NEWS ROUNDUP

Glaciers Melting In Montana Park A panel meeting in France this week plans to discuss concerns that human-caused warming of the climate is why the glaciers in Glacier National Park are melting. CBS News correspondent Stephan Kaufman reports one proposal to be discussed at the World Heritage and Climate Change meeting in Paris this week is a plan to designate Montana's Glacier National Park as a "world heritage site in danger" due to global warming. A dozen organizations last month filed a petition asking the United Nations to declare Glacier in Montana and the adjacent Waterton Lakes National Park in Canada endangered, because of glacial retreat and its effect on the environment of the parks. Together they are known as Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park, and are covered by a 1995 treaty as a UNESCO World Heritage Site....
US Hopes to Reverse Oil Decline by Burying CO2 The Department of Energy and some environmentalists hope that in coming decades oil companies will expand programs that boost the output of aging oilfields by injecting the gas most scientists call the main culprit in global warming. Since the early 1980s, almost as long as US oil output has been waning, companies have been pumping small amounts of CO2 into old Texas oilfields to force to the surface remaining crude that is trapped between complicated rock formations. Depending on the price of oil and CO2, the United States could quadruple its oil reserves to 89 billion barrels, by pumping more of the gas into oilfields, the Department of Energy said in a report earlier this month....
An energy boom in Silt, Colo., for better and worse Lloyd and Rita Jane Moore have a long list of grievances against the gas companies that have been drilling on their land for the past five years. An access road cuts through their pasture, making it impossible to irrigate the field. The waste tanks leak, the promised "reclamation" has yielded nothing but weeds, and the trucks and drills create a constant drone of noise. Perhaps worst of all, their well ran dry. "The sight, sound, noise, and odor pollution will last for 20 to 40 years," says Mrs. Moore. "When we moved from Mead [Colo.] to here we got more land and we thought we'd sell this place later and retire.... How are we going to sell the place with no water?" Unlike some buyers, the Moores knew when they bought their 37 acres in 1993 that they didn't own the mineral rights - a common situation in the West known as a "split estate." But no one had drilled gas for years. Now, nearly 3,000 wells are operating in Garfield County, most of them drilled in the past six years, with thousands more planned. And opposition is building among an unlikely coalition of environmentalists, conservative property-rights advocates, ranchers, county commissioners, and mayors. It's a sign that the West no longer embraces energy booms the way it used to....
Trust U.S. with water, city’s told The city of Grand Junction wants more protection for its watershed, despite the federal Bureau of Land Management claiming plenty of safety nets are in place. “The BLM says they have adequate watershed stipulations in place, but there’s no detail,” said Greg Trainor, utility manager for the city. “We say lay out the detail now, so when someone comes in to drill, there won’t be any surprises.” About 13,000 acres of the city’s and the town of Palisade’s watersheds on Grand Mesa were recently offered for sale in a February oil and gas lease auction. All of the acres were bid on by an individual from Denver for about $1 million, but the leases have not officially been granted. A protest process surrounding the leases likely will not be resolved until mid-April, according to officials with the BLM’s state office. City and town officials, however, want to see stronger stipulations in place on the leases to assure that pipelines, well pads, roads and compressor stations don’t lead to degraded water quality....
Compromises for drilling in Wyoming Flying above the most prolific natural gas field in the lower 48 states last summer, environmentalist Linda Baker looked at the spider web of drill sites spread out like an ugly but lucrative quilt. Nearby, another gas-rich field was just starting to be drilled, but this time, Baker hoped, it would have fewer drill pads to disturb dwindling wildlife. In an unusual move, environmentalists and industry here had forged a compromise to allow drilling while also protecting the environment. Questar Exploration & Production Co. local general manager Ron Hogan described it this way: "We win. The government wins. The country wins. The wildlife wins." The alliance excited Baker: "Here in the middle of the hottest gas field in the United States, we have these two extremes juxtaposed right next to each other: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." Not anymore. This rare compromise vanished in the seven months since Hurricane Katrina swept ashore some 2,255 miles away....
