Crossposted from UNBOSSED
As I noted yesterday, Six New Mexico conservation groups have filed a protest with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) over the April 16, 2008 sale of eighty-three oil and gas leases in New Mexico totaling nearly 103,000 acres.
The Protest is based on BLM’s failure of the BLM to address climate change before it sells oil and gas drilling leases. An innovative approach. These leases are a big deal because they convey legal rights to oil and gas companies to drill. BLM and the oil and gas industry like to claim that they’ll do analysis right before they drill but, at this point, the deed has been done and the pre-drill analysis is little more than a sham.
The Global Warming Context and the Oil and Gas Industry in New Mexico
Greenhouse gas driven climate change is having a significant impact on New Mexico.
The Rocky Mountain Climate Organization reports that the interior west has warmed 70% more than the rest of the globe over the past few years. They note that we in the West are suffering increased wildfire risk, drought and insect infestations.
The journal Geophysical Research Letters reports this week that that our jet stream moved northward at a rate of about 1.25 miles a year on average since 1979 bringing drier and hotter conditions to New Mexico.
A 2005 report by the State shows climate shifts driven by fossil fuel pollution will lead to prolonged heat waves, deeper droughts, public health risks and more air pollution. Governor Richardson has called for a 75% reduction in global warming pollution from 2000 levels by 2050 to protect New Mexico.
While the natural gas industry promotes its product as a "cleaner-burning fuel," the greenhouse impact of natural gas, also known as methane, is 21 times more potent than carbon dioxide. In New Mexico, accidental leaks and deliberate releases inject more than 20 million tons of methane and carbon dioxide into the air every year. Most of this pollution comes from natural gas drilling in northwestern New Mexico, which is one of the largest gas-producing regions in the United States.
As most of you know, with climate change, there are two important questions.
- What can we do to reduce global warming pollution and to mitigate the rise in global temperatures?
With oil and gas development, there are a huge number of pollution-cutting technologies, many of which are cost-effective and actually put more product in the pipeline for consumers. The problem is that BLM doesn’t require industry to use them and industry is too short-sighted to use them.
- What do we need to do to ensure that are communities and wildlands can adapt to climate change?
Many have noted that we must improve the resiliency of our local communities and wildlands. In short, we need to make sure we control our own destiny as a community – strong, localized economies and strong, protected wildlands. Oil and gas development typically results in a localized boom & bust cycle that hurts long-term community & wildlands resilience.
Background - Leasing
There are currently around 350,000 oil and gas wells in the five Rocky Mountain States, most on public lands. The Wilderness Society estimates that public lands in these five states will see a huge increase of 125,000 new federal wells over the coming years.
Until the last few years, BLM’s leasing program has largely operated in obscurity, a product of the post-World War I Mineral Leasing Act of 1920 which was designed to create a competitive leasing program for federal oil and gas resources. For decades, the program rolled along with few protests. However, beginning in the late 1990s, the oil and gas industry began putting massive pressure on the BLM to offer more leases and to offer them more rapidly. Industry wanted even more access to public lands and they didn’t like citizens standing in the way. During the Clinton years, the Department of the Interior was generally more conservation oriented and, in most cases, an attempt was made to avoid issuing leases in sensitive and/or controversial areas (to be clear, the leasing process under Clinton was far from perfect) and thus there were relatively few protests by citizens.
All this changed with the advent of the Bush Administration. The Bush Interior Department essentially turned the keys for our public lands over to the oil and gas industry. As a result, people and conservation didn’t just take a back seat, they got kicked to the curb...and then kicked into the street to get hit by a semi.
Since 2001, the BLM has sold close to 14,000 leases totaling over 14 million acres. These are PUBLIC lands – places we usually like to hike, camp, fish, and hunt...not to mention places that supply our drinking water.
As I said above, today’s BLM is really run by the oil and gas industry. The BLM issued 10,000 new drilling permits in FY2007. That is 10k on top of the 20,000 permits issued during the past five years: Again, as I've noted before, this is so many permits that the industry has been unable to drill on all of them. And the BLM is planning to unload another 125,000 wells on us over the next few years!
This borders on criminal, of you ask me.
First, industry asks the BLM (or the Forest Service as the case may be) to open up certain parcels to leasing. The BLM takes that list and announces an auction of those areas four times a year. Industry often pays as little as $2-$3 and acre. Once a certain company has a lease they have a vested right to do as they wish with that land. Public land essentially becomes private for the purposes of drilling.
