Energy Development

Governor orders protection of New Mexico mesa
Santa Fe New Mexican; Feb. 1

A new set of critics has started taking umbrage at the Bush administration. They aren't the usual suspects. Smoke is curling upward from brush fires on the political spectrum's starboard side.

Deficit hawks are making noise about the rising pool of federal red. The green-eyeshade set is voicing displeasure at an apostasy – a spendthrift Republican administration putting friction burns on the nation's credit card faster than a party-on liberal.

Defenders of public lands should take note. The profligacy is a clue to understanding the Bush administration's drive to expand and intensify consumptive use of national forests, parks and rangelands.

The political calculus of retaining power has driven the administration into the malodorous realm of crony capitalism, well beyond the bounds that traditional conservative values of fiscal discipline, honest markets and prudent stewardship would have imposed.

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For oil and gas interests coveting hydrocarbons beneath public range, timber companies seeking more taxpayer-funded roads in national forests, or play-machine manufacturers demanding increased access to the farthest reaches of unspoiled public wildlands, Washington, D.C. is a discount candy store.

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When the Bush team took over in 2001, America was assured that the Clinton-Gore pander bears were back in their cage and the grown-ups were back in charge. Yet the administration can't bring itself to say no to special interests clamoring for costly government favors.

Expensive crop subsidies for big farms? Ladle them out. More pork for mature energy industries? Fire up the grill. For oil and gas interests coveting hydrocarbons beneath public range, timber companies seeking more taxpayer-funded roads in national forests, or play-machine manufacturers demanding increased access to the farthest reaches of unspoiled public wildlands, Washington, D.C. is a discount candy store.

The administration's undisciplined behavior is threatening the conservation legacy bequeathed to this generation by Theodore Roosevelt and other visionary leaders.

Consider energy, where many of our nation's problems start. The U.S. depends heavily on fossil energy for generating electricity, producing heat and fueling transportation.

The consequences are serious and growing: dangerous entanglement with unsavory regimes, rising emissions of greenhouse gases and unhealthy air pollutants, and increasing pressure to turn the West's wild places into industrial production zones.

Neither the administration nor Congress has championed aggressive policies to lower fossil energy's high costs through greater efficiency on the demand side and more resource diversification on the supply side.

Instead, egged on by fossil energy interests, the administration is overseeing a full-court press to expand drilling on public lands. Last May, the Interior Department announced that no additional BLM lands would ever again be considered for wilderness designation. For good measure, administrative protections for 6 million acres of potential wilderness in Utah were rescinded.

Three months later, federal land managers were directed to remove impediments to oil and gas drilling in Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico.

The directives were characteristic of the administration's clever strategy for pushing through unpopular decisions giving special interests the reduced land protections they want – avoid hearings, floor debates and other bothersome democratic trappings that come with getting bills passed in Congress.

Instead, issue an obscure rule change or acquiesce to a giveaway legal settlement, often just before newsrooms thin out for a weekend or holiday.

Spectacular wilderness-quality landscapes, such as Colorado's Roan Plateau and Utah's Book Cliffs region, are now targeted for boom-and-bust fossil fuel extraction.

Consider the two cases of Otero Mesa in southeastern New Mexico and the Rocky Mountain Front in northwestern Montana. Both places feature rare ecosystems. Both are in the cross-hairs for oil and gas drilling.

Otero Mesa is a 1.2 million-acre expanse of Chihuahuan Desert grassland that is home to both hard-scrabble ranchers and desert-hardened wildlife, including a genetically pure herd of pronghorn and more than 250 species of songbirds. It's a great place to go quail hunting.

The Rocky Mountain Front is a spectacular junction of rugged peaks, cold rivers and wild grasslands south of Glacier National Park. The Front is one of the few places where grizzly bears can still be seen on their ancestral Great Plains stomping grounds. Elk, cougars and wolves roam the Front also.

The Bureau of Land Management has announced an oil and gas development plan for Otero Mesa. Sportsmen and conservationists are skeptical that BLM will adopt or enforce strong safeguards to reduce the impacts.

Same story with the Front – the BLM is conducting environmental reviews that could lead to drilling on old leases. The possible demise of the Roadless Area Conservation Rule could lead to oil and gas development in areas of the Front managed by the Forest Service.

The noise and fumes that are inevitable byproducts of oil and gas production would debauch the unspoiled grandeur of such places. But once the compressors have shut down for good and the acrid fumes have dissipated, the roads will still be there. And that's a problem that spans generations.

