It may be more a question of when than if President Obama will wave his presidential scepter and create a new national monument in southern Utah. If he does, it will be a good end but a bad means.
When the president created the half-million-acre Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument in New Mexico in May, he said he wasn’t done using the 1906 Antiquities Act, which grants him the power to create monuments without any role or input from either Congress or the states. We’ve been here before with President Bill
Clinton’s 1996 declaration of the Grand Staircase Escalante National
Monument, which killed a potential coal mine on the Kaiparowitz plateau. In both cases, Utah’s political leadership
strenuously, and legitimately, objected to such a change with no
negotiation with the people living on or near the monuments. The monument’s supporters can make the case,
as they did 18 years ago, that political inertia forces the president’s
hand — an inertia illustrated by the 50-year failure to negotiate what
should be considered wilderness on BLM land in Utah. As Clinton said, and Obama likely will say,
action was necessary because the extractors were poised to exploit. But
the reality was that there were lots of hurdles to developing the
Kaiparowitz coal. While there were always mine proposals floated, there
were factors — environmental regulation, coal prices, distance to
market, among others — that made it so no bulldozers were about to start
digging. Even without the monument, the Kaiparowitz coal might still be
sitting there. In other words, President Clinton’s urgency was overstated, and President Obama’s likely will be, too. Rep. Rob Bishop, who heads a House subcommittee on federal lands, deserves credit for trying to negotiate.
Long a defender of oil and gas development, Bishop has reached across
to environmental groups recently. It may have taken the imminent threat
of a monument to make him do that, but at least he did...more
No comments:
Post a Comment