of Idaho McClure Center for Public Policy Research (McClure Center), DEQ coordinated the obligatory public outreach required by grants, which included feedback from numerous special interest stakeholders who directly benefit from environmental initiatives, while hard-working residents are relegated to answering simple questions on outcome-based online surveys. All of this is to the detriment of Idahoans.

Section 2 of Idaho’s PCAP denotes a GHG inventory by sector. It targets agriculture as the primary offender: “Idaho’s GHG emissions have had a net increase of 9.5 million metric tons (MMT) since 2000. Agriculture is the largest contributor of GHG emissions in Idaho, accounting for 40% of the total emissions, followed by the transportation sector (30%).”

PCAPs have all the bases covered with carbon inventories. In urban Southern California, transportation is the largest contributor of GHG emissions, differing from Idaho. Either way, the economy is constrained through this scheme.

Section 3 of Idaho’s PCAP insinuates that minorities are somehow disproportionately burdened by weather events. It states, “LIDAC may not have the resources to easily adapt or recover from extreme events and may be disproportionately burdened.” This is a convoluted reference to instituting taxes and fees to be redistributed to low-income and disadvantaged communities under “environmental justice.”

“Environmental justice” basically claims that minorities are attacked by the environment differently than majority populations. For example, every negative thing in the air (e.g., smog, dust, and viruses) disproportionately affects them, according to the UN. Therefore, they should be paid reparations because they are oppressed. Further, the UN claims that the myth of systemic and structural racism is the ultimate cause of oppression because affluent Western nations polluted the environment when they improved society by raising the standard of living.

Section 4 of Idaho’s PCAP deals with “Priority Measures” and includes “quantifiable GHG emission reductions or increases in sequestered carbon.” DEQ focused on the sectors that have experienced an increase in GHG emissions since 1990 and have substantial stakeholder support. The plan states, “Key Implementing Agencies and [Stakeholder] Partners: Idaho State Department of Agriculture (ISDA), DEQ, University of Idaho, The [nonprofit corporation] Nature Conservancy (TNC).”

Is your industry association aware of this? Were you notified for your input on Idaho’s PCAP?

Section 4.1 of the Idaho PCAP deals with agriculture and promotes the use of climate smart agriculture practices. The plan claims that “adopting climate smart agriculture practices can improve water quality, reduce odors, reduce soil erosion, strengthen plant health and productivity, reduce energy use, and reduce costs.”

Sustainable “smart” agriculture practices always increase input costs and the final costs for consumers. It is basically a rationing scheme designed to increase prices.

The plan also says, “This measure supports the adoption of climate smart agriculture practices throughout Idaho, including soil health, nitrogen management, manure and feed management for livestock, energy efficiency, and on-farm energy production, as well as other sustainable climate smart practices.”

Sustainability: Enemy of Liberty

Sustainability is collectivism: It’s a worldview where free individuals must give up their rights and private property for the collective good, where everyone is equal — equally poor. It is antithetical to the U.S. Constitution; therefore, it is unconstitutional. Even though it’s voluntary, that does not stop its implementation by the government.

Sustainability can be defined as artificial scarcity under the guise of conservation. Its goal is transformation through control of society by behavior modification and social engineering. It means using less of everything: Less food, less energy, less choice, less water, less mobility, and less freedom. At its core, its rationing, all contrived by unelected agencies, nonprofit corporations, international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and Indian tribes.

This “governance” is designed to replace our representative form of government by turning elected public officials into rubber stamps, installing prepackaged solutions for problems that don’t exist.

Sustainability is accomplished by restricting resources. Through conservation easements and land trusts, land grabs take place. By mandating metering of wells, water rights are diminished and removed. By restricting vehicles, mobility is impacted. All of this can negatively impact farmers’ and ranchers’ production, which leads to less food and higher prices at the grocery store — for all.

How to Take Action

Many states have already filed their PCAPs with the EPA, which is a requirement to get millions in grant money to develop their Comprehensive Climate Action Plans.

Citizens must contact their governors and rebuke them for signing on to this federal EPA program. They must also notify their state legislatures that this is happening and ask them to take action against it.

Also, citizens must remind their elected officials of their oath “to support this Constitution.” This is illustrated in a Yellowstone season-one episode: Patriarch John Dutton is confronted by a group of Communist Chinese tourists who are trespassing on his land. He demands that they leave, and when he explains that he owns the land, one trespasser says, “It is wrong for one man to own all this.” Dutton responds, “This is America, we don’t share land here!”

Here are key steps you can take to help stop UN-influenced climate action plans in your state:

• Contact your state legislators here: Find the U.S. map under “State Legislator Voting Records” (note: high scores denote adherence to the U.S. Constitution). Here you can also find your representatives’ email addresses. Click here to see if they are in session.

• Download your state’s Priority Climate Action Plan (PCAP) and review it. Send or deliver your PCAP critique to your state legislators and demand to know how it got into the state. Furthermore, tell them to get rid of it because it surrenders state sovereignty and property rights to the United Nations. If you email, be sure to confirm that the recipient received the message. Near the top of the email, type, “Please confirm receipt of this email and distribution.”

Dan Titus is affiliated with the American Coalition for Sustainable Communities (ACSC). Their mission is sustaining representative government; not governance, by collectivist-oriented unelected agencies and commissions. He can be reached through the website iAgenda21.com.