Losing Ground: Energy Development on Public Lands

By Michael Pearlman, 1-17-10

Last week, I had the opportunity to attend the Backcountry Film Festival organized by the Winter Wildlands Alliance and the Wyoming Wilderness Association. Among the films celebrating human-powered winter recreation, was the story of a battle that one outdoors-oriented community has fought for over four decades.

In Crested Butte, Colo., the struggle is being waged over Mount Emmons, known as Red Lady, a mountain with an enormous molybdenum deposit buried beneath the surface. The residents don’t want the mine or the associated environmental impacts, but thanks to incentives provided courtesy of the federal government (circa 1872), the mining company isn’t going away any time soon.

One strategy opponents of the mine are using in the fight is to encourage revision of the 1872 General Mining Law. Under the terms of the antiquated law, mining companies are allowed access to public land for a pittance, the U.S. Treasury gets nothing in return and communities receive few environmental protections. The battle for Red Lady had me wondering what Americans actually get in return for the exploitation of land that is ostensibly theirs.

Last week, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced that his agency is proposing sweeping changes to federal oil and gas leasing policies. The proposed changes would toughen environmental review procedures and allow additional public input before oil and gas companies are allowed to drill on public lands. Salazar’s announcement has elicited the expected responses from each side of the political spectrum--praise from environmentalists and criticism from industry. Oil and gas companies say it’s going to slow the approval process and add more red tape, which will lead to job losses.

The proposal was met with predictable concern by Wyoming governor Dave Freudenthal, who’s always ready to protect the interests of our state’s primary revenue source.  But our economic reliance on oil and gas leases reflects the same boom and bust cycle that’s been occurring for generations. Many Wyomingites realize that this does little to secure our economic future or protect our natural resources. 

To me, the Interior announcement seems like a small step in the right direction toward increased scrutiny of resource development on federal lands, but does nothing to address a deeper issue--America’s energy future. An article published in the Dec. 21 issue of New Yorker magazine suggests that when it comes to energy technology development, our country has somehow managed to lose our status as the world’s primary energy technology innovators.  The detailed piece by Evan Osnos discussed China’s 863 program that was launched in the mid-1980s and has focused on funding new technologies. Since 2001, the 863 program has focused heavily on developing energy technology and the early results indicate the United States is being left in the dust.

According to the New Yorker story:
“In 2006, Chinese leaders redoubled their commitment to new energy technology; they boosted funding for research and set targets for installing wind turbines, solar panels, hydroelectric dams, and other renewable sources of energy that were higher than goals in the United States. China doubled its wind-power capacity that year, then doubled it again the next year, and the year after. The country had virtually no solar industry in 2003; five years later, it was manufacturing more solar cells than any other country, winning customers from foreign companies that had invented the technology in the first place.”

So while the United States was busy continuing a 137-year old practice of giving away federal lands to extractive industries using age old technologies, China was thinking ahead. According to the New Yorker article, we’ll be busy playing catch up for a long time, even if we were to begin investing in new, cleaner energy technology tomorrow. With party politics and all the other problems our federal government is facing, it doesn’t seem likely to happen any time soon.

Is anyone seriously looking at America’s energy future? Or are we simply going to continue to play political volleyball while the true energy revolution occurs across the Pacific? While it’s obvious that resource extraction is not a forward-thinking energy policy, there’s little political willpower to change things, particularly in Wyoming. Here, the coal industry is busy fighting proposals to require clean coal technology; in China, they are busy developing it.

Our state and federal legislators continue to help facilitate the federal land grab by energy companies. Since we are practically giving away the natural resources on public lands, shouldn’t the energy industry at least be held to the cleanest, highest standards possible?  They aren’t and we all bear the costs, now and in the future.  Americans deserve to get real market value for what belongs to them. If energy companies are going to continue to profit from extracting natural resources from these parcels, than a portion of those profits should be collected and reinvested in the development of clean, renewable energy technologies that will help the U.S. advance its energy policy, create jobs and secure our economic future, instead of keeping us stuck in the past.

We are so worried about our jobs and the next budget year that we never pause to consider the irreversible impacts to land owned by all Americans. It seems as though we are doomed to keep repeating our mistakes, rather than taking the riskier (and in the short term, costlier) steps in a new direction. The race for oil and gas development on Wyoming’s public lands has gone full speed ahead for years.Our residents should have more to show for it than a scarred landscape, questionable water quality, and a handful of threatened species.It’s time for our federal government to rewrite the rules that allow industry to pillage public lands and give nothing back.