Roads have few rivals as a long-term scourge of wild ecosystems. Roads fracture big game habitat and erode sediment into trout streams. Roads serve as invasion routes for off-road vehicles spreading noise, weeds and engine exhaust.

Roads also are a burden on the taxpayers. The Forest Service can't take care of the roads it has. The agency faces a $10 billion backlog of maintenance and capital improvement projects on its 380,000-mile road network. Keeping roadless areas off- limits to bulldozers would save the taxpayers $15,000 per mile in planning, design and oversight costs the Forest Service ponies up for road construction.

The first rule of conservative fiscal management is to cease digging when one is in a hole. The administration, however, is ready to hand the Forest Service another shovel.

The Roadless Area Conservation Rule is broadly popular. Both Republicans and Democrats in Congress support legislation to codify the rule. The administration, however, has had designs on the rule since taking office. The Tongass National Forest, with 9.3 million roadless acres, was dropped from its remit late last year and the Chugach is likely next.

For the lower 48, the administration is poised to float a rewritten rule that would allow governors to request exemptions for national forests in their states.

Not all governors are likely to take up the offer, but the rule would set a dangerous precedent allowing individual states to dictate management of lands owned by all American citizens. Imagine if the governor of Utah could get the federal government's blessing to punch a highway through Zion National Park.

Come to think of it, such a travesty could happen, thanks to another one of those obscure rule changes. Last year, the administration adopted a "disclaimer" rule that could literally pave the way for road construction in national parks, wilderness areas, wildlife refuges and unprotected wildlands.

The disclaimer rule allows the BLM to validate highway right-of-way claims crossing federal lands under RS 2477, the shorthand name for an 1866 law that grants rights of way for highways across public lands not otherwise reserved for other uses. The law was repealed in 1976 but valid existing claims were grandfathered.

Who wants to build roads to nowhere in back country wildlands? Anyone who doesn't want them designated as wilderness. Roads disqualify lands from the National Wilderness Preservation System because they would no longer be "untrammeled" according to the 1964 Wilderness Act's eloquent definition.

That's why off-road vehicle interests have long seen RS 2477 as a wrench for breaking open protected areas now closed to dirt bikes and ATVs. Local governments seeking expanded commodity production on federal lands see similar utility in RS 2477. Moffatt County, Colo., for example, has asserted right-of-way claims that crisscross Dinosaur National Monument and other protected lands.

Of course, not every claim is likely to be approved. And courts can stop politically driven decisions that harm our natural heritage, as U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan did last month when he blocked the Interior Department's astonishing reversal of a decision to phase snowmobiles out of Yellowstone National Park.

Sullivan's ruling included pointed commentary that gave judicial force to what the park's supporters knew already: The Interior Department's reversal was a premeditated giveaway that ignored laws, executive orders and management policies spelling out clearly that conservation trumps all other considerations in national parks management.

But hoping for judicial knuckle-rapping is a haphazard way, at best, of preventing the administration from turning public lands management into a flea market for special interests. Only an outraged citizenry that spans the political spectrum can protect the heritage lands that all of us own.

There are promising signs. Hundreds of hunting clubs appealed for continued protection of the Tongass National Forest's roadless areas. Sportsmen's groups whose leaders met with President Bush can take credit for putting the kibosh on a proposed Clean Water Act rule that would have ended protection of prairie potholes, playa lakes, vernal pools and other isolated wetlands. Local governments and landowners are fighting the coalbed methane rush.

But many more voices need to raise a lot more hell about the favors being given to what Theodore Roosevelt used to call the "land grabbers."

There isn't much time. The administration is barreling through America's public lands sporting one of those bumper stickers that say, "We're spending our children's inheritance."

A conservation legacy that took a century to build could be frittered away in much less time.

Critics gain numbers,
volume and headlines

By Greg Lakes, editor
Headwaters News
Feb. 4, 2004

Growing dissatisfaction within the president's own party over the administration's environmental and energy policies first began showing up in headlines last spring, and certainly hasn't tapered off since.

From mostly partisan and environmentalist grumbling early on, the criticism has deepened and broadened with administration decisions on snowmobiles in Yellowstone, fire-reduction policy that involves cutting old-growth far from houses, rejection of the Kyoto accords, weakened air and water quality standards and a persistent push to open public lands to oil and gas extraction.

