Wyoming

Wyoming Governor Dave Freudenthal is a challenging interview subject.

Don’t get me wrong – it is usually fun to talk to Gov. Dave because he enjoys give-and-take bantering with reporters. And reporters can always rely on him for great quotes – jokes and puns and pithy observations. But he doesn’t give away much, either.

He generally has a clear idea of what he wants to accomplish in an interview, and when he’s done, that’s pretty much it.

Hydraulic Fracturing

Wyoming, a bastion of conservative politics long influenced by the energy industry, is now the first state in the nation to say that the ingredients in hydraulic fracturing fluids used to rupture rock blocking oil and gas reserves will be public information.

In June, the Wyoming Oil and Gas Conservation Commission unanimously ruled that ingredients would be reported to the commission – at the insistence of Wyoming Governor Dave Freudenthal, a member of that body. At the time, it was unclear how that would work and whether ingredients would be public.

In late August, Commission Supervisor Tom Doll clarified the situation, saying the ingredients will be public information and on Sept. 15, the commission’s new rules will go into effect, forcing companies to reveal new details about the chemicals used in a range of drilling fluids, including fracking fluids.

In a phone interview with New West, Freudenthal said he’d pushed a straightforward argument – that the actual formula or recipe for fracking fluid could remain a commercial secret, but that the ingredients had to be revealed to the state and, by extension, the public.

Several energy companies were not enthusiastic about this approach, said the governor, but none of them pushed back as hard as Halliburton, the leading developer of hydraulic fracturing technology.

“Halliburton sent a big-time lawyer to talk to us, but it didn’t go well for him,” Freudenthal said.

GUEST COMMENTARY

Whether or not you care about the recovery of grizzly bears, we face a serious challenge today of how to protect the safety of people who live and recreate in grizzly country, as whitebark pine, the driver of the health of the population for Yellowstone grizzly bear population, continues to suffer from a climate-driven beetle epidemic. At this critical juncture, it has been confusing and unconstructive to see grizzly bear management agencies flip-flop on the fundamental question of whether or not whitebark pine matters to the Yellowstone grizzly bear population, and the effects of its loss on human-bear conflicts.

Interstate Relations

Beginning next summer the state of Montana plans to haul thousands of tons of contaminated mine tailings from an abandoned Cooke City gold mine over Wyoming’s Chief Joseph Scenic Highway, a fragile, 47-mile, two-lane mountain route to Yellowstone and one of the state’s most popular tourist byways.

The project to remove 68,000 to 148,000 tons of toxic material overland from the McLaren mill tailings site on the outskirts of Cooke City 318 miles to a smelter in Whitehall, MT, near Butte also includes reprocessing the tailings to harvest residual gold. Montana officials claim that even at currently high gold prices of more than $1,100 an ounce, the revenue from the recovered gold will barely cover the hauling costs.

But the hauling scheme has some high-level political allure in the Treasure State. The project was celebrated in a June 2 Montana agency press release as “good as gold” and an “example of [Montana] Gov. [Brian] Schweitzer’s restoration economy and a demonstration of Montana ingenuity at its best.”

But in northwest Wyoming, the McLaren mill clean-up proposal is not so glittery, evocative of previous borderland mine and mine cleanup skirmishes reflected in the once-popular bumper sticker: “Montana Gets the Gold, Wyoming Gets the Shaft.”

From WyoFile

In an important Wyoming civil rights case, a federal judge rejected two voting schemes proposed by Fremont County as perpetuating “separation, isolation, and racial polarization in the county.”

Instead, U.S. District Judge Alan B. Johnson, of Cheyenne, ordered the county to provide for district election of county commissioners along lines proposed by members of the Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone tribes. The tribal plan includes one district that is largely Native American.

Judge Johnson’s Tuesday, Aug. 10, order marked a clear victory for tribal plaintiffs in the 2005 voting rights case. The case is one in a series of lawsuits claiming discrimination against minorities, including Native Americans living on reservations Montana, South Dakota and Wyoming, under Section 2 of the federal Voting Rights Act.

“After decades of disenfranchisement, and five years of litigation,” said Gary Collins, one of the plaintiffs and a member of the Northern Arapaho tribe, “it feels great to know that we will finally cast a meaningful vote in the county commission election while still preserving our own tribal sovereignty.”

From the Daily Yonderhttp://www.dailyyonder.com/Daily Yonderhttp://www.dailyyonder.com/

Capt. William Clark is my friend on Facebook. Yes, that Capt. Clark. He gazes over my left shoulder as I visit his page, his red hair tied back, the white ruffles on his shirt collar the result of a good show with the starch. Maybe he approved my friend request because he knows I am his descendant, many generations hence.

