Rant of the Week: Oil and Gas Leasing next to National Parks

Re: This AP article:

Uproar over federal drilling leases next to parks

To me, the deciding factor in exactly how horrible of an offense this is on part of the Bush Administration depends on whether these parcels were nominated by industry for the lease sale, or whether the BLM itself put these parcels up for lease.

The vast majority of leases are nominated by the oil and gas industry for regular (quarterly) lease sales. The BLM is a completely passive participant when this is the case. If a company nominates some parcels, they go up for auction. If this was the case for the areas next to the parks, this is not a “Bush administration ‘fire sale.’” (Unless, of course, if someone within the government asked industry to nominate these parcels. But if this was purely an issue of industry interest, the Bush administration had nothing to do with these parcels being nominated).

However, if the BLM itself nominated these parcels and put them up for auction, which it can do (see Roan Plateau), then there definitely was collusion by the Bush administration and it makes this intentional and quite despicable. One of Sierra’s quotes makes be believe this is indeed the case:

Roy said that when he asked Selma Sierra what was going on, she replied: "We added some tracts, sorry we didn't notify you.”

If industry did nominate these parcels, I fail to see how they would be added after the fact. I would guess that all the industry-nominated leases were submitted, then Sierra got a call from Washington telling her that these controversial parcels would also be added to the list. Yes sir Mr. Cheney, sir!

(However, I can’t let the Park Service get away with this talk about being “shocked.” They should not have been surprised in the least. These areas had been leased before. It’s not like BLM is opening up new areas for development. The Park Service knew darn well that any lease sale these parcels could be nominated and leased at any time.)

Okay, with that out of the way, let me try to argue that managing with buffers makes no sense from a land management standpoint and that BLM would have a hard time denying these leases from a legal and consistency perspective.

I guess it’s quite obvious that the lands the National Park Service want excluded from oil and gas development are not national parks and are not managed by the NPS. What’s the point of a National Park boundary when it seems some folks want surrounding lands managed like a National Park? So let’s say the government adds a 10-mile buffer on public land to every National Park, which would receive park-like restrictions. So then would we need another buffer to protect values of that buffer? An extreme question maybe, but can’t you see how buffers can be never-ending?

The government would be heading down a very slippery slope and set a precedent by buffering National Parks in Utah. The Utah BLM State Director is right that no policy exists for this, and there’s a reason for that. Why do you think there has never been this kind of buffer applied in the US? Because this has been discussed in detail before (even in environmentally friendly DOI’s such as Bruce Babbitt’s) and they’ve come to the realization that it’s infeasible and doesn’t make sense. Let’s slide down this slope, shall we? Let’s say we buffer all National Parks. Why should it stop there? Don’t State Parks have scenic values that warrant protection? What about National Wildlife Refuges? Wilderness areas? Wilderness Study Areas? Come on folks, these special designations apply to what is inside of these areas, not what is outside. Managing for values outside the special area opens a whole new can of worms in public land management. In addition to oil and gas development, should we close these areas to vehicle travel? Rights-of-way? Any other actions that would be visible looking outside from inside the park?

All stipulations on oil and gas development on federal minerals must be developed within a land use plan, BLM Resource Management Plans, to be exact. Not one RMP has these stipulations for buffers. If lands are not closed in an RMP, they are available for leasing and development. So BLM would have a very hard time making the case that these areas should not be leased. In fact, an oil or gas company would have grounds to sue the BLM for making an arbitrary and capricious decision to close those areas to development outside of their normal process.

The best way to handle this issue is to use the tools BLM has in its tool box to protect scenic values. All BLM lands have a Visual Resource Management (VRM) Class designation. VRM Classes range from Class I, which is extremely restrictive and is typically only used for wilderness areas and would allow only very minor modifications of the landscape, to VRM Class IV, which would allow a strip mine. A VRM Class II designation would allow for minor modifications of the landscape. Under this designation, BLM could require oil and gas operators to hide their infrastructure around topographic features and/or camouflage. This would be the best way to protect the viewshed from the park onto BLM land.

