Richard WarnickSynfuel Update: The BLM Wasn’t Kidding
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is doing whatever it can to help the Bush administration wreck our public lands. Back in February, I wrote:
They can’t be serious…. The federal government has come back to the idea, sensibly abandoned in the early 1980s, of extracting tar sands and oil shale in Utah. These are known as synthetic fuels, or synfuels. To use an analogy, it’s scraping the bottom of the barrel for the last drop of oil.
Mining tar sands in Alberta, Canada.
Oil shale and tar sands development in Utah would ruin vast natural areas to the point they would be unrecognizable and ecologically defunct. Wilderness designation isn’t even relevant to this debate. Under the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976, the Bureau of Land Management is required to “take any action necessary to prevent unnecessary or undue degradation of the lands.” This applies to all public lands.
You might think that Republicans wouldn’t want to break the law in order to visit large-scale destruction on one of the most Republican states in the nation. Well, nobody ever went broke by underestimating the Bush administration’s capacity for doing the wrong thing. The BLM not only wants to lease Utah public lands for synfuels, but they want to offer the oil and gas industry a subsidy in the form of reduced royalties. The new leasing policy sets the royalty rate for oil shale at 5 percent, far under the current 12.5 percent for domestic oil and gas.
This adds one more to the stack of disastrous policy decisions that the Obama administration will be responsible for reversing early next year.
November 18th, 2008 at 7:54 am
You know, Richard, it’s like the Bushies looked around at the disasters they had already created in the wars and in the financial markets, and thought to themselves, “What have we missed? Oh yeah, we have failed to sufficiently rape the environment, not to mention thank Utah for being our biggest supporters from day one!”
November 18th, 2008 at 9:33 am
I suspect this is only the most vislble feature of the reward package Utah will earn for its EXTREME republican loyalty.
The ‘Lame One’ will no doubt find some time for an overpriced speaking gig in the Behave State, rationalizing the damage to his flock. Makes me wanna hurl.