Today, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar demonstrated his conservation leadership by halting the race to mine uranium at the edge of the Grand Canyon National Park for six months, and setting the stage for a full 20-year withdrawal. As John Podesta and other conservation leaders stated in their request several weeks ago, this move by the administration is necessary to protect one of America’s greatest assets and one of the world’s natural treasures.

For those of you that do not follow the politics of our public lands, this might seem like an obvious choice, made simply to capture headlines about protecting Grand Canyon National Park. However, when it comes to public lands these days, it requires a fight to protect even the greatest of places.

Back in 2008, the New York Times broke the story that a British company had begun exploratory drilling just miles from one of the main entrances to Grand Canyon National Park. This shined a national spot light on a mining boom that was growing across the West.

Many of the foreign-owned mining companies responsible for the boom were staking claims right outside national parks. The Pew Environment Group’s Ten Treasures at Stake report depicts in great detail the growing threat. Data from the Bureau of Land Management cited in the report shows that in 1995 there were less than 100 mining claims in uranium-rich areas near the Grand Canyon. By 2007, that number grew to more than 6,000 mining claims, and today there are more than 8,000.

In 2009, Salazar temporarily stopped new claims by issuing a two-year moratorium so the Department of the Interior could study the impacts of uranium mining on Grand Canyon National Park. Without today’s announcement, the clock would have run out at the end of this month. Salazar issued today an emergency withdrawal order that extends the moratorium another six months, until a final environmental impact statement can be issued. Salazar also announced that he has directed the preferred alternative in the final rule to be a full 20-year withdrawal of the threatened lands around the Grand Canyon.

Politicians had lined up on both sides of the debate. More than 60 Democrats, led by Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), sent a letter asking Secretary Salazar to fully withdraw 1 million acres for 20 years in order to stop new mining claims. At the same time, Republicans Paul Gosar (R-AZ) and Trent Franks (R-AZ) requested that Chairman Doc Hastings (R-WA) hold a hearing questioning “the Administration’s perceived environmental concerns” about uranium mining creating a “serious national security threat.”

This political divide should come as no surprise, especially when one considers that the National Mining Association donates three times more to Republicans than it does to Democrats.

However, Gosar was quick to capitalize on the Grand Canyon’s popularity to promote the oil industry agenda. “Arizona’s First Congressional District is home to countless popular vacation destinations such as the Grand Canyon National Park,” he wrote in a press release. “If gas prices continue to soar, our local communities could be hit hard by decreased tourism and fewer visitors.”

Where is that concern for the tourism impact that would be caused by countless mines popping up next to Grand Canyon National Park? What about the impact on the Colorado River that sustains the National Park and provides drinking water to 25 million Americans? The list of reasons for protecting Grand Canyon National Park is long and wide ranging.

Still, some conservative leaders feel it’s better to play up fears of government overreach than recognize that some places should be protected.

On Friday, Transocean, the company that operated the infamous Deepwater Horizon oil rig, told its shareholders that it gave its executives multi-million-dollar bonuses based on the company’s “best year in safety performance.” Today, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar lashed out at the global offshore drilling company, which moved its official headquarters from Houston to Zug, Switzerland in 2008 in order to avoid paying taxes to the United States government. In a statement to ThinkProgress, Salazar criticized the company’s “complacency” about the explosion that killed 11 people, spewed 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, and caused irreparable damage to Gulf communities:

At the end of the day, it was that complacency that created an oil spill that was pouring over 50 thousand barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico a day.

Using the justification of the company’s “exemplary statistical safety record,” Transocean’s executive compensation committee — GenOn Energy CEO Edward R. Muller, oil industry lawyer Martin B. McNamara, and retired Shell executive Robert Sprague — granted CEO Stewart Newman $6.3 million in bonus and “incentive compensation.”

“Transocean just doesn’t get it,” presidential oil spill commissioner William Reilly said in the conference call with Salazar. Reilly’s commission found that “systemic failures by industry management” and a “culture of complacency” were at the root of the disaster that Salazar characterized as a “nightmare” and “tragedy.”