I agree looking beyond the arches in Arches National Park and seeing a gas well stinks. And I fully agree that if these parcels were put up for auction by the BLM and not oil and gas companies, this is yet another Bush Administration give away. However, I don’t think that closing a 10-mile buffer around the parks to oil and gas development is a logical solution for this problem.

Rant of the Week - Government audit of oil and gas leases

Back in June, I blogged about an effort in Congress to force oil and gas companies to develop their idle leases on federal land. If a company doesn’t drill a producing well on their lease within 10 years, it expires and would be available to re-lease at a later date. I made the case that energy development on our public lands is happening quite quickly enough for my tastes and that there is nothing wrong with having idle leases out there. So now our Government Accounting Office (GAO) looked into the issue and found (*gasp!*) that indeed there are a lot of acres out there that are going undeveloped. Here’s the AP article:

Report: Drilling on federal lands could be faster

Let me be frank: I think the findings and recommendations are a bunch of bullshit. The reason these areas are undeveloped lies solely with the oil and gas companies, not with broken agency processes or excess regulation. Sure, environmental reviews often take more than the mandated target of 30 days. However, the vast majority of these Applications for Permit to Drill (APDs) are on leases which have already been developed, not in these undeveloped areas. About 95% of the development that takes place on public land is within established producing oil and gas fields. Look where we’re seeing most development in the west now: Pinedale Anticline, Piceance Basin, Uinta Basin, etc. Companies are spending money where they are certain they’ll get good returns on their investments. Drilling holes in wildcat areas that haven’t been explored yet is financially risky and far less common. So if APDs are being held up, they are not for these undeveloped areas.

DOI lackey Stephen Allred is flat-out lying in the last paragraph of the article. Boy will I be glad to see these industry idiots leave in a couple months. No department has ever been as corrupt or incompetent as Bush's Department of the Interior. Contending that environmental reviews are holding up development amounts to nothing more than another Bush administration attempt to gut all environmental oversight and regulation. If you want to speed up the processing of APDs, increase the freaking BLM budget so they can hire more people to process them. But since that’s never going to happen, I guess we’ll have more deregulation to look forward to.

Regarding Allred’s assertion that we need to fast-track development, this already happened. Thanks to the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the Bureau of Land Management does not have to prepare Environmental Assessments (EAs) anymore for oil and gas wells that meet several new criteria. Instead, they can do a Categorical Exclusion (CX), which is little more than a one-page paperwork exercise. No impacts are analyzed and often no mitigation is applied in CXs. These are called "Section 390 CXs," and are being challenged in court by environmental groups.

In some cases, fast-tracking is appropriate. For example, if a company wanted to re-drill a well on an existing pad and there would be less than 5 acres of new disturbance, and the original well was already analyzed in an EA, then fast-tracking the well makes sense. However, other criteria overreach. For example, the act said that if the agency disclosed the impacts of many wells in a field development Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), all future wells in that area can be permitted by a CX. The problem with this is that a field development EIS is quite broad, and the exact locations of the wells might not be known at that point in time. Therefore, the analysis of environmental impacts is not assessed in enough detail in the EIS; the wells should be subject to individual review under EAs, not fast-tracked by using CXs.

Anyway, setting aside all the complicated details, it’s safe to say that we cannot responsibly move any farther towards fast-tracking oil and gas development than we already are. I shudder thinking what else our politicians might do trying to speed up development even more.

Professional Rant of the Week

A huge reason an Obama victory is so important.

Nicholas D. Kristof: Rejoin the World

Rant of the Week: Obama the Socialist

McCain’s latest hook is his charge that Obama’s proposed tax plan is “socialism.” I clearly remember the right painting Gore and Kerry as “liberals,” but I’m surprised Rove never played the socialist card. Maybe they didn’t need to. This desperate attack is McCain’s last hope, and I don’t doubt it’s having some effect, if not only on the already fired-up right.

