By Jessica Goad

Yesterday, the House Natural Resources Committee passed three bills to mandate and encourage oil and gas drilling in the West.  All of the bills throw open more public lands to drilling, mirroring the wishes of the oil lobby, the American Petroleum Institute (API).

Just two days ago, API released a report outlining its political wish list.  It included two provisions about drilling on lands that belong to American taxpayers:

We Are Calling For: The opening of the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge – 1002 Area; portions of the Rocky Mountains; lifting of the drilling moratorium in New York, and timely review projects on federal land.

We Are Calling For:  The federal government to increase lease sales and adopt pro-access processes to improve development of U.S. oil and natural gas resources on public lands.

All three of the drilling bills passed by the Natural Resources Committee yesterday seek to open more lands for oil and gas development, increase lease sales, and streamline access — just as API has asked Congress to do:

-  H.R. 4381 from Rep. Scott Tipton (R-CO) requires planning for an “all of the above” energy plan on public lands and requires the relevant secretaries to meet a “domestic strategic production objective.”

-  H.R. 4382 from Rep. Mike Coffman (R-CO) mandates leasing and requires that at least 25 percent of the acres nominated by the oil and gas industry be leased, in essence turning land management decisions over to the industry.

-  H.R. 4383 from Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-CO) would force the Interior Department to issue oil and gas leases within a certain arbitrary time frame, as well as punish citizens for exercising their legal right to protest oil and gas leases.

Not surprisingly, these three members have taken significant campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry. In the 2012 cycle, oil and gas has given Tipton  $44,250; Coffman:  $77,500; and Lamborn:  $31,250.

More light was recently shed on the cozy relationship between members of Congress and the oil and gas industry. A few days ago, emails from a staffer to Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) were released referring to the oil and gas industry as “our partners.”

While the three bills passed yesterday seek to increase access to public lands for energy development, an Interior Department report released on Tuesday shows that the industry already has incredible access.  Not only did the government hold “… three of the top five largest [lease] sales in the agency’s history” last year, but 56 percent of the public lands leased to the oil and gas industry in the lower 48 states were not producing any fossil fuels or being explored.

Jessica Goad is the Manager of Research and Outreach for the Public Lands Project at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

By Tom Kenworthy and Jessica Goad

Congressional Republicans who think the only purpose of public lands is to provide subsidized commodities to industry generally ignore the many economists who provide hard evidence that protecting natural spaces provides huge economic benefits.

If these lawmakers don’t believe economists, perhaps they’ll believe another group with political sway: small business owners.

A new survey conducted for the Small Business Majority finds that 63 percent of small business owners in Colorado say access to protected public lands and outdoor spaces is a major part of why they set up operations in the state.

The results show that these small business owners strongly support the president’s “all of the above” energy strategy — with more than half saying they would be more likely to support such a plan if it includes steps to conserve some areas and keep them free of development.

By a 4:1 margin, those small business owners say that creating new national parks and monuments would have a positive impact on jobs and the economy.

“Our nation’s most prolific job creators are asking that smart steps are taken to preserve Colorado’s natural assets because they believe it’s good for business,” said John Arensmeyer, founded and CEO of Small Business Majority.

These small businessmen understand intuitively what the experts continue to explain in their anaysis.

Last fall, for example, more than 100 economists wrote to President Obama urging him to expand efforts to protect more national parks, national monuments and wilderness areas. “Protected public lands are significant contributors to economic growth,” they said in their letter.

More recently, Headwaters Economics, a consulting firm based in Montana, found that more than four times as many jobs are created in non-metro counties with protected public lands than in those without. Counties with more than 30% of their lands federally protected increased jobs by 344% over 40 years, compared to just an 80% increase in jobs in non-metro counties with no protected federal lands.

Read more

By Jessica Goad

In a surprise move last night, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer (R) vetoed a bill demanding that the federal government turn over up to 25 million acres of public lands to the state by 2014 or face a lawsuit.  In a statement, Brewer said that she was:

“…concerned about the lack of certainty this legislation could create for individuals holding existing leases on federal lands.  Given the difficult economic times, I do not believe this is the time to add to that uncertainty.”

The overwhelming legal expert opinion is that this type of bill is unconstitutional — which is how the courts have ruled over many decades.  The Salt Lake Tribune called a similar effort in Utah “tilting at windmills.”