BLM hollers uncle over permit processing rule Overwhelmed by the explosion of oil and gas drilling in the Rockies, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management on Monday said it can no longer process permit requests within 30 days, as required by federal law. "Our goal is to process drilling permits within 30 days, but we cannot commit to processing all permits within that time frame," BLM spokeswoman Celia Boddington said Monday. "Legal requirements like the National Historic Preservation Act, National Environmental Policy Act and Endangered Species Act take beyond 30 days. We clearly have a responsibility to do a thorough review of applications in accordance with those statutes." The BLM said it would make an effort to meet the 30-day goal but it would not be possible for all permit applications. That's because the agency has to comply with several statutes and work with different agencies while approving or denying permits. That could cause delays. The 30-day requirement was set in the Energy Act of 2005 to streamline the processing of permits and boost drilling in the Rocky Mountains. Energy companies have to apply for permits to the BLM, and those permits must be approved before they can drill on federal lands....
Off-roader laws face hard turn Pablo Salas rolled into Cathedral City on a recent weekend expecting to enjoy some family fun riding dirt bikes on a popular hill north of Interstate 10. Instead he found a police blockade near Date Palm Drive at an entrance to an area seasoned off-road riders call "the shovel." The spot, one of few great sites left in the Coachella Valley, boasts a mix of open private and public land that includes plenty of trails, hills and sand that are great for riding. It's also the focus of a Cathedral City police crackdown as the community considers enforcing one of the strictest anti-off-road laws in Southern California to give police more time to patrol the rest of the city. If approved, people like Salas, 34, won't be able to ride in the Coachella Valley anymore....
Power plant shutdown fuels fight between tribes, utility On the last day of 2005, the West's dirtiest power plant shut down, forcing the coal mine that supplied it to close. That was keenly felt by the nation's most populous Indian tribe, which lost jobs and millions of dollars in royalties from the world's largest coal company. Those elements now frame a sticky debate in Indian country about one of the USA's thorniest policy issues: reliance on traditional energy sources such as oil, gas and coal, vs. developing renewable alternatives such as wind and solar power. A key to the debate is an arcane regulatory mechanism called pollution credits. Polluters, such as coal-fired power plants, buy and sell credits in a commodities-style market designed to help clean up the nation's smokestacks. A plant that closes and stops polluting earns credits, based on a federal formula, for its owners. In this dispute, an outside coalition of environmental groups for the first time is demanding tens of millions of dollars worth of the plant owner's credits as restitution for decades of pollution and, the groups say, undervalued coal royalties. ...
Jumbo jet applies for firefighting job There could be a new weapon to help battle wildfires this year -- a very big weapon. An Oregon-based aviation company has spent $40 million to convert a Boeing 747 into a firefighting air tanker that can deliver a monster payload of water or chemical retardant on forest and grass fires. The modified version of the largest passenger jet in service must receive certification from the Federal Aviation Administration and pass a series of tests conducted by the U.S. Forest Service. Pat Norbury, head of the Forest Service's aviation operations, said the huge tanker could be used this year in what is likely to be a major fire season in the parched West. The jet can dump 20,500 gallons of firefighting liquids, nearly seven times the capacity of the largest tanker approved by the Forest Service for use this season....
Endangered Species Act: Time to reform old law The environment is cocktail party fare in places like New York, Boston and Washington, D.C. But in places like Libby, Montana, Klamath Falls, Oregon and Nye County, Nevada, where people's livelihoods depend on living off the land, the environment is a life or death matter. In these places, and hundreds of other communities just like them, Bush's promise to balance the needs of nature with the needs of people was well received in places that had suffered years of economic hardship in the name of snail darters, short nosed suckers and spotted owls. People from New Mexico to the Canadian border were tired of being told by bureaucrats and environmental activists that under the provisions of the Endangered Species Act they would no longer be allowed to graze their livestock, water their crops, turn a shovel or saw a tree because some obscure plant, insect, fish bird or animal might somehow be impacted. It didn't matter whether it meant they could not feed their families, schools would have to close or whether recovery plans were based on weird science. Bush's promise to reform the ESA and put people back into the equation by focusing on recovery plans and recognizing private property rights resonated in the rural districts....