My first response to this charge would be similar to the charge that Obama is Muslim: So what if he is? Some Americans act as if socialism would end the world as we know it. They fail to see that socialist concepts are alive and well in America and even more so in Europe. We’ve got a public school system, Medicare and Medicaid. Socialism! Taxation has always had some element of redistribution. If the right wanted to yell “socialist!!” they should have done so long ago. It may be harder to make a billion dollars in a left-leaning European country, but these countries often rate out at the top in happiness matrixes. Oh no, fewer poor people and more happy people, the horror!

While all those reasons hold true, the biggest annoyance about the GOP’s charge it this: John McCain is trying to dupe Americans into thinking a government can run without tax dollars. He’s said time and time again that “no one should be paying higher taxes.” Give me some of what you’re smoking, John! McCain might say he’s planning on cutting spending enough to make up for not needing to raise taxes. Like what? McCain has bragged about how he’s going to cut $18 billion in earmarks. So McCain would cut less than 1% of our federal budget and that would eliminate the need for taxes? We’ve borrowed millions of dollars from China and other countries to pay for Bush’s war, subsides for corporations and out of control spending. No surprisingly, apparently McCain also favors this policy. I’m sick of our leaders whining, pandering, and peddling fear while pretending our government can run without taxes.

You can call it socialism. You can call it spreading the wealth around. I call it finally paying our bills.

Rant of the week: On the ground at the Sand Wash wild horse gather

Back in July I ranted about wild horses and mentioned that the BLM would have a horse gather in October. I got to get out for a day to watch the gather and I thought I’d share the experience will you all.

The BLM figured there are around 420 wild horses in the Sand Wash basin herd. Through monitoring studies, BLM concluded that the Appropriate Management Level (AML) of horses in Sand Wash is from 165 to 365 animals. Wild horses have a 20-25% recruitment rate, so every four years or so, BLM has to round up the excess horses to return the herd back to 165.

BLM hires one of two companies from Utah to perform all wild horse gathers in the west. Their teams are made up of cowboys, called wild horse wranglers, and a helicopter. The chopper is used to round up the horses, flying low to guide the horses into a trap, which funnels them into the corrals. The cowboys utilize a trained horse to entice the wild horses into the funnel. The horse is aptly called the “Judas Horse.” Right when the horses are about to enter the trap, a cowboy releases the Judas Horse, which runs into the trap. The wild horses naively follow along, only to realize once in the corrals that they were duped.

Once in the corrals, they aged, sexed and sorted into groups. Typically, there are 3 main groups: 1) Horses to be removed from Sand Wash and transported to the holding facility Canyon City. These horses are typically the older horses (which would die quicker and therefore cost less to hold) and horses that aren’t likely to get adopted. 2) Horses to be put up for adoption in Craig after the gather, which include younger attractive horses that are more easily trainable. 3) Horses to be returned to Sand Wash, which include a variety of ages and types.

As I mentioned in July, BLM is trying some new things to reduce horse numbers, and thereby reducing costs and hardship to horses. So for the first time in Sand Wash, the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) assisted the BLM in applying fertility control to the mares released back into the Herd Management Area. The contraceptive drug is applied to the mares every couple years thereafter (by dart gun I believe) to slow or halt reproduction in the herd.

From Friday October 17 though October 23, the contractor gathered nearly every horse they could from the basin. Last I heard, 238 were transported to the holding facility at Canyon City, 20 were held for adoption (the guess is that 5-10 will be adopted), 51 studs and 62 mares were returned to their home on the range. BLM figured 15 – 40 horses might have escaped capture, putting the new Sand Wash herd at about 130 – 150 animals.

Check out this video of horses coming into the trap. Notice the Judas Horse on the left, which is released once the wild horses approach the trap.

Helecopter herding in wild horses into the trap (Craig Daily Press photo)

Horses being aged and sexed in the corrals.

A pair of foals sorted for adoption.

Read a 7 News article about the gather and watch their video here.

Read a Craig Daily Press article on the gather here.