This is a blow to the American Legislative Exchange Council, a corporate front group that designs “model” legislation and is funded by the likes of Koch Industries, BP, Exxon Mobil, and Shell.  ALEC endorsed this particular legislation, as the Associated Press reported:

Lawmakers in Utah and Arizona have said the legislation is endorsed by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a group that advocates conservative ideals, and they expect it to eventually be introduced in other Western states.

Turning over public lands could eventually lead to their privatization, opening them up to mining, drilling and other industrial activity.

A similar bill demanding federal lands be turned over to the state was signed into law by Utah Governor Gary Herbert (R) last month.  The state has demanded 30 million acres of public lands by 2015 or it will sue.  And, the Utah legislature has already authorized the state’s attorney general to spend $3 million on the anticipated legal battle.

Brewer’s veto of this bill is also a major setback to those aiming to start a new “sagebrush rebellion” in the West, and may bring an end to other lawmakers’ dreams of privatizing public lands.  As Arizona state senator Al Melvin, the primary sponsor of the bill, said:

What we envision is all of the Western states going before the Supreme Court to force this issue.

It seems that for now, this unconstitutional effort has been thwarted, despite similar bills rumored to be in development in Montana, Idaho, and New Mexico.

Jessica Goad is Manager of Research and Outreach for the Public Lands Project at the Center for American Progress.

By Jessica Goad

Yesterday the Silver State North Solar Project on the California border near Primm, Nevada began generating electricity. It is the first-ever solar project sited on public lands to be completed and produce power.

The 50-megawatt project, which was developed by First Solar and owned by Enbridge, will power approximately 9,000 homes. It employed 380 workers at peak construction, just a portion of Nevada’s 17,254 jobs in green goods and services.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar described the significance of the project in a dedication ceremony:

… a landmark for America, a landmark for the solar industry and a landmark for how we use public lands.

The Silver State project is also notable because the company worked with stakeholders to avoid places unfit for industrial energy development. It is close to existing transmission lines and the size of the project’s footprint was reduced in order to minimize impacts on wildlife and the landscape. As the Nevada Wilderness Project wrote on its blog:

In the case of Silver State North, we dubbed this 600-acre project 40 miles southwest of Las Vegas “smart” because the developer was willing to gather environmental input early on to avoid complications during the formal review process. From where we sat at the review table, that was a good sign.

Currently there are a handful of wind and geothermal project sited on public lands that are operational. But until today, there were no solar energy projects producing power. The Interior Department has permitted 15 other solar energy projects that are in various states of construction, financing and permitting.

The Obama administration has permitted more renewable energy projects on public lands than all other administrations combined.  It is also in the process of finalizing a landmark set of guidelines that guide solar energy development into specially-designated zones, a new and improved model for energy development on public lands.

Jessica Goad is Manager of Research and Outreach for the Public Lands Project at the Center for American Progress.

by Jessica Goad

A report released yesterday by consulting firm Headwaters Economics continues to shed light on the economic importance of protected public lands to local economies in the American West.

It finds that there were more than four times as many jobs created in non-metro counties with protected public lands compared to those without. This data contradicts the ideological rhetoric of many Republicans seeking to throw open more federal acres to mining and drilling.

As the report states, over 40 years:

Western non-metro counties with more than 30% of lands federally protected increased jobs by 344%.

The chart below shows that from 1970 to 2009 (the most recent data available), the more protected public lands (national parks, national monuments, wilderness areas, etc.) that were in a rural county, the more jobs created.  This compares to only an 80% increase for counties with no protected federally-managed places at all.

In part, this trend occurred because land conservation creates a wide variety of jobs.  In 2010, recreation and tourism spurred 388,000 jobs on Interior Department-managed lands and 224,000 in and around national forests. Echoing these facts, a group of 104 economists sent a letter to the president in November asking him to create jobs by protecting more special places for recreation.

This latest data contradicts the mantra of many western Republican lawmakers, who contend that protected public lands are “locked up” by the government and have no value.  For example, Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT), Chairman of the House Subcommittee on National Parks, Forest and Public Lands, has stated:

Contrary to claims by the administration and others, the designation of national monuments and wilderness are not a boon to local economies, but rather a detriment in most scenarios.

That is just plain wrong.

