That barbed sentiment comes from a veteran of the Big Green power wars during President Ronald Reagan's administration: William Perry Pendley.
He's better known these days as Mountain States Legal Foundation's outspoken and ground-breaking president - his landmark Supreme Court win in the Adarand v. Pena civil rights case was called a “legal earthquake” by Time magazine.
His four books have established him as the go-to authority on natural resource politics and law.
Pendley earned his stripes not only as a reconnaissance navigator in the U.S. Marine Corps' Phantom II jet fighters, but also in the Department of the Interior as deputy assistant secretary of energy and minerals during the Reagan years.
Environmentalists want a Utopian world where they don’t use anything and deprive everyone else of affordable energy so they can’t use anything.
That barbed sentiment comes from a veteran of the Big Green power wars during President Ronald Reagan's administration: William Perry Pendley.
He's better known these days as Mountain States Legal Foundation's outspoken and ground-breaking president - his landmark Supreme Court win in the Adarand v. Pena civil rights case was called a “legal earthquake” by Time magazine.
His four books have established him as the go-to authority on natural resource politics and law.
Pendley earned his stripes not only as a reconnaissance navigator in the U.S. Marine Corps' Phantom II jet fighters, but also in the Department of the Interior as deputy assistant secretary of energy and minerals during the Reagan years.
It appears that managing a bureaucracy was the tougher of the two jobs from his new account, “Sagebrush Rebel: Reagan’s Battle with Environmental Extremists and why it Matters Today.”
I asked Pendley his thoughts on something that matters today: the recent demise of the Interior Department's little-known agency, the Minerals Management Service, which he helped create.
The MMS was dismantled at the direction of President Obama's appointee, Rhea Suh, profiled in this space previously.
“It came as no surprise,” Pendley told me, “It's the same power play as Obama's war on coal - to make energy so expensive that no one can use it.”
“Before President Reagan,” Pendley explained, “the OCS drilling program's pre-leasing activity was run by the Bureau of Land Management and its post-leasing efforts by the Conservation Division of the U.S. Geological Survey.”
The MMS made money for the Treasury in the hard-to-understand world of oil and gas and boosted energy products for Americans for nearly three decades.
Pendley covers the creation of the Minerals Management Service in his excellent book, Sagebrusj Rebel: Reagan's Battle With Environmental Extremists And Why It Matters Today. It came to a final resolution when Congress passed the Federal Oil and Gas Royalty and Management Act whick President Reagan signed on Jan. 12, 1983.
This brings to mind one of the earlier skirmishes over domestic oil and gas leasing.
Secretary Watt ran the Dept. of Interior by MBO - management by objective. One of our goals in the Land & Water wing of Interior was to get rid of the huge backlog of oil and gas applications (it numbered in the thousands). It became apparent that after almost two years BLM had not made sufficient progress on this goal
One day Watt called myself, Assistant Secretary Carruthers, BLM Director Bob Burford and the other Deputy (I don't remember if it was Dave Russel or Dave Houston) into his office. Watt told us he had a proposal on his desk to create the MMS which would take the domestic leasing of oil and gas away from the BLM. I remember Watt saying, "I'm going to make a decision on this next Friday." He then invited us to provide our comments on the proposal.
After the meeting with Watt, Carruthers called his counterpart, Assistant Secretary for Energy & Minerals Dan Miller, and asked why he hadn't at least alerted him to the proposal, and preferably discussed it with him. Miller said the proposal was news to him and that he hadn't submitted or even seen the proposal.
So what was going on here?
Watt was creating competition between two agencies within the Dept. of Interior. And guess what? It worked. Next thing you know BLM had realty, wildlife, range and several other categories of employees working on the backlog of applications and they made great progress..
That's when I learned from Jim Watt that competition is not only good for the private sector, it also works in government bureaucracies.
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