Conservative Field and Stream mag - Bush Energy Bill sucks

You know its wrong when even a conservative rag like Field and Stream
hates the plan:

http://www.fieldandstream.com/field...,489794,00.html

Drilling the Wild
A voracious energy policy afflicts our public lands.
by Ted Kerasote


Rod and gun in hand, and backing the Second Amendment right to own
firearms, President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have
won the hearts of America's sportsmen. Yet the two men have failed to
protect outdoor sports on the nation's public lands. With deep ties to
the oil and gas industry, Bush and Cheney have unleashed a national
energy plan that has begun to destroy hunting and fishing on millions
of federal acres throughout the West, setting back effective wildlife
management for decades to come.
The Invasion Begins
In his second week in office, President Bush convened a National
Energy Policy Development Group, chaired by Vice President Cheney.
Meeting with representatives of the energy industry behind closed
doors, it eventually released a National Energy Policy, the goal of
which was to "expedite permits and coordinate federal, state, and
local actions necessary for energy-related project approvals on a
national basis."

Put into practice through a series of executive orders, the policy has
prioritized drilling over other uses on federal lands, while
relegating long-standing conservation mandates from the 1960s and '70s
to the back burner. For example, in Wyoming, Montana, Utah, Colorado,
and New Mexico, the Bureau of Land Management has approved over 75
percent of the energy industry's applications for exemptions to work
in critical winter range, heretofore closed to protect wildlife—sage
grouse, mule deer, and pronghorns, in particular (the Federal Land
Policy Management Act of 1976 gave agencies the means to close
critical habitat). The BLM has also continued to issue drilling leases
while in the process of writing new resource management plans that
still await public comment. In addition, the Bush administration is
working hard to eliminate Wilderness Study areas—set aside for their
scenic value as well as their importance to wildlife. Most
disturbingly, Congress is now debating a national energy bill that
would codify the policy, making it the law of the land rather than an
executive order. Subsequent administrations—be they Republican or
Democratic—would be unable to institute a more balanced management
plan for our western lands without resorting to new congressional
legislation.

The results of these actions—billed as promoting national energy
security—have begun to turn vast tracts of the western United States
into industrial landscapes. The winners are the energy companies,
which have been able to acquire their leases for as little as $2 per
acre. The casualties are big game, upland birds, cold- and warmwater
fisheries, the traditional interests of hunters and anglers, and the
economic welfare of communities whose livelihoods are based on outdoor
recreation and ranching. The High Cost of Natural Gas
The Powder River Basin in northeastern Wyoming and southeastern
Montana—approximately 13 million acres of prairie, escarpments, and
mountains—provides the starkest example of how the Bush
administration's unbridled energy policy is running roughshod over our
public lands. The BLM's final environmental impact statement for the
area calls for about 66,000 new coalbed methane (CBM) wells (about
14,000 have already been drilled in Wyoming; several hundred in
Montana), 26,000 miles of new roads, and 52,000 miles of new
pipelines.

Peter Dube, an outfitter from Buffalo, Wyoming, has already felt these
impacts firsthand. "My ranch is out in the sticks," he says, "60 miles
from Buffalo, 45 miles from Gillette, and I've had to wait to pull
onto my county road because the truck traffic is so bad—with smog like
L.A." Pronghorn and mule deer habitat has become fragmented, and his
hunters have lost what Dube calls "the aesthetic experience" of being
in a remote and quiet landscape.

Roads and pipelines aren't the only way energy development is making
wildlife more vulnerable. Wherever there are coal seams, CBM is
trapped on the surface of the coal by water pressure. Pumping out the
groundwater releases the methane, which rises to the surface, where
it's collected. However, each well discharges about 16,000 gallons of
salinized water per day—43 million gallons per month for the Powder
River Basin alone. Not only are underground aquifers being rapidly
depleted, but the discharged water must be put someplace. It's been
spread over the landscape; it's emptied into rivers; it's collected in
infiltration pits. The salinized water kills forage for wildlife and
livestock, and it pollutes waterways. Art Hayes Jr., whose family has
ranched on the Tongue River since 1884, told me that the salinity
level in the Tongue has gone up fivefold seasonally since a CBM
company, Fidelity Exploration, began dumping water directly into the
river. Both a tailwater fishery for rainbow and brown trout and a
warmwater fishery for smallmouth bass and walleyes have been
jeopardized. As president of the Tongue River Water Users Association,
Hayes says that he's spent countless days trying to get CBM
development done "halfway sanely"—to no avail.

Energy, Over All Else
Western Colorado's Roan Plateau is also potentially facing the same
sort of development that's taking place to the north: 20- to 40-acre
spacing of well heads, in a land that supports deer, elk, mountain
lions, black bears, turkeys, and a genetically pure strain of native
Colorado cutthroat trout. Such tight spacing puts in a lot of roads,
which fragments animal habitat and displaces varieties of game, making
them more vulnerable to stress and poaching. Keith Goddard, who lives
in Rifle and whose outfitting business caters to about 100 hunters and
anglers each year from across the United States, says, "If the energy
companies put in wells at this spacing, I'm out of business because of
the stress it causes on game. I'd like to see one pad per 640 acres."

The know-how to secure energy in environmentally sound ways exists,
but the will to do so does not. Cheney's National Energy Policy
Development Group, in its report on the energy policy, says, "Enormous
advances in technology have made oil and natural gas exploration and
production both more efficient and more environmentally sound. Better
technology means fewer rigs, more accurate drilling, greater resource
recovery and environmentally friendly exploration." Why, then, aren't
advances in technology like directional drilling being used? Answer:
It's more expensive. The casualties of the energy companies'
penny-pinching are fish and wildlife.

A New Kind of "Wise Use"
Rampant gas development has also come to my own backyard, Wyoming's
Upper Green River Valley, a region that's home to the longest mule
deer and pronghorn migrations in the Lower 48. The BLM has permitted
4,176 gas wells with 5,000 to 7,000 more on the way, and I've
witnessed pronghorn herds fleeing from seizmic thumper trucks only to
be turned around by hovering helicopters.

Despite our dismay at seeing western landscapes transformed in this
way, none of us—hunter, angler, wildlife watcher—can discount the need
for energy. We use it in our vehicles; we use it to heat our homes and
cook our meals. Clearly, something must be done to secure supplies.
But only 3 percent of the world's oil and natural gas lies under
domestic soils, while we used 25 percent of the global total in 2002.
In other words, our energy security can never result from more
drilling in our public wildernesses. Of course, the worldwide quest
for fuel damages the environment wherever it is unleashed. As Doug
Grann, the president and CEO of Wildlife Forever, the conservation arm
of the North American Hunting and Fishing Club, points out, we cannot
sacrifice the wildlife and wild country of this planet while doing
nothing to develop alternative fuels and improving the fuel efficiency
of our cars, factories, and homes.

Legal efforts mounted by conservation organizations over the
inadequacies of the BLM's environmental impact statements, and input
by hunters and anglers to their senators—who are now debating a
national energy bill—can affect how much hunting and fishing will be
left on these federal lands.


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