Read a Craig Daily Press article on the adoption here.

Two rants of the week

Barack Obama is running an absolutely stellar campaign

Although I thought the Dems were a bit slow getting the campaign going, they have done everything right since the DNC kicked off. I think his campaign has learned important lessons from 2000 and 2004. He’s responding to personal attacks perfectly, but not responding in kind. He’s quick on his feet when responding to policy attacks. His campaign has studied the bloggosphere and this knowledge is reflected in his responses.

Obama is spending his boatloads of campaign contributions well. His television ads are amongst the best political ads I’ve seen. Sure, some stretch the truth, but I think there’s some legitimacy to the position that “everybody does it,” and unfortunately, the public can believe these ads. If you don’t put out a few of your own, you could take a hit. (I thought it was pretty funny how McCain was all bent out of shape in the 3rd debate. “Your ads lie!” he whined. Um, John, take a look at 90% of your ads, then get back to us). His positive ads where it’s just him talking to the camera, providing solutions, are a huge difference maker. Americans do want to talk about the real issues, and there’s clearly only one campaign doing so.

Obama has debated well. There were a few instances where I thought McCain left an opportunity for Obama to respond, but he didn’t take it up. I have to defer to his campaign’s thoughts on those issues, because I’m sure he’s been briefed on anything McCain would say and how to respond, if at all. I thought the debates went a long way in alleviating a lot of fears about Obama.

Ever since throwing his hat into the ring, Obama has run an efficient grass-roots campaign unlike any other in our history. O has used the internet extremely effectively in fund raising as well as networking supporters. Obama is offering to put your name in a drawing to meet him if you canvas 30 houses or call 70 phone numbers. Obama has energized young supporters in unprecedented numbers, who in turn help register new voters, the majority of who support Obama. They’re actually organizing car pools for Election Day to make sure everyone who wants to can get to a polling station. This grassroots network shows Obama’s commitment and engagement with the voters.

I am very hard pressed to come up with any mistakes that the Obama campaign has made to date. Anybody? Props to Obama, Axelrod and the rest of the crew.

A recent poll: Where I was wrong and where I was right

The other day I was out in the field with a coworker that I’ve never discussed politics with before. Turns out he’s a registered Republican, mostly so he can vote in the primaries in Moffat County (the Republican candidates usually run uncontested in the general election, so the Republican primaries are the only time many Moffat County residents get to make a choice between candidates). Like many open minded folks around here, he’s a fiscal conservative but liberal on social issues. He’s moderate and most importantly, undecided in the presidential race.

He told me how he’s always been a fan of the “maverick” McCain and was read to X his name in November. However, one thing has turned him off: the selection of Sarah Palin as a running mate. He saw her as vastly unqualified and it worried him to think Palin could be our president one day. He was sickened by her vicious personal attacks on Obama. This, of course, reflected on the decision making of John McCain. I didn’t ask my coworker outright whether Palin made him switch his vote from McCain to Obama, but it did provide some proof that Sarah Palin could be John McCain’s biggest mistake in this election.

I did write in an earlier post that selecting Sarah was a smart move. I am now happily eating my shoe on that one. There is more proof than personal communication. Last week a CBS/New York Times poll came out, showing a growing lead for Obama. They were asked, “Why has your view of McCain gotten worse?” 21% answered his selection of Sarah Palin as VP.

That’s very significant. But so this: 23% said his attacks on Obama were the reason they soured on McCain. This is where I was right. Even neocon William Kristol called for McCain to end the attacks. I’ve been contending this election year that finally negative attacks are proving counterproductive. In past elections I’ve been holding out for the American public to say “enough!” and punish these nasty attacks by voting the other way in November. If these poll numbers are any indication, this is finally the election. In an important Senate race in Colorado, Republican Bob Schafer has run the most vile attack campaign seen in the state. Tons of oil and gas money are buying attack ad lies against Democrat Mark Udall. The more vicious the attacks get, the more Udall leads in the polls. This time the Karl Rove distraction tactics are not working. Now, the only question which remains is if the guilty parties are indeed punished, will campaigns abandon attack tactics next election? At least I can naively hope so.

