Phoney Envrionmentalist Rent Seekers

O’Malley Watch has another great post about the Teflon Leprechaun’s approval of the state’s dubious Kudner land purchase. I highly recommend it.

Martin Watcher links to a Star Democrat investigation into the deal, which exposes the sellers David Sutherland and Walter Petrie as “phoney environmentalists.” The land deal essentially allows Sutherland and his cronies to artificially increase the value of the whole area, develop the good land, then use state and county money to preserve the less valuable land.

Sutherland and Petrie are rent-seekers, that is, those who obtain from government what they cannot get fairly on the open in market. I touched a bit on this in my post about Johns Hopkins’ climate change policy. I highly recommend Chris Horner’s book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism. Horner, a former lawyer, lobbied the Clinton-Gore administration to sign the Kyoto Protocols, on behalf of ENRON. ENRON was strategically positioned to make a killing on the energy scarcity and higher energy costs that Kyoto would have created. Google Books has a fairly extensive excerpt.