The U.S. Bureau of Land Management has proposed opening up relatively pristine natural areas in eastern Utah to oil and gas drilling, including Nine-Mile Canyon and Desolation Canyon, despite the agency's own determination in 1999 that the areas have "wilderness character" and thus are good candidates for wilderness designation. "BLM is condemning these lands to a future of oil rigs and gas pipelines and almost certain disqualification from future wilderness designation," said Stephen Bloch of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.
source: The Washington Post
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Delay And Deny Posted 2:56 am
31 Oct 2008
The real need in this country is to release BLM land to homesteaders...people need to spread out from the exurbs into Agraria.
We each need 2 acres per household. We need to abandon the high cost, high density cities and return to the land. We need to escape the robber barons and bureaucrats that enslave us to oil and light rail.
Hydrogen will be the Conestoga wagon of the 21st century!
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wendigo Posted 3:59 am
31 Oct 2008
Jabailo, your grand agrarian experiment has already been tried. It's called Kansas, and it's not all that.
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stopgreenpath Posted 5:17 am
31 Oct 2008
this discussion cannot be about "oil bad/solar good." it has to be about STEWARDSHIP of our public lands and Big Geothermal is just as harmful to the land as Big Gas. Don't get me wrong, i'm the Number One fan of renewable energy. it's just that slaughtering millions of acres of effective carbon sink and everything that once lived there, while sucking all the groundwater, eroding the soil and hijacking ratepayers is not exactly my definition of "renewable."
the REAL solution lies on our own rooftops, but Big Energy can't monopolize, control and manipulate the energy supplies if we own the means of generation, so they are doing EVERYTHING they can, including large-scale manipulation of Big Environmental Organizations, to trick people into believing that there is some need for faraway, wilderness-killing combustion and long-distance, leaky, home-stealing towers. Dirty little secret? Our boy Robt. Kennedy, Jr. is heavily invested in Big Solar, which will explain why NRDC has been so opposed to point of use solar, and so rabidly supportive of massive new "infrastructure" (see RETI process).
this is a huge, huge issue, and our entire wilderness is gonna be fried if we let Big Energy take it over. That includes Big Solar and Big Wind. we need to fight for our resources to be devoted to getting every property outfitted with as much point of use solar and microwind as possible, as many conservation devices/designs as possible, and STOP ALL THESE HORRIBLE ROBBER BARONS!
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blooc Posted 2:58 pm
10 Nov 2008
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howardgw Posted 3:53 am
15 Nov 2008
At the request of Congress, the USGS performed a qualitative assessment of oil and gas potential in National Monuments approved and expanded under the Clinton Administration, which did protect them from exploration/production. Of 19 monuments, only 4 had any prospects, and those for only modest amounts of oil and gas with no relevance to energy independence.
In contrast, the oil industry claims undiscovered reserves of as much as 4 billion barrels of oil in and adjacent to the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. The whole region contains only 24 geologically favorable oil and gas sites, all of which have been explored for many years. One site has trickled out 25 million barrels of oil since its 1964 discovery, barely more than one day of current consumption over 35 years.
Reckless opening of valuable natural lands to energy exploration can only worsen the nation's energy position. Hopefully, Obama will reverse this trend.
Information from: The American West at Risk: Science, Myths, and Politics of Land Abuse and Recovery
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