Green groups to Obama: Designate public lands to stop oil and gas drilling

Environmental lobbyists are pressing President Obama to turn more western lands into national monuments to prevent oil-and-gas companies from drilling there. The Sierra Club is leading the charge and is sweetening its message with political sugar, saying Obama could thereby help Democrats win House and Senate seats in midterm elections year. This week it will launch a campaign called “Our Wild America,” which will call for new national monument designations. “We think there’s real opportunities for them to do additional monument designations by the midterm elections and that it’s a positive political thing for the administration and for senators and congressmen,” Dan Chu, who is leading this program, told The Hill in a recent interview. Chu argues the West is becoming “less purple and more blue” because of an influx of Latino and younger voters. The Sierra Club aims to marshal those voting blocs to get new national monuments in New Mexico and Colorado. Chu said Latino and young voters care more about conservation than about energy drilling, citing a poll for the Sierra Club and National Council of La Raza that said 69 percent of Latino voters support increasing the number of national monuments. Kathleen Sgamma, vice president of government affairs with the Western Energy Alliance, said that its polling suggests 74 percent of Latinos favor boosting oil-and-gas production...more