House Resources Committee Reconciliation Bill Mandates Arctic Drilling and Public Land Sell-Off

News Release

House Resources Committee Reconciliation Bill Mandates Arctic Refuge Drilling and Public Land Sell-Off

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October 26, 2005 (Washington, DC) - The House Resources Committee today passed a budget reconciliation package that includes controversial provisions to drill in the long-protected Arctic Refuge and revoke the 24-year old moratorium on offshore drilling. In addition, although the committee, chaired by Rep. Richard Pombo (R-CA), moved to mitigate some of the damaging public lands provisions originally proposed by Chairman Pombo, the committee nonetheless neglected to protect from mineral extraction Wilderness Study Areas and other lands that have been administratively protected from mineral withdrawal.

Yesterday, Chairman Pombo had originally put forth a proposal to require the Secretary of the Interior to sell lands containing mineral deposits within public lands and national forests, including National Parks, National Monuments, Wilderness Areas, National Wildlife Refuges, and the National Landscape Conservation System. The committee today voted to protect National Parks, National Monuments, Wilderness Areas, National Wildlife Refuges, Wild and Scenic Rivers, National Trails and National Conservation Areas, but it neglected to protect more than 16 million acres of Wilderness Study Areas and other places, such as Headwater Forest Reserve (CA), the Rocky Mountain Front (MT), and the New World District adjacent to Yellowstone National Park that had previously been protected from mining.

“Unfortunately, the Committee isn’t really diverging from its bottom line goal of selling off our public lands for private profit,” said Dave Alberswerth of The Wilderness Society. “These proposals are bound to be hugely unpopular once people realize that lands that were meant to be protected for their grandchildren are instead being whittled away without any public input.”

The draft reconciliation package would also:

Open up protected areas of the Outer Continental Shelf to leasing and drilling (Subtitle E);
Require the “patenting,” or sale, of valuable mining claims on public lands for $1000/acre (Sec. 6202);
Requires that 35 percent of the nation’s oil shale resources be conveyed to corporations in a single fire sale (Sec. 6401);
Declare an unwritten environmental impact statement on oil shale development “deemed adequate” to fulfill all legal requirements Sec. 6401);
Re-open provisions of the recently enacted energy policy act to require the Bureau of Land Management to “rush to judgment” in considering oil and gas drilling permits on public lands and national forests (Sec. 6519).