By Christy Goldfuss, the Public Lands Project Director at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

In a hearing on Thursday, Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT) claimed that the overwhelming majority of westerners oppose the administration’s recent work to protect wild lands, a responsibility illegally ignored by the Bush administration. As he was questioning Interior Secretary Ken Salazar at a budget hearing before the House Natural Resources Committee, Bishop held up a pile of letters and claimed that the people directly impacted by Secretarial Order 3310 are the ones complaining “time and time again”:

Why are the people directly impacted by these decisions are the ones who are complaining time and time again about these decisions?

Watch it:

The Wild Lands policy introduced by the administration last December fulfills the government’s responsibility under the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) to “prepare and maintain” an inventory of public lands for all uses, including wilderness. Under the Bush administration, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) had ignored that responsibility.

As Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) said during an oversight hearing last week, “the Bush administration did not want Congress to preserve wilderness so they volunteered to stop looking for it.” In a settlement with the State of Utah, then Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton abandoned BLM’s responsibility to designate new wilderness study areas beyond those identified by recommendations made to Congress in 1993. In the last five years, BLM found more than 18,000 new sites for oil and gas wells but not a single new site for potential wilderness.

When Bishop took the opportunity to support Big Oil, he snubbed the other western elected officials and business owners that support the Wild Lands policy, including those from his own district and state. A letter thanking Secretary Salazar for the Wild Lands policy was signed by 67 elected officials from around the West. People in Colorado were so supportive of the policy that 73 elected officials signed their own letter, and seven businesses from Congressman Bishop’s own district asked him to stop his attack of the Wild Lands policy. That’s 147 businesses and elected officials from around the West that aren’t complaining. They’re saying thanks.

By Tom Kenworthy, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress.

Speaking today at the Center for American Progress, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said the Obama administration will not shy away from pushing for expansions of the nation’s network of protected lands, including the designation of new national monuments. He also issued a strong defense of his department’s new policy giving interim protections to wilderness-quality federal lands just a few days after the House voted to block the use of funds to implement the policy this year.

In unveiling the America’s Great Outdoors initiative last week, President Obama laid the foundation for what could become a solid administration legacy on land conservation in the 21st century. Building on the broad national support for community-based efforts to protect America’s rich land and waterway resources, the initiative seeks to re-invigorate our connections to the outdoors, particularly among the young and urban residents, to facilitate local and state conservation programs, to look at land conservation in a broader, landscape-level context, and to begin managing federal lands to build resilience to climate change.

Interviewed by historian Doug Brinkley, Salazar said the initiative will rely heavily on what he called an extensive and broad-based “dialogue with the American people” about conservation priorities. He defended the administration’s new “wildlands” policy that seeks to provide interim protections for pristine federal lands as was done for several decades before the Bush administration relinquished that authority in a legal settlement with the state of Utah:

We need to manage the public estate for all purposes, including wilderness characteristics. . . . I think there are people who’ve made more of this issue than they should have, including people who are doing it for whatever political agenda they want to serve. . . . Wilderness is not a bad thing.

Watch it:

The launch of the America’s Great Outdoors initiative comes against a backdrop of Republican hostility on Capitol Hill to sensible land conservation efforts by the Obama administration. The House of Representatives has adopted a budget bill that would prevent the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management from implementing its wildlands policy, and only narrowly turned back a GOP-led effort to strip the president of his authority to designate national monuments, a power used by most presidents for more than a century.

Supporters of those extreme measures are so beholden to special interests that want to open treasured federal lands to more oil and gas drilling and other commercial development that they fail to understand how strongly the public supports stronger land conservation efforts.

Even in the midst of the great recession, voters across the country remain strongly committed to funding land conservation and acquisition measures. In 2010, according to the Trust for Public Land, 41 out of 49 state and local initiatives to fund land conservation were approved by voters, and those measures will provide nearly $2.2 billion for those purposes. Since 1988, voters across the country in local and state elections have dedicated more than $56 billion to conserving open space and other land conservation projects, approving bonding and pay as you go ballot questions more than 75 percent of the time.

