Jack Markell, the "business governor" of our fair state, took over and claimed that he was going to find the most qualified person to handle the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control. The facade was to convince us country folks that no one in our state or in our region was qualified enough to handle that job.
Just to prove it, he looked no farther than the guy he sponsored in a fellowship to the Aspen Institute, Colin O'Mara. We all know that a guy right out of college working for the town of San Jose, Calif. has to be more qualified and cognizant of the uniqueness of Delmarva than someone whose lived their life here.
Markell, aside from the obvious nepotism, really wanted someone in position to push his Agenda 21 initiatives and the liberal mantra of "environmentalism." Who better to do that than a kid out of California?
Before you start accusing me of seeing black helicopters, you need to look at the record. Delaware had a posterboard program for farm run-off that had been lauded by the US Department of Agirculture and the EPA, yet the first thing Markell did was to scrap it and abdicate state sovereignty by relinquishing the program to the EPA. He gave us curbside garbage service (while raising our taxes) but our roads and highways are still the most littered in the mid-Atlantic. He gave millions of dollars to environmental boondoggles like Fisker, wind farms, solar panel farms and Bloom Energy.
I'm sure the folks who live in Prime Hook could appreciate being washed into the Delaware Bay while the beaches of Rehoboth got replenished due to their not being of greater importance to our governor.
So welcome to California East. The latest and greatest effort is O'Mara's grand scheme to clean the air up on our Small Wonder. He didn't even bother to hide that the plan was a carbon (forgive the irony) copy of the California Low Emission Vehicle standard and the Greenhouse Gas Standard.
Obviously no one dared recognize that our fair state, only 20-plus miles wide has a near constant prevailing northwest wind. Why bother admitting that the smell of my garbage can filled with crab shells are on their way to Bermuda within minutes. Even if I reverted to horse and buggy power, the manure smell would have no effect on Delaware, much less "cleaning the air our children to breathe." (Never let an opportunity for "the children" to cause a guilt trip from the global warming gurus.) We simply will never "clean" our air as long as we have Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh, Chicago and Detroit pumping out those despicable gasses blowing this way.
Aside from this harebrained idea, cooked up in California where fighting state bankruptcy and insolvency seem unimportant, the real cost of "clean auto emission" is going to simply place one more burden on the people who pay their inflated salaries. Best estimates are that such an initiative would cost the average car owner an extra $3,000 on their sticker price. Think that won't effect you as you're keeping your car? Think again. The next step is to outlaw vehicles that don't have these gimmicks.
It's time we stood up to this quackery of induced panic. These people are incapable of understanding that adding ethanol, which costs more to produce than it gets in return, to our gas only costs you and me more out of our paycheck. When the state garners 60 cents from every gallon of gas you buy, they don't really care if you have a gas guzzler. If you buy a more efficient car, they'll simply raise taxes to cover that lost revenue they've already spent.
Let's just admit that the "emperor" has no new clothes and that he's simply strutting around naked. I'm tired of someone who's never done an honest day's work taking my hard earned money so he can add a line to his resume.
George Roof
Magnolia
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