Does the American public have a voice in this process? Not really. BLM doesn’t prepare any simultaneous environmental analyses to justify the lease sales. Instead, they simply say they’re going to sell the leases and make the public file a "protest" if they have concerns. More often than not, these protests are dismissed, even when the public can organize massive opposition. According to April Reese at High Country News 95% of lease sales in Colorado were protested in 2005 (compared with zero in 1999 and a handful in 2000) and nearly all those protests (94%) were rejected. In New Mexico, 933 parcels were protested between 2001 and 2007. Only ten of those were withdrawn from leasing.
Cutting the Public Out of Public Lands
The thing that makes it really tough for the public is that they’re not given any meaningful information to determine whether leases would hurt their communities, water resources, or wildlife. Further, the public never gets enough information to look at the cumulative impacts of these drilling operations. So we’re automatically at a huge disadvantage...not to mention the inherent disadvantage people have if they choose to protect their rights against the very powerful federal government agency that is essentially industry run.
For example, here’s the information given by BLM for a lease parcel recently offered for sale in New Mexico:
NM-200804-013 565.040 Acres
T.0070S, R.0300E, NM PM, NM
Sec. 019 LOTS 2-4;
019 E2,SENW,E2SW;
Chaves County
Roswell FO
NMNM 55932, NMNM 84870
Stipulations:
None
Right.
Got that? Do you know what it means to you? The places you like to hunt, fish, hike? Ya. Right. Unless you’re really good with maps, and really good with research, or have a hell of a lot of free time.... it tells you nothing about where this lease parcel actually is, what its precise boundaries are, and what kind of impacts development would have. Even if people have this ability, it’s not a substitute for the work that BLM itself should be doing before it sells leases, right? People deserve to be part of the process – not merely an afterthought. YOU deserve to be part of this process.
BLM defends its leasing program by saying that leasing is justified by its comprehensive management plans – what BLM calls Resource Management Plans(RMPs). But this is a sham. These plans were usually prepared years, if not decades ago, and contain the most basic of analyses.
Down in southern New Mexico where I used to work for oil and gas, for example, a plan used by the Las Cruces Field Office says that:
"Land open to fluid mineral leasing activities would affect wildlife by site-specific habitat degradation and wildlife disturbances during exploration activities such as access construction and drilling."
Well, no shit, Sherlock. This isn’t helpful information. What kind of wildlife? What would the magnitude of impacts be? What would the cumulative impacts be? How are you going to prevent or at least reduce these impacts? Are there other potential impacts you haven’t looked at?
The Bush Administration and its apparatchiks in the BLM have made a mockery of the environmental laws that have been on the books since I was born. They have turned our well-meaning conservation laws into toothless paper tigers through tortured logic and legal interpretations.
For example, in the context of climate change, a draft plan for the Canyons of the Ancients National Monument, in Colorado, where oil and gas development is allowed, says that:
"it is not yet possible to know with confidence the net impacts to climate"
and hides behind an alleged
"lack of scientific tools designed to predict climate change on regional or local scales limits the ability to quantify potential future impacts."
Come on.
When you take a look at the Protest filed by the New Mexico conservation groups and the 72 exhibits they filed in support, it’s pretty damn obvious that BLM’s position is a load of bovine fecal matter. Sticking your head in the sand isn’t a strategy. Look at the administration’s political position on climate change. They’re now actually talking about it, but only because the rest of the world, and most of the country, has forced them to. But what have they done? Right.
It’s not an accident that BLM makes the leasing process tough for everyone but the oil and gas companies to understand. The BLM doesnt have much of an institutional culture grounded in conservation. Instead, they’re supposed to manage public lands for "multiple use" .....whatever that really means. Further, most of these people are arrogant. They think they know best how to manage the public lands, and that the public really doesn’t have anything important to say that would change their minds. The BLM often fails to ask the public for its views on important decisions that common sense says they should know about. Instead, BLM uses "categorical exclusions" and "determinations of NEPA adequacy" to justify a decision without public involvement or environmental analysis.
Bovine fecal matter.
What they either don’t realize or don’t care about is that these decisions have real impacts to people, communities, and the landscape. It is sad to think that BLM is so out of touch with what the public wants. No one is denying that oil and gas development is important. But it’s also exacerbating our climate crisis, and crippling the long-term viability of our communities and wildlands. The BLM – and the NM BLM in particular - should be ashamed.
To sum up... as the BLM has rushed to get public lands into industry hands they have failed to take into account the cumulative impacts of all the oil and gas wells pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. This is inexcusable as the long-term impacts on New Mexico’s water, air and economy will be massive and technological fixes are already at hand.
This protest is ground-breaking. This kind of thing has never been done before.
Be sure to take out the whole series:
Part One
Part III will analyze the protest in detail;
Part IV will look at a similar protest lodge just this week in Colorado.
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Resources:
- Notice of the Bureau of Land Management’s April 16, 2008 lease sale auction is online
here.
- The protest document is available
here.
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Western Environmental Law Center
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High Country News