And a new Colorado College poll conducted in five Rocky Mountain states finds that westerners are strongly committed to conservation and believe that environmental protections and a strong economy go hand-in-hand. The survey found that for 87 percent of western voters “having clean water, clean air, natural areas, and wildlife” is either extremely (47 percent) or very (40 percent) important to quality of life. And two-thirds say that boosting renewable energy production will create jobs in their state.

Westerners understand, Salazar said today, that protected areas like national monuments, are “economic generators” and that there is a direct connection between conserving land and economic development. “We can tone down the rhetoric,” he said. “We in the United States have some very special places — they are not Republican places, they are not Democratic places, they are not independent places, they belong to all of us.”

By Tom Kenworthy, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress.

The lords of yesterday have their knickers in a twist over Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s new policy that reinstates the department’s ability to provide interim protections for wilderness quality federal lands in the West until Congress determines whether they should remain pristine or can be developed.

Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT), who is the new chair of a House Resources Committee panel on public lands, told E&E Daily he’s planning to hold a show trial to demonstrate Salazar didn’t have the legislative authority to bolster protections for Bureau of Land Management properties, charging that the new policy violates the spirit, if not the letter, of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA):

I don’t know anywhere else where an administration has been brazen enough to think they can establish policy without the legislative authority to do so.

You would think that someone who spent 28 years teaching American history and government before he came to Washington to represent the oil and gas industry could actually read and understand the 1976 statute that governs how the BLM manages its nearly 250 million acres of publicly owned land. Or could remember as far back as 2003 – his first year in Congress – when Bush administration Interior Secretary Gale Norton really did abuse her authority and trample on FLPMA and the way it had been applied – even by the notorious James Watt – for more than a quarter of a century. No protest from Bishop about brazen administration actions on that occasion.

It’s not like Bishop would have to read all 78 pages of FLPMA. It’s right there on the first page, in the Declaration of Policy, where it says it is the policy of the United States that “ the public lands be managed in a manner that will protect the quality of scientific, scenic, historical, ecological, environmental, air and atmospheric, water resource, and archeological values; that, where appropriate, will preserve and protect certain public lands in their natural condition.”

A little later on, in section 201, FLPMA clearly states that the secretary of interior “shall prepare and maintain on a continuing basis an inventory of all public lands and their resource and other values (including, but not limited to, outdoor recreation and scenic values), giving priority to areas of critical environmental concern.”

That is the spirit and letter of FLPMA, utterly violated by Norton in 2003 when she and the state of Utah cut a deal as Congress recessed for its Easter break. That agreement, in response to a Utah lawsuit, said the BLM’s authority to create so-called wilderness study areas (WSAs) had expired in 1993, and that the agency would no longer provide interim protections to prevent impairment of areas that had wilderness qualities. That immediately put 2.6 million acres of public land in Utah at risk of development and being disqualified forever as wilderness.

As more than 50 law school faculty members with expertise in natural resource law said in a 2009 letter to Salazar urging him to reverse the Norton policy:

The 2003 agreement…is an unpublished and unenforceable out-of-court settlement, whose legal effect was nothing more than to terminate the litigation….

The Obama administration, the law professors, continued, “is free to adopt the same interpretation of FLPMA that was followed by all previous administrations from the passage of FLPMA in 1976 until 2003, namely, that the BLM has continuing authority…to designate WSAs and to manage them so as not to impair their suitability for preservation by Congress as wilderness.”

By Tom Kenworthy, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress.

When president-elect Barack Obama nominated Colorado Sen. Ken Salazar to head the Department of Interior at the end of 2008, some voices in the conservation community wondered whether the moderate Democrat with ties to ranching and other traditional western industries was the best choice to chart a new direction in managing one-fifth of the nation’s land. But immediately after taking office, Salazar quickly moved to dispel many of those worries with a series of directives that forcefully demonstrated that the Bush era had ended, particularly on policies related to energy development on federal lands:

– He suspended 77 controversial oil and gas leases in Utah, some of them near national parks and national monuments.

– Understanding that renewable energy projects create more jobs than fossil fuels development, he directed his agencies to make the development of renewable energy a priority.