Clark was co-leader with Meriwether Lewis of the Corps of Discovery, seekers of a convenient way to travel to the Pacific Northwest over land, by water. They proceeded to find a way, “convenient” if one didn’t mind portaging around that wall of towering mountains striping the western third of the country.

Now more than 200 years later, Capt. Clark busies himself sending his friends electronic dispatches from the trail. Just the other day, he posted this:

(June 20, 1805). While Cpt Lewis is admiring the river scenery, my party has been hiking overland, combatting musqueteers and worse. The feet of the men with me So Stuck with Prickley pear & cut with Stones that they were Scerseley able to march at a Slow gate this after noon!

Was there something disdainful in his tone about his companions “admiring river scenery”? Hard to tell. Regardless, I posted back that his adventure sounded a bit like the hike I’d just taken with my husband and dog along the Snake River just outside of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in Grand Teton National Park.

Adaptive Management

Today 1,500 natural gas wells pierce the Pinedale Anticline and hundreds of miles of road lattice its surface.  An earlier industry-funded study of mule deer in the Anticline showed a 30 percent decline from 2001 to 2007. And the Mesa can expect only further industrialization. Less than a tenth of recoverable gas reserves in the Pinedale Anticline have been extracted so far. Drilling is scheduled to continue through the year 2025, with production continuing until 2065. A total of 4,399 wells are allowed under the current management plan.

As managers sort out contracting processes and monitoring protocol, some of America’s most spectacular wildlife populations still await protection in their home ranges.

A decade ago Wyoming was poised to lead the United States into a new era of environmental planning for oil and gas development projects with the 2000 Environmental Impact Statement Record of Decision for the Pinedale Anticline.

“The Pinedale Anticline Project was the BLM’s first attempt to use adaptive management to extract oil or gas. The project was intended to showcase adaptive management and its potential to mitigate environmental concerns while facilitating development,” writes Melinda Harm Benson in her review of what has happened on the Mesa, a paper titled “Integrating Adaptive Management and Oil and Gas Development,” published in October of 2009. A professor of geography at the University of New Mexico, Benson has worked as a lobbyist and attorney for several western conservation groups, and as a lecturer and research scientist at the Haub School and Ruckleshaus Institute of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Wyoming.

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Congress last had a pay cut in April 1933, during the worst of the Great Depression.

A bill to end that 77-year-long era, H.R. 4720, sponsored by Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick, D-Ariz. and co-sponsored by a bipartisan group of lawmakers was introduced in the House of Representatives in March.

If the bill becomes law, salaries for all senators and representatives would be cut by 5 percent, which would save $4.7 million, and block automatic increases in congressional salaries for 2011.

“The American people have had enough of Washington politicians refusing to live up to their responsibilities,” said Rep. Kirkpatrick. “If elected officials are going to say that this country is facing its most difficult economic times in generations, then they need to act like it.”

VILSACK TO MAKE ANNOUNCEMENT JULY 8

Updated July 7, 1 am: Baucus Continues to Support Open Fields.

Nobody ever accused the federal government of moving rapidly, even with congressionally mandated programs. And the long-ago approved new hunting access program called Open Fields is excellent testimony to that axiom.

After an extensive lobbying campaign by the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, Pheasants Forever, Ducks Unlimited and many other conservation groups, Congress included $50 million in the 2008 Farm Bill for Open Fields, a new, innovative program to help fund dwindling public access to private lands, perhaps the greatest threat to the sport of hunting in this country. 

The story of the short-lived partnership is in one respect a straightforward tale of a business deal gone awry. But it also highlights the challenges Native Americans face when they seek to share in the nation’s prosperity while safeguarding their natural resources and culture.

Indians and whites have been doing business together since the time of Columbus—almost invariably to the Indians’ detriment. But the announcement last year that the Northern Arapaho tribe had been tapped to supply organic grass-fed beef to Whole Foods Markets seemed like a win for all concerned: The tribe would make money off its land, the grocery chain would score points for environmental and social responsibility, and consumers would enjoy the health and culinary benefits of eating free-range beef with a Native American pedigree.

Alas, it hasn’t worked out that way.

Barely a year after it was trumpeted with tribal dances and cooking demonstrations at Whole Foods stores in Denver and other western cities, the beef deal has collapsed. Tribal officials pulled the plug after a price dispute with Paramount Meats, Inc., the California firm that was the middleman in the deal and now provides Whole Foods with grass-fed beef from other sources. The tribe has recently resumed selling its cattle in the conventional beef market.