June 15, 2010 05:38 PM UTC

It's the Job Ken Salazar Wanted...

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• by: Colorado Pols

Gets awfully thankless sometimes, as the Grand Junction Sentinel’s Dennis Webb reports:

More than 100 scientists and environmental groups have signed a letter asking President Barack Obama to request the resignation of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, while other leading conservation organizations continue to strongly support Salazar.

WildEarth Guardians, which circulated the letter, contended in a news release Monday that the actions of the former U.S. senator from Colorado haven’t matched his tough talk about being “the new sheriff in town.”

“Mr. Salazar’s failure to clean up Interior is why we’re seeing the mess in the Gulf,” Nicole Rosmarino of WildEarth Guardians said in the release. “We need serious mopping up within this department, and it should start with Salazar leaving.”

But Steve Torbit, regional executive director of the National Wildlife Federation, said he thinks Salazar has “done more in a balanced way” than any Interior secretary in at least a quarter century…

Many of those signing the letter represent smaller, more regional conservation groups. Some, such as the Wolf Recovery Foundation, promote predator species, while several advocate on behalf of wild horses, which Interior manages.

Steve Smith, assistant regional director of the Wilderness Society, said calls for Salazar’s resignation serve as a distraction to the work being done by public officials at a critical time.

“When talking about Ken Salazar in particular, this kind of distraction goes to the level of ridiculous,” he said.

By most accounts, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has worked to balance the need for energy exploration with environmental protections that were neglected under his predecessors in the Bush administration. From what we can see in this letter, the environmental organizations calling for Salazar’s head have a laundry list of grievances, only some of which concern the present oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. On the other side, the oil and gas industry has criticized Salazar for decisions unfavorable to them he has made on resources and leasing.

We’ve not spared Salazar, or assistants like Tom Strickland, from criticism they have coming over the response to the Gulf oil spill: although the more egregious abuses at the Minerals Management Service are not alleged to have continued under Salazar, oversight failures that may have contributed to this spill are going to have to be reckoned with. Nobody seriously claims that Salazar is as cozy and accommodating with the oil industry as, say, his predecessor Gale Norton, but there is obviously the question of whether or not Salazar was strict enough.

The fact remains, all this being said, that Democrats are just not vulnerable to attacks over the environment in the same manner the Bush administration would have been, had they been in charge when the Deepwater Horizon exploded and sank. Republican attacks on the Obama administration for insufficiently aggressive government intervention lack credibility in fundamental ways–ways that remain in the back of voters’ minds even as they want to agree out of frustration. For as long as that remains the case, and especially while the major-player environmental organizations continue to back Salazar, we’re not worried about his job security.