Orcas: Loved to death? Luna's death was sad enough in itself. The end for the young orca on Friday off Vancouver Island becomes just a little more disturbing when you remember that the juvenile was part of an endangered species. Returning the lost male to his pod could have boosted the efforts to save Puget Sound's dwindling population of 90 orcas. The orcas are a long way from the historical population level of about 120 to 150. Activists and Canadian and U.S. authorities put a good amount of effort into developing fairly promising plans to reunite Luna with his family, but for various reasons nothing came to pass. For all those efforts, in fact, people probably hastened Luna's doom. The whale died pretty much as people had taught him to live, taking chances around a big boat. In his separation from his family, the apparently lonely guy had found much-too-ready companionship with people who circled, watched and even fed him from their boats, or on shore....
Supreme Court tilts eastward The U.S. Supreme Court has taken on a decidedly more Eastern tinge. With Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito replacing William Rehnquist and Sandra Day O’Connor, court watchers are wondering how the newly configured court will deal with natural resource issues that are of crucial importance to the Rocky Mountain region. The panelists weren’t exactly sure how the eastward tilt might affect upcoming Supreme Court cases, but several speakers pointed out that Rehnquist and O’Connor, with ties to Arizona, had a special interest in Western geography and critical regional water issues. O’Connor and Rehnquist were middle of the road when it came to environmental rulings, voting "with the environment" 31 percent and 36 percent of the time, respectively, said Thompson. It’s unlikely that the most recent appointees will approach that rating, said panelist Nan Aron, president of the Alliance for Justice, a national association of public interest and civil rights groups. A careful scrutiny of Roberts’ and Alito’s judicial history raises grounds for "extreme concern" from the standpoint of environmental interests, Aron said. The two new justices are much more likely to challenge the federal government’s authority to address environmental issues, she explained....
Buyer Beware: Conservation Can Backfire Over the past few decades, nongovernmental organizations have spent billions buying land and creating natural reserves. Recently, scientists have begun trying to evaluate whether these groups are getting their money's worth. Ecologists Gretchen Daily of Stanford University and Peter Kareiva of the Nature Conservancy teamed up with a pair of economists to learn more about the interplay between conservation and real estate markets. Building a basic economic model, the group considered three categories of land: reserves set up for conservation, private lands with surviving habitat, and developed areas that are no longer useful for wildlife. The law of supply and demand predicted a common-sense result: When private land is scarce, buying a big chunk for a new reserve jacks up prices, which makes it more expensive to buy private land in the future. "Your conservation dollar doesn't go as far," says economist Paul Armsworth of the University of Sheffield, United Kingdom, one of the study's co-authors. A bigger concern is that buying land and setting it aside as a reserve simply shifts development elsewhere. A reserve can become a selling point, making the surrounding private land even more attractive for developers who cater to homeowners longing for uncluttered views....
Editorial: Flora, fauna, and folly LAST YEAR, the House gutted important provisions of the Endangered Species Act, benefiting developers and drillers who do not want their projects slowed by concerns for plants and animals facing extinction. Now it is up to the Senate to defend a law that has kept the nation's symbol, the bald eagle, from disappearing from the lower 48 states. As chairman of the Environment committee's Fish, Wildlife, and Water subcommittee, Senator Lincoln Chafee, Republican of Rhode Island, is in a position to ensure that any changes to the law are improvements, not loopholes. The House bill would change the law's very purpose by limiting designation of protected habitats to areas needed to save a species from imminent extinction, rather than the current standard of recovery. The House bill also would require federal agencies to ignore species protection if it interferes with their mission. The Defense Department already has this authority, which would now be extended to agencies overseeing oil and gas drilling, mining, and timbering....
Camping, hiking and fishing in the wild as a child breeds respect for environment in adults, study finds If you want your children to grow up to actively care about the environment, give them plenty of time to play in the "wild" before they're 11 years old, suggests a new Cornell University study. "Although domesticated nature activities -- caring for plants and gardens -- also have a positive relationship to adult environment attitudes, their effects aren't as strong as participating in such wild nature activities as camping, playing in the woods, hiking, walking, fishing and hunting," said environmental psychologist Nancy Wells, assistant professor of design and environmental analysis in the College of Human Ecology at Cornell. Interestingly, participating in scouts or other forms of environmental education programs had no effect on adult attitudes toward the environment. "Participating in nature-related activities that are mandatory evidently do not have the same effects as free play in nature, which don't have demands or distractions posed by others and may be particularly critical in influencing long-term environmentalism," Wells said....