New West Network

<< Newer articles <<    Home     >> Older articles >>

'An Absolute Crime'

Setting up a face-off with the White House, Sen. Ken Salazar said this week that along with two other members of the Colorado congressional delegation, he isi sponsoring a bill to restore the traditional 50-50 split between the states and the federal government of mineral leasing revenues on federal land.

The division was changed to 52-48 (in favor of the feds) in a little-noticed provision in the $555 billion appropriations bill signed by President Bush in December. Wyoming Gov. Dave Freudenthal, whose state stands to lose dozens of millions in mineral royalties, has called the change "an absolute crime."

In other energy news: Colorado offers rebates for residential solar-power systems; huge new natural gas pipeline sends fuel east from the Front Range; and coal hits near-record production levels.
[more]

Introducing...

The best way to check out The New West magazine is to subscribe. We want to know who’s interested in The New West, so we have made the magazine available free to qualified subscribers who answer a short questionnaire.

• Click here for the questionnaire for a free subscription.
• You can also subscribe for $9.95 a year by clicking here.

In the Spring Issue and online here:

• Montana’s Cash Cowboy
• Real Ranch Living: Not Everyone is Selling Out
• Essay: The Family Farm, Version 2.0
• Essay: Tracks Across A Landscape
• Have Your Ranch & Develop It, Too
• Design Showcase: The Big and Little of Western Building
• Stuff It: Can Wolf Hunting Help Conserve the Species?
• Traffic Perplexes New Western Communities
• Boise in Its Own Little Bubble
• Revenge of the Resource Economy
• Spotlight North Idaho: On the Agenda: Youth, Growth & Silver
• Spotlight North Idaho: Players of the Panhandle
• Spotlight North Idaho: Coeur d’Alene Tribe Rides the Idaho Boom

[more]

By Robert Struckman, 2-01-08 | comments (22) | email story | print story

Idaho State Politics: Commentary

Once upon a time, in a conservative Western state with a significant LDS population, some citizens – concerned about traffic congestion and the increasing pollution in the valley location of its capital city – wanted public transit to help take the load off the beleaguered highway system. Stymied due to a lack of funds, they found themselves trying to convince a largely rural state Legislature that the affected counties should have the right to tax themselves to pay for it.

But this story has a happy ending. The citizens convinced the Legislature, the population approved the tax, the system was built, and ridership is double what the experts predicted – for 2020.

The tipping factor Utah had on its side is one thing Idaho lacks: the strong support of its business community. [more]

The CO2 Underground

The U.S. Department of Energy will fund a 10-year, $38 million project to study the long-term storage of carbon dioxide in deep geologic formations on the Gulf Coast. For the next 18 months, the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas will pump about a million tons a year of CO2 into brine formations up to 10,000 feet below ground, near the Cranfield oil field about 15 miles east of Natchez, Miss.

Capturing and storing 60 percent of the CO2 emitted by U.S. coal-fired power plants would require the transport and disposal of a daily volume roughly equal to U.S. oil consumption per day, according to an MIT report.
Texas alone could hold 40 years' worth of US emissions.

In other energy news: shale-oil exploration still only prospective on the Western Slope; Gov. Ritter appoints an environmentalist to the Colorado Public Utilities Commission; and state lawmakers try to head off uranium mining in Northern Colorado.
[more]

Monday Business Roundup

The ski resorts of the Mountain West are looking at millions of dollars in lost revenue as unseasonably warm temperatures and an almost complete lack of snow pushes back opening dates for the region's major resorts. This is especially troubling in a year when resorts across the region have invested hundreds of millions in new developments and upgrades in hopes of luring more visitors.

Telluride became the latest ski area to postpone its opening when it said on Friday its planned opening date of Thanksgiving Day is unrealistic given the lack of snow.

Many mountain operators were hoping for a big dump early this week to allow for Thanksgiving skiing – but it now appears that the real snow will happen only in the far northern Rockies, bypassing Colorado and Utah.