– He withdrew the Bush administration’s industry-friendly research and development leases for oil shale development in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming.

– He launched a department-wide effort to ensure that federal land management decisions respond effectively to climate change.

And, saying “There’s a new sheriff in town,” he began to clean up the scandal-plagued Minerals Management Service, the Interior agency that oversees royalty collections from oil and gas companies operating on federal land and offshore.

A year later, Salazar is still riding herd on an industry that had grown accustomed to getting nearly everything it wanted from Washington. Early last month Salazar announced that his department’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) would conduct more thorough environmental reviews of potential oil and gas leases – including site specific inspections — and that a new departmental team would oversee energy reforms, so Interior would no longer be a “candy store” for the fossil fuels industry:

The previous administration’s ‘anywhere, anyhow’ policy on oil and gas development ran afoul of communities, carved up the landscape and fueled costly conflicts that created uncertainty for investors and industry. We need a fresh look – from inside the federal government and from outside – at how we can better manage Americans’ energy resources.

The Bush administration did industry’s bidding for eight years: from fiscal 2001 to fiscal 2009, more than 41,700 drilling permits were approved on federal lands, almost two-and-a-half times as many as during the previous eight years. In 2005, the Government Accountability Office found that the “dramatic increase” in oil and gas development on federal lands had undercut the BLM’s ability to meet its environmental obligations. The pace of development was such that rural Sublette County, Wyoming – which doesn’t even have a traffic light – recorded ozone levels in February 2008 that were nearly 50 percent higher than federal health standards. But it wasn’t just the numbers, it was also the cherished places the Bush administration wanted to drill: Colorado’s Roan Plateau, New Mexico’s Otero Mesa, Montana’s Rocky Mountain Front, the Wyoming Range, and the list goes on.

Last November, American Petroleum Institute (API) president Jack Gerard accused the administration of taking “a series of actions…to delay or thwart oil and natural gas exploration.” The Independent Petroleum Association of Mountain States (IPAMS) that same month accused Interior of “irregularities” in cutting lease sales and failing to issue $100 million in leases already sold, even though federal records show that more than 45,000,000 federal acres were under lease as recently as last fall, and that more than 32 million of those acres had yet to be into production.

Salazar, to his credit, has not backed away under industry criticisms, calling them “poison and deceptive.” Oil and gas interests, he said, “do not own the nation’s public lands; taxpayers do.”

An all-star cast of the leading voices in the new Obama era is convening at the Newseum in Washington DC to discuss the future of U.S. energy policy. The National Clean Energy Project follows a similar meeting convened by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) last summer in Nevada. But much has changed in the past few months. The new administration — including Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, and White House energy adviser Carol Browner — have committed to a multibillion investment in a new clean energy grid with the economic recovery act signed into law last week by President Obama.

The live webcast of the event can be seen at NationalCleanEnergyProject.org.

Joe Romm is liveblogging the summit at ClimateProgress. The Wonk Room is liveblogging the summit below.

Former senator Tim Wirth of Colorado introduces the meeting.

10:30 PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON

Every time before in the last thirty years when I started this … every time oil dropped people said give my Hummer back. They’re not saying that any more. I want to thank everybody this economic recovery bill has good things in it and I’m grateful as a citizen. We have to maximize the value of this economic recovery. The big short-term gains in jobs and greenhouse gas reductions are in energy efficiency advances.

10:35 VICE PRESIDENT AL GORE

We really do have a planetary emergency. This sounds shrill to many ears. We’re still not used to thinking in those terms. We’ve seen the oil price roller coaster. This roller coaster’s headed for a crash and we’re in the front car.

10:45 HOUSE SPEAKER NANCY PELOSI

We have to hold together or we will all regret the missed opportunity.

10:55 T. BOONE PICKENS

Geothermal does not operate an eighteen-wheeler. Get realistic… I’m running out of time. But we are going to have an energy policy in America.

11:00 JOHN PODESTA, CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS ACTION FUND

We have to recognize we’re living through a terrible recession, a dependence on fossil fuels, and the almost existential threat of global warming.

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