BLM proposes opening wilderness-y areas in Utah to oil and gas drilling 5

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1. 

   Delay And Deny Posted 2:56 am
   31 Oct 2008

   Homesteading
   
   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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2. 

   wendigo Posted 3:59 am
   31 Oct 2008

   Bureau of Lame ManagementBLM doesn't even pretend to manage its land any more.  They are all about oil and gas leasing, and have been since the current administration took office.  The situation will not change until we get a new head of Interior.  Norton and Kempthorne have been disasters.
   Jabailo, your grand agrarian experiment has already been tried.  It's called Kansas, and it's not all that.

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3. 

   stopgreenpath Posted 5:17 am
   31 Oct 2008

   not just oil and gaswhat about the 190 MILLION acres they have just opened up for "geothermal???"  the several million acres under siege for Big Wind and Big Solar, new roads and gigantic, wasteful, GHG-emitting powerlines?
   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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4. 

   blooc Posted 2:58 pm
   10 Nov 2008

   it'll all go away anyway and we won't mention whyoh don't worry stopgreen all our wilderness will eventually be developed due to overpopulation anyway. Protect all you want but another 100 million people in the next 50 years have to live, eat, house, drink, and bathe somewhere. The robber barons got their way and it's called religion and breeding for religion.

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5. 

   howardgw Posted 3:53 am
   15 Nov 2008

   where the wild places wereOpening Utah's magnificent wildlands for oil and gas exploration has nothing to do with energy security or independence. Despite the extremely poor prospects of finding enough oil and gas to make a net gain in energy at all, and a profit only at high prices, the Bureau of Land Management is approving invasive exploration activities in many lands of high natural and scenic values: for example, the Lockhart Basin, Hatch Point, Dome Plateau, Goldbar Rim and others. Even Wildlife Refuges, protected for  some wildlife values, are not protected from oil and gas exploration and production: 27% of the nation's 575 refuges have been either explored, drilled, and exploited, or laced with pipelines. 105 refuges contain a total of 4,406 oil and gas wells, 1,806 currently active. Production from these wells is a tiny proportion of total U.S. production, itself only 30% or so of consumption.
   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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