Most recently, the governor of New Mexico stepped in to contest BLM plans to open Otera Mesa to drilling rigs.

In between is recurring evidence that the administration is alienating some of what have traditionally been Republicans' most ardent supporters.

Late last year, the administration's move to exempt Alaska's Tongass and Chugach national forests from limits on logging and road-building prompted a petition to Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth from members of nearly 500 conservation and hunting groups.

Those groups included 40 clubs in Bush's home state of Texas.

National groups, such as Trout Unlimited and the National Wildlife Federation expressed their own protests, and the dissatisfaction of their largely well-heeled urban, suburban and Republican memberships.

Federal agency figures say roughly 34 million Americans older than 16 fish and 13 million hunt.

The so-called hook-and-bullet crowd was a key component of Bush votes in 2000, but at least some rue the changes they've wrought.

"You've got a bunch of timber beasts setting environmental policy in Alaska, and that's wrong," said former Alaska Fish and Game Commissioner Carl Rosier, quoted in the Christian Science Monitor.

"In three years, we've witnessed a 180-degree swing from Bill Clinton to George W. Bush."

Other Republican officials have split from the administration line, including New York Gov. George Pataki, who wants to reduce auto emissions, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) who joined with Connecticut Democrat Joe Lieberman to push limits on greenhouse gases, Republican Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, with a variety of environmental measures, and the eight Republican senators who voted against the administration plan to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The exception is the National Rifle Association, whose officials say their 4 million members are more solidly behind Bush than any other president in recent history.

Closer to home, the BLM is reviewing applications for three companies with natural gas leases on Montana's Rocky Mountain Front, where drilling was banned on Forest Service land seven years ago.

The new plan has drawn protests from the Montana Wildlife Federation and its 25 member groups, and Trout Unlimited, as well as sportsmen, ranchers and conservationists across the state.

They note the area is one of the last in the lower 48 where wildlife populations migrate from mountains to plains; it's home to the nation's second-largest elk herd, the largest bighorn sheep herd and a sizable population of grizzlies; and it would produce, at best, enough natural gas to supply the nation for a few days.

In New Mexico, Gov. Bill Richardson signed an executive order last week protesting BLM plans to open to drilling the Otera Mesa, a 100,000-acre tract of pristine Chihuahuan Desert.

Ranchers, hunters and environmentalists had already filed objections, while oil and gas companies complained BLM rules intended to protect habitat created too much extra expense.

Richardson, a Democrat, said his order was not a blanket indictment of the industry, but his administration would file a formal protest by next week.

We'll quit cold turkey
No matter what else transpires, we will run out of cheap and easy oil, and that alone will put an end to the drilling.

Our economy has been built on abundance, but there was only so much oil in the first place. Some estimates indicate we will hit the wall on the cheap and easy stuff sometime between now and 2010, and that we will be hitting the same wall with natural gas soon after.

We'll be getting off it cold-turkey. The effects will likely be very disruptive. There is no excuse for this. People in the energy industry, such as M. King Hubbert, saw it coming decades ago.

More recently, in just the past year or so, three books have come out to explain it in some detail. In order of their publication, the three books are The Party's Over, Hubbert's Peak, and Out of Gas.

Hitting the supply wall will come too late to save us from climate change. A year or two ago, the Financial Times reported that a prominent European climate scientist was invited to a major conference of European CEOs. He told them that, even if all burning of fossil fuels was stopped immediately, the planet's atmosphere is already set on a course of warming that may last for three more centuries.

Author's blog:
Balance the carbon budget
Everywhere I look these days, I see budgets.

The federal budget boggles the mind. President Bush forecasts a 2005 deficit of $521 billion - the approximate size of the entire federal budget as recently as 1980.

Fun fact: 521 billion $1 dollar bills weigh 521,000 metric tons. You'd need the largest ship in the world, a 1,500-foot supertanker named the Jahre Viking, to carry the whole load.

Speaking of supertankers - the U.S. is utterly dependent on their seaworthiness. We use 20 million barrels of oil per day, and nearly 58 percent of the total is imported, a deficit of a different sort.

Few disagree that heavy dependence on imported oil is bad for America. Our security and economy are at the mercy of unpredictable forces outside our control. A nightmare scenario for security planners is an extremist gang overthrowing the decadent family running Saudi Arabia, which sits on 25 percent of the world's proven oil reserves.

Where people disagree is on the solution. The Bush administration and some in Congress demand more domestic production. That's why the push is on to expand drilling in the Rocky Mountains.

