Bureau Proposes Opening Up Utah Wilderness to Drilling

[tpsbmam]

Source: WaPo

The federal Bureau of Land Management is reviving plans to sell oil and gas leases in pristine wilderness areas in eastern Utah that have long been protected from development, according to a notice posted this week on the agency's Web site.

The proposed sale, which includes famous areas in the Nine Mile Canyon region, would take place Dec. 19, a month before President Bush leaves office. The targeted areas include parts of Desolation Canyon, White River, Diamond Mountain and Bourdette Draw.

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Terry Catlin, the bureau's energy team leader for Utah, said it has not finalized the list of lease sites but bases them on "industry nominations" and provides a 30-day comment period before the sale.

"At the end of the 30-day protest period, we look at the protests and make our final decision at this point," Catlin said in a telephone interview yesterday. "There isn't anything unusual about this timing. We do a lease sale every three months."

The agency will publish the list of lease sites Tuesday. In a notice being published today in the Federal Register, the bureau says it is finalizing five resource management plans applying to about 9.5 million acres, a required step for parts of the sale to go forward.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/30/AR2008103004662_pf.html

[aquart]

1. Bet those leases go real cheap to real friends.

[Bobbieo]

2. I've been following this story for weeks now on my Native Unity blog.

All of the Bureau Chiefs, now, are Bush appointees. They are cleaning out the West for their corporate buddies and no one is stoppiing them. What a shame!!!

[russspeakeasy]

3. The Romney Retirement Program?????

[phusion]

4. Oh fuck no!

Please help write in and protest this...

[BearSquirrel2]

5. Post bonds ...

Ya know what. I'm not really opposed to the idea of "clean drilling". But I'm not sure they know what "clean" means.

So here's my plan. Instead of having to go to court to recover damages ala Exxon Valdez, why don't we just figure out what the biggest disaster would take to clean up and have the companies in question make bond deposits on a per barrel basis. If they have a disaster, cleanup would come directly from these bonds and we wouldn't have to go to court would get it.

The oil company would draw dividends on principal of the bonds so they would have an incentive to avoid environmental damage. When the wells are capped, the investors would get the full value of the bonds.

Problem solved. Of course the oil companies would balk because they want to externalize all their costs onto the taxpayers and ravage the environment.