President's Drilling Push Hits Home Stretch
With just over a year left before the next president takes office, the Bush administration is making its final push to lease public lands in the Rockies, Alaska, and elsewhere to the oil and gas industry.
“We are going all-out to blunt this aggressive effort to open more environmentally sensitive lands to drilling,” says Ann Morgan, who directs our Public Lands Campaign. In September, to alert citizens to the scale of the drive to drill, we issued a report indicating that the number of oil and gas wells on public lands in five Rocky Mountain States could increase from 77,000 today to roughly 200,000 within 20 years. “In addition, we are working with Congress to make sure that any drilling is done responsibly, and in appropriate places.”
“A large percentage of this activity would occur on lands that are simply too wild to drill,” says Nada Culver, the analyst who produced the report. In Utah, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management has tried to lease on the perimeter of both Dinosaur National Monument and Arches National Park. The agency also is permitting the industry to broaden its assault on Nine Mile Canyon, home to one of the nation’s most significant collections of Native American petroglyphs.
A second Wilderness Society report this fall documented the growing importance of protected lands and other natural assets in six states in the Rockies. “While the extractive industries remain viable in this region,” observes Dr. Michelle Haefele, an economist who was one of the three authors, “the oil and gas industry, to cite a prominent example, accounts for just 1.3 percent of personal income in these six states [Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and New Mexico]. This region’s economic health is tied closely to the condition of its public lands and other natural assets, and excessive drilling jeopardizes this economy.”
Another author of this report, Dr. Pete Morton, noted that the heavy emphasis on drilling for fossil fuels exacerbates the threat posed by global warming. “The administration should put its effort into renewable energy instead,” he says.
In addition to producing reports to help build the case against drilling in the wrong places, we have intensified our coalition building. “Conservation groups, Native Americans, ranchers, business owners, sportsmen, and others have proved a potent combination,” says Morgan, “enabling us to fend off drilling proposals that would have jeopardized the Rocky Mountain Front and New Mexico’s Valle Vidal. We intend to maintain this momentum.”
