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The Bush Energy Plan & America's Public Lands
1. What is the Bush administration's plan for the public lands of the West?
Since its inception, the Bush administration has been determined to give the energy industry the rights to drill for oil and gas in as many of America's public lands as it can, including our most beautiful, remote and sensitive lands. Now that the administration's end is in sight, federal officials across the West are redoubling their efforts to lease these areas for oil and gas development and to approve permits to drill them, virtually guaranteeing the industrialization of millions of acres of previously wild and open land. Already, almost 26 million acres of these lands have been leased and tens of thousands of wells have been drilled. The dense web of power lines, pipelines, waste pits, roads and processing plants springing up across the West is driving elk, sage grouse, deer and other wildlife from their native ranges. Meanwhile, polluting haze from new industrial activities has significantly impaired visibility in many parts of the West. Things will get even worse if the Bush administration has its way and approves even more drilling in its remaining days -- and the impacts on the wide open spaces of the West are sure to be dramatic and irreversible. 2. Does the plan even target iconic regions such as the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem and Utah's redrock wilderness? Yes. The White House energy plan endangers the wildlife and resources of several of our nation's most celebrated wild regions, including unspoiled stretches of the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem and Utah's redrock canyon country. 3. Did the administration need new laws to implement its energy plan for the West? Yes and no. When the administration took over in 2001, Congress had already enacted laws that gave it ample authority to carry out its energy agenda on the vast majority of our public lands. The administration has used -- and is using -- existing legal authority to set new records in leasing and drilling, particularly in the Rocky Mountain West. In other words, the situation in the West is unlike that in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, where the administration needs congressional approval to permit oil development and has repeatedly pressed Congress to pass the required legislation. In the West, however, the Bush administration didn't like the current laws and wanted to roll back their existing environmental protections to facilitate energy development. It has had some success. In 2005, the administration and energy industry friends in Congress teamed up to pass new legislation, the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which included provisions to expedite issuance of leases and approval of drilling permits and to limit public involvement. It also included three big exemptions from environmental protections under the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act and the National Environmental Policy Act. 4. By what other channels is the administration pursuing its agenda?
Even before passage of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the Bush administration had taken other actions to open up western wildlands to industrial development. It accelerated the process for granting drilling approvals at the expense of thorough environmental review; gave energy companies easier access to oil and gas deposits on public lands; cut royalty payments that companies make to the federal treasury; and reduced environmental protections. And when officials have been unable to accomplish their goals within existing rules, these rules have all too often been ignored. Officials from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the Interior Department agency that manages the vast majority of federal lands and onshore energy resources, have directed field staff to expand access to public lands for energy development and short-cut related environmental reviews. In addition to the nearly 26 million acres under lease in this region, the BLM has issued an unprecedented number of drilling permits in recent years. In the Pinedale, Wyoming area, for example, the number of drilling permits more than doubled in the last five years. Already, there are about 77,000 wells on federal lands in the Rockies. The agency repeatedly suspends seasonal closures designed to protect wildlife from harmful human activities during key times in their life cycles, so that even more drilling can occur. Presently, the BLM is rushing to revise numerous western land use plans to permit even more leasing and drilling. Current estimates are that these new plans could dramatically increase the number of oil and gas wells in the West -- to 126,000 over the next two decades. Wyoming, for example, could see roughly 58,000 new wells while Montana could see more than 26,152. The impacts of development on this scale would be staggering. 5. Has the Bush administration been targeting lesser-known wild places as well? Yes. Under direction from the White House, the BLM has moved ahead to permit damaging exploration and development activities in some of our wildest and most remote places, many of which are little known and completely unprotected. While Yellowstone National Park is itself off limits to oil and gas drilling, many of its signature wildlife species rely on adjacent, unprotected wild lands -- such as Wyoming's Upper Green River Valley, as well as the Jack Morrow Hills area and the surrounding Red Desert -- to thrive. The Upper Green River Valley, a crucial big-game migration route, has been extensively leased for oil and gas development. With more than 90 percent of its area under BLM control, the Jack Morrow Hills area, which spans some 600,000 acres in the Red Desert and is home to more than 45,000 pronghorn antelope, is also threatened. To the south, oil companies have leased thousands of acres of Utah's spectacular redrock canyon country, including sensitive and remote lands in the Lockhart Basin, Hatch Point Plateau, Nine Mile Canyon and Mussentuchit Badlands. Oil and gas companies have also set their sights on unprotected areas of Colorado's San Juan National Forest, as well as the Vermillion Basin and the top of the Roan Plateau. And in New Mexico, the BLM is continuing to pursue opening the largely undeveloped Otero Mesa to significant and extremely harmful oil and gas development over the opposition of the governor, as well as hunters, ranchers and numerous other concerned citizens. 6. Would opening more public lands to oil and gas drilling significantly boost energy production? No. In the interior West, where most of the nation's oil and gas resources lie, more than 90 percent of BLM-managed land is already open for energy leasing and development. Many of the sensitive areas that have been targeted by the agencies are known to have little in the way of energy resources. 7. Is oil shale the answer to our energy needs?
No. Oil shale -- rock that produces oil when heated to extreme temperatures -- is being increasingly promoted by energy companies and their allies in the White House and Congress as an alternative to traditional fossil fuels. But the potential threats to people's health, communities and the environment make commercial scale oil shale development too dangerous to risk -- especially when safer, cleaner and more cost-effective solutions such as energy efficiency and alternative energy technologies are already available. In passing the Energy Policy Act of 2005, Congress sought to fast-track commercial oil shale development on public lands -- despite the huge risks and unknowns. The energy industry is chomping at the bit for this additional option to access federal wildlands, even though the consequences of producing oil from shale are largely unknown and similar efforts in the 1970s failed financially. The BLM has said that it intends to offer commercial oil shale leases in 2008. Development of this resource would likely require an enormous complex of huge coal-fired power plants, which are already the single largest industrial source of some of our nation's worst air pollutants, including sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, carbon dioxide, and mercury -- all of which increase asthma and emphysema and can even lead to death. What's more, these coal-fired power plants and the use of shale-derived fossil fuels would significantly increase global warming pollution. Water quantity and quality in the region are severely threatened by the prospect of oil shale development, and the wild nature of these lands, including their ability to support the wildlife that inhabit them, would be permanently changed. 8. How can the United States better meet its own energy needs? By promoting energy efficiency as well as renewable energy, we can reduce our dependence on fossil fuels such as oil and natural gas and increase our use of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power. Fuel economy standards adopted in 2007 will save more than 2 million barrels of oil a day by 2030, and by expanding production of gasoline-electric hybrids and making more improvements in conventional vehicles, automakers could raise the fuel efficiency of new vehicles even further. Related NRDC Pages Many of the wild western spaces the Bush energy plan targets are part of NRDC's BioGems program. last revised 2.12.08
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