Jessica is the Manager of Research and Outreach for the Public Lands Project.

Coming to a state near you?

By Tom Kenworthy

Before long the tar sands issue won’t be just about imports from Canada via pipeline.

Utah, which has never met a dirty fuel it didn’t love, has been encouraging efforts to develop a home-grown tar sands industry. Construction on a project located on state lands in the eastern part of the state could begin by the end of the year, according to a story in Environment and Energy Publishing’s Energy Wire:

“It’s not just something that’s up in Canada,” Utah Tar Sands Resistance member Raphael Cordray told E&E. “People don’t know it’s here in Utah. Our goal is to get the citizens of Utah to recognize that there’s a proposed tar sands site in Utah that could become the first commercial site in America, and what is at stake.”

Utah has about a third of the roughly 36 billion barrels of tar sands oil thought to be located in the U.S. Not all of that is estimated to be technically or commercially recoverable, however.  Tar sands contain a form of petroleum called bitumen that can be refined into gasoline. But the process is costly, energy-intensive, and on a life-cycle basis releases far more global warming pollutants than conventional oil refining operations.

U.S. Oil Sands, the Canadian based company that is working to develop the Utah deposits, has leases on about 32,000 acres of land in the state. The company was granted permits to begin production by the state in 2009. But it faces a legal challenge from an environmental group, Living Rivers, which fears tar sands production will harm Utah’s desert and mountain landscapes.

Meanwhile, supporters of another dirty fossil fuel, oil shale, have been making a political ruckus in a number of counties in Utah, Colorado and Wyoming — organized by a former Bush administration Interior Department official who now directs a Utah state office focused on energy development on federal lands in the state.

A number of county boards in the region have approved, or considered approving, a resolution taking the Obama administration to task for scaling back plans by the Bush administration to develop oil shale resources. Combined with efforts on Capitol Hill, this represents the beginning of an all-out election year push by Republicans to agitate for massive developments of dirty and impractical fossil fuels.

Oil shale – not to be confused with shale oil deposits like those in the Bakken field in North Dakota – is an energy developers’ pipe dream. Though oil shale deposits in Colorado, Wyoming and Utah may contain an estimated 1.5 trillion barrels of recoverable oil, it has never been proven to be commercially viable in the U.S.

Oil shale is a rock that contains kerogen and must be heated to very high temperatures to release a synthetic oil. It has “one-third the energy density of Cap’n Crunch!“ Shale oil is conventional oil trapped in reservoirs found in shale rock formations.

Development of oil shale could have a significant impact on already stressed western water supplies, according to a 2010 study by the General Accounting Office. And a recent report by Western Resource Advocates shows that oil shale development would take huge amounts of energy, would have emit large amounts of global warming pollutants, and would increase air pollution problems in the interior West.

Tom Kenworthy is a Senior Fellow with the Center for American Progress Action Fund

by Jessica Goad

The United States is home to some of the most stunning and unique natural areas in the world, including 397 national parks, 101 national monuments, and 556 national wildlife refuges. But many more public lands—managed by the federal government and owned by all Americans—are worthy of protection for future generations. This Earth Day it’s worth thinking about the places that have strong local coalitions calling for protection that should be granted this year.

The road to protection could be a long one, though. Due to partisan gridlock Congress has not sent the president a single piece of land-designation legislation since March 30, 2009, when President Barack Obama signed into law a bill protecting 2 million acres of wilderness and 1,000 miles of Wild and Scenic Rivers from development. Both Republicans and Democrats have introduced more than 20 wilderness bills in the 112th Congress, but not only has a single one not passed, none has even come up for a vote.

President Obama has slowly begun building his conservation legacy by establishing a national monument at Fort Monroe and protecting the Grand Canyon from new uranium mines. But he has the authority to do much more.

Here are the top five places that have both local community and political support, and are therefore good candidates for protection during the remainder of this calendar year:

Read more

By Jessica Goad, Manager of Research and Outreach, Center for American Progress Action Fund.

In the last few months, Republican presidential candidates from Mitt Romney to Rick Santorum have shown their ignorance about the value of public lands.  And recently a handful of states have joined the fray, with state legislators introducing bills that demand Congress turn over millions of acres of public lands to the states or face a lawsuit.  Utah has taken this idea the furthest, where two weeks ago Governor Gary Herbert (R) signed a bill into law demanding that Congress give 30 million acres of federal land located in Utah to the state by 2015 or it will sue.

