ROCKY MOUNTAIN LAND USE GROK

Plant a Little CO2

By David Frey, 8-09-07

Some ranchers in Wyoming are making money putting something aside from crops in the ground: CO2. Guilt-ridden carbon emitters are paying ranchers to offset their polluting ways by sequestering carbon on their ranchland. And not just in Wyoming. Some 200,000 acres in New Mexico and another 200,000 in Montana signed up for the National Carbon Offset Coalition, which gets ranchers to use carbon-storing practices on their land and sell carbon credits on the Chicago Climate Exchange.

“Storing, or ‘sequestering,’ CO2 is a new market, and one that could prove profitable for agriculture,” writes the Casper Star Tribune. “Some farmers and ranchers in Wyoming figure they might earn a few extra thousand dollars a year by selling their carbon offsets to coal-fired utilities and others who emit greenhouse gases.”

The idea isn’t without skeptics. The payoff isn’t huge: healthy Wyoming rangelands offset just .27 metric tons a year. Niobrara County rancher Terry Browder tells the Star Tribune he might be able to earn $1 an acre. Still, he’s not complaining. His technqiues, like intensive rotational grazing, have been shown to store more carbon than is produced.

“Everything we do to sequester (carbon) is good for wildlife, good for watersheds—all down the line,” Browder says.

The Star Tribune also reports on worries about uranium companies’ plans to conduct in-situ leach mining in Wyoming and throughout the West.

“Damage to our surface, to our grass, to our livelihood is extensive,” says Echo Klaproth, taking issue with industry claims that the process is low-impact.

Some 120 people turned out for a public meeting held in Casper by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Rick Chancellor, administrator of the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality’s Land Quality Division, complained the NRC never bothered to let his agency know about the meeting.

In Colorado, score two for environmentalists on the contested Roan Plateau. First, Sen. Ken Salazar, D, did enough arm-twisting to get the Bureau of Land Management to hold off on leasing the western Colorado landmark for gas leasing. Salazar had pledged to hold up confirmation in its incoming director unless it gave the state’s new governor, Bill Ritter, also a Democrat, more time to study the proposal. The BLM agreed to give Ritter 120 days to read up.

“At the end, what I ended up getting from the BLM, they will give the state of Colorado their undivided attention,” Salazar told the Rocky Mountain News.

The second score goes to Salazar’s brother John, a Democratic congressman from Colorado. He and Rep. Mark Udall, D, successfully pushed a provision in the House energy bill that would ban drilling atop the plateau. Now, the bill moves on to a conference committee to hammer out differences with the Senate.

“While I was pleased to learn that the Interior Department finally decided to delay leasing the top of the Roan Plateau,” John Salazar told the Associated Press, “I believe we must continue to strike balance, and the language protecting the top of the Roan in the energy bill does just that.”

Across the state line in Utah, Eagle Mountain residents are taking issue with what they see as the town’s rubber-stamp mentality when it goes to development.

“There are many things that are wrong with our city, and many of those things have been done in the name of development,” Darren Jones tells the Salt Lake Tribune. Jones is one of 35 members of the new Citizens Coalition of Eagle Mountain.

Controversy isn’t new in Eagle Mountain. The city is poised to see its 10th mayor in 11 years in November. Its former mayor resinged while awaiting trial on allegations of misusing public funds.

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