Sure, there's a fair amount of oil in the Rockies, about 2 billion barrels of proven reserves, according to the most recent federal estimates.

Some ought to be produced. But drilling rigs alone won't make us energy independent. The problem is that demand is outrunning domestic supplies.

The Department of Energy forecasts that petroleum demand will rise 43 percent by 2025. Imports are expected to total 70 percent of consumption that year.

Even if domestic wells could put a large dent in imports, perpetuating our dependence on petroleum is probably not a good idea anyway.

That's because another budget is out of balance - the global carbon budget.

Every year, burning fossil fuels sends 6 billion metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere. Forests, soils, and the oceans soak up only half. The remainder is sitting up there stoking the greenhouse effect.

The signs are apparent. Glaciers are melting at Glacier National Park. Forest pests are expanding their ranges and going after moisture-stressed trees. In the northern Rockies, foresters have noticed beetles attacking whitebark pines above 8,000 feet.

Scientists - along with Defense Department analysts, by the way - are worried we will hit a tipping point that will send huge carbon pulses upward, accelerating global warming. Vast stores of carbon now locked in permafrost and in weird seabed ice formations could be released if temperatures get warm enough.

What to do? Like good conservatives, we must balance our budgets. The best place to start is energy efficiency.

Efficiency does not mean doing without life's conveniences. Efficiency means squeezing more work out of energy.

Efficiency will help us off the foreign oil treadmill and buy time to phase in non-carbon energy technologies. Efficiency will lessen pressure to poke holes in Western forests and rangelands better suited for conservation or ranching.

Theodore Roosevelt wrote in 1909: "Conservation of our resources is the fundamental question before this nation, and that our first and greatest task is to set our house in order and begin to live within our means."

Spoken like a true conservative.

Anti-intellectual votes
Dave Skinner's screed against Republicans for Environmental Responsibility accuses the group of clever fakery.

Dave knows a little bit about clever fakery. His comments on this page admit to being a Republican. No surprise there.

As a former employee of the now-defunct People for the West (also known from its money trail as Corporations from the East), Skinner's political leanings have never been obscure to the few that bother to observe.

But that's not what Mr. Skinner told Flathead County voters in 2002 when he ran for the Flathead County Commission as a "lunch-bucket Democrat."

I can't confirm Rocky Barker's assessment that Dave is "one of the strongest intellectual voices speaking for the values he carries."

But if this is so, it just reinforces my sense of a growing anti-intellectualism among the electorate. Skinner secured less than 5 percent of the total votes cast in the 2002 primary election.

Politics are about people
A couple of quick snarls here.

I honestly am somewhat torn over the energy issue. But the fact remains that here in the West, even in Montana, with a five-week hunting season, what about the other 47 weeks of the year?

Do we set aside everything for a five-week seasonal economy?

As for Ken's gripe about the "facts" in DiPeso's column, why bother?

For instance, Ken's never been up the Blackleaf or past the old gas sites up there. I have. The world has not ended up there, and it won't, just like it's not over on the Alberta front.

Next, the $10 billion road backlog on USFS is a recently inflated number pushed out there by Taxpayers for Common Sense. It's hooey, predicated on the expectation that all the road network would be upgraded with a gravel cap. Ain't gonna happen.

In fact, taking the numbers from Wildlands CPR's "report" on all the great road-rip jobs available (with tax subsidy dollars, of course) and crunching them honestly shows the actual backlog is in the $1.6 to 1.8 billion range.

And as for the Moffat County RS 2477 issue, again, hooey. The Greens demanded wilderness in areas that THEY wanted, Babbitt did their bidding over howls from the locals (I lived in Routt at the time) and the fact is, there is value to extracting the underground resource and retaining RS2477 rights for access to those resources.

BLM was assessing "ways" in Jeep Cherokees, which are not monster trucks. Never mind the times I poked around in the Moffat County "wilderness" in my 1965 Ford van with no ground clearance and an unlimited-slip differential. That's eyeball truth that such roads exist in fact and can't simply be disappeared through bureaucratic fiat.

Finally, as for the ad hominem angle, Ken, the fact remains that we're talking politics here, and politics is all about people, the associations they make, whose money they spend, and why they spend it like they do.

TR 4, for example, spends his money on the League of Conservation Voters. And probably most important, why IS Pew Trust bankrolling this dog-and-pony show, after all?