This is important. At the Center for Individual Freedom, I explain how the Obama administration, on at least two fronts (there actually are more fronts, but I focus on two), is harming the environment in the name of helping it. This politicization of science, to ill effect, is exactly what the administration claims to be against, and what the establishment media credits the Obamites for reversing. But the media narrative is wrong: Especially when it comes to the environment, everything is politics, and politicized, for and by the Obama administration.

In the first case I discussed, I didn’t mention it in the piece, but even liberal U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein is against the Obamites (as are all conservatives, as far as I can tell) because they are so wrongheaded on this. The Obamites are using what looks to be bad science to try to shut down an oyster farm that has been operational for 40 years — even though the oysters are good for the overall ecosystem!

It is well known, for example, that oysters, in the words of a National Academy of Sciences report, “contribute to water filtration, the transfer of nutrients and carbon to the sediments, and biogeochemical cycling.” In Drakes Bay, specifically, NAS found that oysters had been a positive ecological force “for millennia until human exploitation eliminated them . . . from the mid 1800s to the early 1900s.”

In the second case, the feds are destroying productive artifical reefs, and killing tens of thousands of pounds of fish per incident, by exploding abandoned oil platforms — at the same time they are sharply limiting the fishing of red snapper despite the fact that snapper are more plentiful than ever. This is truly Alice-in-Wonderland stuff:

In a March 26 phone interview, [U.S. Rep. Jo Bonner elaborated: “These contradictory policies [applying fishing limits while setting explosives that kill fish] highlight the recurring inconsistency and hypocrisy of a federal bureaucracy gone awry…. This is a textbook example of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing – or not even caring.”

What’s next — draining an entire lake in order to save the lake? That hasn’t happened yet, as far as I know, but don’t put it past these people.