But buried under the headlines is the fact these bills are being quietly drafted and promoted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a right-wing corporate front group that provides draft legislation to state lawmakers and is funded by some of America’s biggest corporations including Koch Industries, BP, Exxon Mobil, and Shell.

As the Associated Press reported:

Lawmakers in Utah and Arizona have said the legislation is endorsed by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a group that advocates conservative ideals, and they expect it to eventually be introduced in other Western states.

And in January, Utah Pulse noted that:

Lawmakers in four western land states will be running similar bills in their legislative sessions this year – Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Idaho.  Ivory’s bill will be unique to Utah, the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, has turned his bill into model legislation that other western land states can use.  While ALEC is a conservative legislative/business group, Ivory says he hopes to get Utah Democrats onboard with this new effort.

ALEC is behind many controversial state legislative efforts, including Wisconsin’s anti-union legislation, “stand your ground” gun laws, and teaching children climate denial.

Read more

By Jessica Goad, Manager of Research and Outreach, Center for American Progress Action Fund.

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) released the GOP budget yesterday morning.  In all the coverage about the  massive shortcomings of the budget, many may have missed the proposal to sell off millions of acres of the public lands that belong to all of us.

Tea Party favorite Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) is credited with adding the language, which says:

Sales of Unneeded Federal Assets:  In the last year alone, Republicans put forth proposals to sell unneeded federal property.  Representative Jason Chaffetz has proposed to sell millions of acres of unneeded federal land. Likewise, Representative Jeff Denham’s bill to authorize the sale of billions of dollars worth of federal assets would save the government money, collect corresponding revenue, and remove economic distortions by reducing public ownership.  Such sales could also potentially be encouraged by reducing appropriations  to various agencies.  If done correctly, taxpayers could recoup billions of  dollars from selling unused government property.

This is likely referring to Chaffetz’s bill, H.R. 1126, the “Disposal of Excess Federal Lands Act of 2011.”  The radical proposal would force the government to sell off 3.3 million acres of public lands in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, and Wyoming to the highest bidder, without specifying how American taxpayers would receive a fair compensation for them.

Selling off public lands—including national parks—has recently been high on various Republicans’ wish lists.  Read more

by Jessica Goad and Scott Keyes, cross-posted from TP Green

Rep. Cliff Steans (R-FL), a birther, one of the leaders of the Solyndra witch hunt and defender of subsidies to Big Oil companies. He told constituents at a town hall meeting Belleview, Florida, on February 25 that “we don’t need any more national parks in this country” and that we need to “actually sell off some of our national parks”:

I got attacked in a previous town meeting for not supporting another national park in this country, a 200-mile trailway.  And I told the man that we don’t need more national parks in this country, we need to actually sell off some of our national parks, and try and do what a normal family would do is — they wouldn’t ask Uncle Joe for a loan, they would sell their Cadillac, or they would take their kids out of private schools and put them into public schools to save to money instead of asking for their credit card to increase their debt ceiling.

Watch it:

Our national parks represent America’s heritage, held in trust from one generation to the next.

Despite Stearns’ idea for a national-park fire sale, the facts show that parks, monuments, and other protected places generate a steady stream of wealth for both the treasury and local businesses.  In 2010, Florida’s Everglades National Park generated 2,364 jobs and over $140 million in visitor spending, and Florida’s 11 national parks in total provided $582 million in economic benefits.  The National Park Service also reports that America’s parks overall created $31 billion and 258,000 jobs in 2010.  In addition to their economic impacts, national parks have important value in that they are available to all of us for recreation, not just the wealthy few.

This is not the first time Republican members of Congress have advocated selling off Americans’ public lands without clarifying how taxpayers would get a fair return for them.  Last fall, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) proposed selling off 3.3 million acres of the public lands that belong to all of us.  And former Rep. Richard Pombo proposed selling national parks to mining companies in 2005.

Republican presidential candidates have also recently been confused about the tangible and intangible values of our national parks and public lands.  Mitt Romney told the Reno Gazette-Journal that he doesn’t know “what the purpose is” of public lands, Rick Santorum told Idahoans that public lands should go “back to the hands” of the private sector, and Ron Paul advocated for public lands to be turned over to the states.