Drillers versus killers

[Fred Derf Veteran]

Drillers versus killers

Sep 3rd 2007

From Economist.com

Oil and sport collide in the Rocky Mountains

WYOMING has got rich off oil and gas, as the pace of drilling throughout the Rocky Mountains has accelerated under the Bush administration. The state?s budget surplus approached $2 billion last year. Anyone driving through, as your columnist did in August, will notice that much of the traffic along the main highways consists of huge trucks carrying equipment to the drilling fields (which are themselves occasionally visible off to the sides of the highway).

But even at the heart of the energy boom, tensions are building between the drilling and mining industries on the one hand, and ranchers and sportsmen on the other. In August the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, a traditionally Republican pro-hunting group, sued the interior department to protest against the leasing of 2,000 new oil and gas wells in south-central Wyoming, an area favoured by sportsmen and wildlife viewers.

?Over the last 100 years, there has been an informal alliance of agricultural industries, sportsmen and the oil and gas industry,? says Jason Marsden of Wyoming Conservation Voters, an advocacy group. That relationship is souring, he says, because of the fast pace of development.

Sportsmen want healthy wildlife, to shoot or fish. But the flurry of drilling and mining has fouled rivers with silt and sediment, reduced access to hunting lands and threatened some of the West?s great herds of wildlife. (Ranchers, too, are unhappy about pipelines running through their lands.) The Wyoming range, a national forest in the western part of the state, is home to good deer and elk hunting, and to several types of cutthroat trout. Trout Unlimited, a group for anglers and hunters, is campaigning against further oil and gas leasing there.

Another big battleground is the Roan Plateau in Colorado; Colorado's governor is trying to slow down the Bureau of Land Management?s permit process for oil and gas drilling there.

Strange new political alliances are forming in the Rocky Mountains. In recent years hunters and anglers?usually devout Republicans?have joined forces with large environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and the Nature Conservancy. Trout Unlimited has become especially vocal of late. Its membership has more than doubled in the past ten years, to 155,000.

Pat Williams, a former Democratic Senator from Montana, goes so far as to call sportsmen ?the single most powerful conservation voice in Congress?. In 2005, after two decades of legislative debate, Wyoming became the first state to set aside money from the state?s general fund for wildlife habitat improvement, according to Mr Marsden. Now the pot has grown to $40 million or so, and is very politically popular.

Oil and gas still has huge clout in Washington, DC. Even so, politicians are starting to align with the sporting crowd?including President George Bush himself, though he shows no signs of cutting back on drilling. Last month Mr Bush signed an executive order obligating public land agencies to "manage wildlife and wildlife habitats on public lands in a manner that expands and enhances hunting opportunities.? What this means on a practical level is rather unclear.

In August Mitt Romney, on a swing through Wyoming, said he would support banning development in the Wyoming range. Conrad Burns, a former Republican senator from Montana who strongly supported drilling on public lands, tried at the eleventh hour to save his political skin by opposing drilling on the Rocky Mountain Front. He failed, and was toppled last year by a Democrat. Montana now has two Democratic senators and a Democratic governor, in no small part because of the conservation lobby.

Some Republicans fear for the future of their party out west. Wyoming?s Democratic governor, who often chooses sportsmen over oil and gas, won re-election last year with 70% of the vote. ?I think people are fed up? with all the drilling, says John Hereford, a Republican environmentalist in Colorado. He hopes that more Republicans will take a more accommodating environmental stance. The alternative, he says, is that more will leave the party.

Of course, the Republicans? Iraq troubles and sex scandals (including one recently in the Rocky Mountain state of Idaho), are not helping to swing votes either. But it may be the sportsmen who ultimately call the shots.

http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?...37&fsrc=RSS

This makes me think of the pro-arctic wildlife reserve drilling crowd that thinks that it will not affect the park's wilderness. I can only imagine what would go on when sufficient people are not there to keep a constant eye on them.