Energy Policy
Bush Administration Pushes Through New Oil Shale RulesThe Bush Administration, as part of its effort to lock in policies via administrative rules before leaving office, has put takens steps to open 800 million acres of land in the West to oil shale exploration. The move comes just a few weeks after a moratorium on shale oil leases expired. The independent investigative news site Pro Publica has an in-depth look at an issue that is likely to provoke much controversy in Colorado, Wyoming and Utah for many years to come.
While oil shale has a lot of promise, as detailed by Hal Herring here at NewWest.Net a few months back, it also has potentially immense environmental consequences, and it's not clear it can be extracted in a way that ultimately yields more energy than it consumes.
Westerners in Washington
The Obama Team: Richardson to Commerce
New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, a one-time Clinton Administration Energy Secretary who infuriated his former patron with a critical early endorsement of Obama, will be named Secretary of Commerce in the Obama Administration. The popular governor had made no secret of his desire to return to Washington, but was taken out of the running for Secretary of State when that job went to Hillary Clinton.
Obama has also decided on his key economic advisors, with New York Federal Reserve president Timothy Geithner as Treasury Secretary and former Treasury chief and Harvard President Lawrence Summers as head of the National economics Council. Obama also said in a radio address Saturday that he plans to launch a broad jobs-based stimulous package.
Richardson's appointment follows the selection of Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano as head of Homeland Security. With former South Dakota Senator Tom Daschle heading Health and Human Services, and with Montanan Jim Messina playing a key role as head of personnel at the White House, Westerners seem to be well-represented on the Obama team so far.
But there's still no clear indication on the cabinet jobs that are most important for the West: the Departments of Interior, Energy and Agriculture.
The Tour de France might come to seem less grueling -- and certainly less murky -- than Greg LeMond's two-year legal fight against the Yellowstone Club, which he resumed this week when he asked a Montana judge to order club owner Edra Blixseth to pay him the final $13.5 million of a $21.5 million settlement, a Bloomberg story says.
The judge granted LeMond's request, but the cycling great, who won the world's top cycling race in 1986, 1989 and 1990, will have to get in line for his money. The Yellowstone Club, which Edra Blixseth only won control of in August after a long and bitter public divorce with former timber executive Tim, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Nov. 10.
In her filing in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Butte, Montana, Blixseth tallied the club's debts at about $350 million. The biggest liability is $307 million, not including interest, to Credit Suisse Group. The Zurich-based bank loaned the club $375 million in 2005. [more]
New West Blog
Will Green Building Survive a Recession?
Writer Lisa Selin Davis asks on Grist this week: “… if McDonald’s is seeing record profits due to inexpensive food, will green housing be the equivalent of a biodynamic, $8 a pound plum?”
Industry leaders say not so much:
“Certainly green building is not a fad, rather, it’s a trend,” James Brew, an architect with the Rocky Mountain Institute’s Built Environment Team, wrote to me. “And while this current economic situation has stalled some projects and limited the availability of capital, the trend is still there.”
Read Davis’ story here.
[more]Featured Event
Missoula Filmmakers Preview Their “Best Bar in America”
Missoula filmmakers Damon and Eric Ristau are finishing up their independent feature film Best Bar in America and you can see in the trailer above that it’s taking shape.
So much shape, in fact, that the Ristau brothers are celebrating with a preview party this weekend.
The film, starring the likes of Andrew Rizzo, David Ackroyd, Gregory Collett and Lee McAfee, showcases some of the West’s best bars and places, through the eyes of two men on a quest. Eric said this summer in an interview with New West Missoula: “One of the epiphanies of the film is that rather than it just being a room full of people drinking alcohol there is actually a deeper culture to it and a wisdom that exists in those places as the modern day campfire. It’s a place to exchange stories and a place to exchange wisdom.”
You can check it out yourself: The preview party is on Saturday, Nov. 22 at the Stensrud Building (314 N. 1st Street) from 7 to 11 p.m. (See the full listing at MissoulaEvents.Net here.)
[more]News Brief
USDA Rule Would Send Organic Dairy Cows To Pasture
The United States Department of Agriculture says organic milk cows should be sent to pasture -- at least for 120 days a year.
As Steve Karnowski reports for the Associated Press, the draft USDA rule comes after outcry about big organic milk producers that keep their animals in large feedlots, feeding them organically and producing organically, but not giving them any fresh grass or room to roam. Under the proposed rule, which is up for public comment until December 23, in order to be certified organic, milk cows must be on pasture for half of the year and 30 percent of their dry food must come from grazing.
Boulder-based Aurora Organic Dairy, which produces store brands for the likes of Wal-Mart and Safeway and Broomfield-based Horizon were at the center of the controversy. Aurora spokeswoman Sonja Tuitele tells the AP that the company is looking at the draft rules and will provide comment. As Karnowski reports, Tuitele "said the proposals don't adequately provide for inclement weather. She also said the final rules will need to take geographic differences into consideration." Horizon, on the other hand, is supportive of the proposed rule.
[more]
Guest Opinion: Children Chant
Children’s Chant Against Obama: Never Again
When second- and third-graders chanted "Assassinate Obama" on a Madison School District bus recently, district spokeswoman Janet Goodliffe explained that most of the children didn't understand what the words mean. According to The Associated Press, she attributed the chant to the community's being "highly conservative" and overwhelmingly for John McCain.
I admire Janet Goodliffe as a preschool education leader. But as a teacher, she offered tortured excuses instead of capitalizing on a great teaching opportunity.
This is not an isolated incident. As a former teacher and Idaho Falls school volunteer, Luella Hendrickson, wrote on this page Thursday, after the election, children in her daughter's elementary class condemned Obama for being a Muslim, not being a U.S. citizen, selling out to the Arabs, taking away our guns, etc.
Anyone with ears to hear know these children were parroting their parents. Children get the drift from home: The new president is radical, dangerous and not to be trusted.
How terribly sad.
[more]
New West Missoula
The New New West MissoulaWe're very pleased to launch our new New West Missoula page - a new look and lots of new features. We'll post at greater length shortly on the thinking behind all this, but in the meantime let us know what you think. You can leave a comment here or take a brief survey here. Thanks!
President-elect Barack Obama has chosen Jim Messina, former chief of staff for Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., as one of his deputy chiefs of staff in the White House.
Messina, who partly grew up in Boise and graduated from the University of Montana, worked as Obama’s campaign chief of staff and will now be part of Obama’s tight inner circle as the President-elect prepares to take over in Washington.
Messina is a long-time political figure in Montana who started his career in the statehouse in 1991. In August, Messina did an interview with High Country News‘ Ray Ring, (You can read the full interview, titled “Obama’s Western Ace-In-The-Hole” here) in which he he said:
[more]I think that’s what (much of the West) is—Westerners are not partisan. ... People ask me all the time, “Why are Democrats doing so well in Montana?” It’s because we are able to speak to all Montanans about issues that are important to all, like public access to lands—that’s not a Democratic issue or a Republican issue, but the fact is, Democrats are better at it than Republicans are, and it speaks to a whole bunch of people who are unaffiliated and who care deeply about it.
News Brief
Credit Crunch Trickles to Power Industry
The Associated Press' Matthew Brown today details how the credit crunch is squeezing the nation's power industry, focusing on a hot-button coal-fired plant near Great Falls, Montana.
Brown reports:
If credit woes put the brakes on scores of proposed plants, observers say a shift to other, more expensive fuels could end up soaking customers. The alternative is more frequent and potentially extended outages.
Click here for the story. [more]