In other business news: DIA beefs up its snow-handling force; big labor creates a "behemoth" union for state employees; and Boulder minds the gap between revenue levels and relatively lavish city services.
[more]

Coal Is Still King

Coal up, solar down – that's the message from the markets and the media this week, as solar-power companies face a possible expiration of the tax credits for solar investments, while coal producers and coal plants continue to boom despite the looming threat of carbon-emissions caps.

The Solar Energy Industries Association posted an alert on its Web site citing "widespread reports" that the long-awaited energy bill being laboriously squeezed through Congress will not include a measure to extend the Solar Investment Tax Credits.

Meanwhile The Economist reports that for all the news about states in the U.S. delaying or canceling the construction of new coal-fired plants, coal is still king (Sub. req.) in much of the world. "Utilities in both [the U.S. and Western Europe] are running their coal-fired plants at full throttle, have several new ones under construction and would like to build even more," the influential British newsweekly reports.

In other energy news: Western governors team for TV ads pushing energy policy legislation in Congress; "micro-hydro" makes a comeback in the Roaring Fork Valley; and the process of divvying up state oil and gas revenue in Colorado goes on, and on, and on...
[more]

BWAM!

The Bike/Walk Alliance for Missoula, one of this town’s newest non-profits, has an admirable mission, eager volunteers and already more than 90 members. It also arguably has one of the worst acronyms -- BWAM -- of any local organization (a quick Google search shows a Missouri-based bike group of the motorized variety and a definition in the Urban Dictionary that can’t be printed here).

We’ll try not to hold that against them. After all, Missoula needs all the help it can get improving its bicycle and pedestrian network. The group’s organizers also throw a really good chili dinner, which NewWest.Net attended last weekend. The event served as launching point of sorts for the group, which officially formed last year but had yet to host any community gathering like this one. [more]

ENVISION MISSOULA

More public transportation. More bike lanes. Higher density housing developments. Fewer traffic jams. Is this the future of Missoula County?

The broad consensus of attendees of the Envision Missoula workshop held at the University of Montana Tuesday night agreed that it ought to be.

The workshop, sponsored in part by the Office of Planning and Grants (OPG), offered Missoulians a chance to share their visions of what Missoula will look like when the population eventually doubles to 200,000, and to discuss how questions of land-use are tied to Missoula’s transportation future.

The data gathered at the workshop -- which will repeat Wednesday and Thursday -- will be used to help inform Missoula's 2008 long range transportation plan update. [more]

SMARTER GROWTH

Checkerboard subdivisions and fragmented open space spotted with homes is not a popular development plan for the Northern Rockies.

Owners dividing large tracts of land to create smaller lots to sell to buyers became widespread post World War II. This formalized method of expansion assisted in cities rapidly growing suburbs into surrounding farmland.

The problem: The old approach did not address the overall impacts and ignored the need for a comprehensive approach to planning communities – hence, it created rural sprawl.

The lesson: develop in town, or when it happens in rural areas, reduce the impacts through good design.

Through the Sonoran Institute’s research in Building from the Best of the Northern Rockies book project, the group has witnessed a remarkable renaissance of well-designed neighborhoods and subdivisions in the region. [more]

Hurdles For E-Trains

Backers of Northern Colorado's ambitious FasTracks plans for light rail spidering out from downtown Denver cannot be pleased with the results of this week's referendum in Washington State.

There, voters soundly rejected a long-term, multi-billion-dollar mass transit plan for Seattle that had as its centerpiece the Puget Sound's first light-rail system. Notably, among the groups expressing doubts about the "Roads & Transit" Proposition 1 were environmentalists like the Sierra Group.

In other energy news: Gov. Ritter unveils his Climate Plan while seeking middle ground with the oil and gas industry, and energy prices hit an unfortunate trifecta with gasoline, heating oil, and diesel fuel all topping $3 a gallon. [more]

<< Newer articles <<    Home     >> Older articles >>