Rant of the Week: The Vice Presidential Debate

First of all, I thought Palin did a good job for the level of her knowledge. She is a confident speaker, and she came off quite well. The problem, though, is that she’d been studying talking points on many subjects and instead of answering questions, she could only reproduce those talking points. When a she got a second chance to talk about the same issue, she repeated the same talking points. She simply does not have the breadth of understanding needed to answer tough questions and counter Biden. But she did well, and I do like the Palin I saw last night much better than the one that dwelled in a sewer of lies and insults during her RNC speech.

Sarah Palin is not prepared to be VP. This is not a huge issue in itself. I don’t she’ll have much to offer McCain’s administration, but I don’t think she’ll hurt things. What’s more important here than Palin’s lack of qualifications is McCain’s decisions making. What does this say for how he will select his cabinet? Will he again defer to the evangelicals when nominating Supreme Court appointees? McCain either showed a lapse of judgment or showed that he’ll cave to interests within his party. Both possibilities are extremely dangerous for our country.

You know what sickens me is the excuses Repubilcan cheerleaders are giving for Palin’s performance. Check this quote out from the Denver Post forum:

Palin was short changed by the fact that a black woman (another jealous one) Obama supporter was the commentator. From the get go, Palin had a nick against her and it set the tone of her being on her heels. How dare them pull that stunt. It was disgusting that Gwen somehow weasled in to that role. What a joke.

I KNEW this excuse would come. There is absolutely no question Gwen ran a fair debate; this assertion is completely unfounded. Frankly, I can’t believe I’m hearing it. Making silly excuses doesn’t help their case. What is their excuse going to be when she meets with leaders from China? Are they going to cry and whine, “It’s not fair! They don’t like her! They’re hard on her.” She could be the vice president people. Do you expect everyone to treat her with kiddie gloves and if they ask her tough questions will they whine some more? Using “the black woman” excuse is extremely cheap, pitiful, and cowardly.

Fact is, Gwen’s debate format helped Palin. While Jim Lehrer let the candidates go back and forth and respond to each other as much as they wanted, Gwen cut off the debate on the question after only one response. Palin does not do well when she’s pushed on a topic. This was quite apparent during the Couric interview when Katy pushed her on legislation, what she reads, how McCain voted for regulations, etc. In this format, Gwen didn’t push her for more specifics and neither did Biden. Palin would have looked a lot worse in a Jim Lehrer formatted debate. Right wingers all should be thanking Gwen.

Joe Biden was on point. I’d never seen him debate this well. He did exactly what he needed to: attack McCain, not Palin; show a good grasp of the issues; propose solutions that the Obama campaign would implement; he was respectful and not condescending. In fact, he passed up many chances to nail Palin on her record; he passed up every one. When Palin gave the wrong name of the commander in Afghanistan, Biden didn’t even correct her. And at least Biden answered the questions.

After watching both debates, I can see a pattern forming. Obama and Biden proposed solutions for many issues. Nearly every time they talked, they said, “We should do X, Y, and Z.” If anyone contends that they don’t know Obama’s platform, that he doesn’t propose solutions, only catch phrases, they’re either not listening or they’re lying through their teeth.

Any observer can contrast that sharply with what McCain and Palin have been offering in speeches and debates. First of all, they peddle fear that Obama is going to raise taxes (only for the 5% of Americans who make more than $250,000) and that Obama would sit down with Ahmadinejad (false again—he said he would meet with Iran representatives, not Ahmadinejad). Both Palin and McCain invoked both these falsehoods again and again. They talk about their records and their competitors’ records, but rarely talk about what solutions they would put in place. They don’t even have a response for the Democrats’ charges, they just deflect the question and repeat the same talking points.

Whether you like them or not, there is zero question which party is offering the solutions here. I’m hoping Americans are tired of fluff and dodging tough questions and issues.