Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.
Monday, October 15, 2012
Obama's Great Alaska Shutout : Interior bans drilling on 11.5 million acres of 'petroleum reserve.'
President Obama is campaigning as a champion of the oil and gas boom
he's had nothing to do with, and even as his regulators try to stifle
it. The latest example is the Interior Department's little-noticed
August decision to close off from drilling nearly half of the 23.5
million acre National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska. The area is called the National Petroleum Reserve because in 1976
Congress designated it as a strategic oil and natural gas stockpile to
meet the "energy needs of the nation." Alaska favors exploration in
nearly the entire reserve. The feds had been reviewing four potential
development plans, and the state of Alaska had strongly objected to the
most restrictive of the four. Sure enough, that was the plan Interior
chose. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar says his
plan "will help the industry bring energy safely to market from this
remote location, while also protecting wildlife and subsistence rights
of Alaska Natives." He added that the proposal will expand "safe and
responsible oil and gas development, and builds on our efforts to help
companies develop the infrastructure that's needed to bring supplies
online." The problem is almost no one in the
energy industry and few in Alaska agree with him. In an August 22 letter
to Mr. Salazar, the entire Alaska delegation in Congress—Senators Mark
Begich and Lisa Murkowski and Representative Don Young—call it "the
largest wholesale land withdrawal and blocking of access to an energy
resource by the federal government in decades." This decision, they add,
"will cause serious harm to the economy and energy security of the
United States, as well as to the state of Alaska." Mr. Begich is a
Democrat. The letter also says the ruling "will
significantly limit options for a pipeline" through the reserve. This
pipeline has long been sought to transport oil and gas from the Chukchi
Sea, the North Slope and future Arctic drilling. Mr. Salazar insists
that a pipeline could still be built, but given the Obama
Administration's decision to block the Keystone XL pipeline, Alaskans
are right to be skeptical...more
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