As the Rocky Mountain News reports:
U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar will block confirmation of President Bush’s nominee to run the federal Bureau of Land Management if the agency doesn’t give Colorado more time to review BLM plans for drilling atop the Roan Plateau.
“I’m doing it because of the fact the Department of the Interior and BLM have not been responsive in not allowing at least 120 days for Gov. (Bill) Ritter and others to review the Roan management plan,” Salazar, a Colorado Democrat, said during a telephone news conference Thursday.
Salazar’s move to block James Caswell’s nomination to lead the BLM comes a day after political maneuvers in the House killed an effort by two Colorado congressmen – Democrats Mark Udall and John Salazar – to deny funds to the BLM in 2008 for use in leasing lands on the plateau for oil and gas drilling.
Udall and John Salazar issued a joint statement blaming the Bush administration for “strong-arm” tactics in attaching a “highly speculative” cost estimate to their amendment, leading to its demise Wednesday…
Ken Salazar said he is not opposed to oil and gas exploration, but believes the BLM needs to move more cautiously on the Roan, and that he would not allow western Colorado to become a “sacrifice zone.”
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Salazar and Udall should work to guarantee the cleanliness of the drilling as opposed to trying to stop it. At this time, if these 2 push for high environmental standards to be associated with it, then they have the high grounds. As it is, right now, they just look like a couple of guys who want to stop drilling no matter the consequence.
There is no doubt that W and his ilk are raping and pillaging. Worse, it will almost certainly go to MUCH more sensitive area. And those on the west slope WANT the jobs and do not mind the drilling. But NONE of them want the environment and the water damaged. All that is needed is to change the conditions for drilling this area.
One of the Roan’s chief attributes is its solitude.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Bush will appoint Caswell as a recess appointment.
Congress recesses July 1-10 for the Independence Day holiday. My gut says Caswell will be appointed while they’re gone.
….but history of Bush and how he does things.
the interruption can be minimized. As to the noise, even that can be minimized. New tech is not the big pumping arm. They can truely minimize it
I am guessing that you are correct concerning caswell.
as is wording suggesting BMPs. Making them more compulsory than they already are would be difficult, and implementing more regulations would be tough as well. Enforcement of the EXISTING regulations should be the focus, and that would involve increasing the amount of inspectors and the values of COGCC.
I believe great technology does exist, such as coiled tube drilling, but I also believe that is not the entire answer.
Reid had said that the senate wasn’t going to recess in order to avoid the whole recess appointment thing that Bush has been doing. Instead he was going to have one of the local Senators “on call” (Mikulski, Menendez, Webb) to receive just such appointments so that they could be scheduled for debate.
However it’s still listed as a “Recess” on many of the published Senate calendars. It will be interesting to see what happens.
http://thinkprogress…
The only thing “official” I had seen from Reid’s office was a threat to cancel the July 4 recess if there was no action on immigration, which is now moot.
it’s what we are used to. How many more years of study does Salazar want? One more, three? This has been studied, hashed, and rehashed for years. People on one side or the other are always going to be unhappy with any plan. It’s time to move forward.
You mean the 98.5% of the people who are unhappy trying to get their way selfishly, while the .5% of the people who are happy have to be burdened with waiting to lease more public lands for energy development, in spite of the fact that some 70% of the public lands they have leased in the region remain to be put into production….?
Of the nearly 75000 public comment received on the BLM’s plan (the product of all that hashing and rehashing of which you speak), 98.5% opposed drilling the public lands atop the plateau (which comprise only about 1/3 of the planning area, the remainder being available for development, btw), as do a majority of the local cities and towns (including a couple of the cooperating agencies that worked with BLM to develop its plan). No other plan in colorado BLM history has received even a fraction of this level of comment.
Thus, to pretend that just because it took BLM so long to totally say F-U to a bunch of citizens that cared enough to be involved in a supposedly public input process, that somehow quality was achieved (is this a new conservative formula-> length of bureaucractic obsfucation and bumbling = is directly proportional to value of product?) is silly.
how many live in the Roan area, and what percentage of citizens who live in the Roan area did not comment at all?
Local comment also strongly favored protection.
Often the same ones attending multiple hearings. Objectors tend to be more vocal and present than people who dont care. I’d be surprised if a majority of citizens objected to some drilling on the Roan and to the money that flows from the drilling. Remove enviro groups, those directly affected by drilling, and public officials and the numbers would trail off significantly.
As often as Sen. Salazar ticks me off, this is why he is still 100 times better than a Sen. Coors would have been and that’s what we would have been stuck with had Dems run Mike Miles, much as I liked him, in 2004.
Our Senator would not release his earmarks to CNN, what is he hiding? It seems that he has discovered “Pork” early on.
http://i.a.cnn.net/c…
Over 85% of the BLM lands in the Piceance Basin (home to N.America’s largest migratory deer herd) are already leased for oil and gas development, and large portions of the private lands in the area have long been owned by oil and gas companies. Roan Plateau–one of Western Colorado’s top area’s in terms of species diversity–remains an undeveloped, and for now 50,000 acres of unleased BLM lands–amid hundreds of thousands of acres of public lands that are already leased, or in production, for oil and gas. The few BLM lands not yet leased in the Piceance Basin include this small part (about one-third) of the Roan Plateau planning area, a few Wilderness Study Areas, and that is about it. The rest is already either being drilled or having the plans drawn up to be drilled.
Roan Plateau is home to some of the purest strains of Colorado River cutthroat trout, species that occur no where else on earth, and wilderness-quality public lands. There is no need to immediately lease and drill these lands, and local communities remain steadfastly opposed, jobs or not. In fact they know that the jobs in the gas fields will remain plentiful for the next thirty years until they drill every place they are allowed. Then they will all go away. Western Slope communities know that too.