Oil and Gas Drilling on Public Lands Reaches New High

With the rise in gas prices, Americans are facing increasing calls to accept expanded energy exploration at home. Last month, both President Bush and Republican presidential candidate John McCain called for lifting bans on offshore oil drilling. Bush’s proposal included removing the ban on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. McCain says he still supports the ban.

While offshore drilling has drawn national attention, less has been made of oil and gas drilling on public land within the continental United States. This despite figures showing the amount of oil and gas drilling on public land has reached a new high. The Wilderness Society recently reported more than forty-four million acres of public lands are leased for oil and gas development. Last year the Bush administration approved over seven thousand-one hundred drilling permits, a new record. According to the Wall Street Journal, more rigs are currently operating in the U.S. than at any point in over two decades.

But in states across the country, local residents are organizing to halt what they call the destructive effects of oil and gas drilling in their communities. This includes here in Colorado. Last year a survey of more two-hundred-seventy-five energy companies ranked Colorado as the world’s most attractive investment area for oil and gas exploration. But public backlash has forced a wave of pending measures. These including a three-month ban on drilling in wildlife breeding grounds and revoking more than two-hundred million dollars in tax breaks for the oil and gas industry.

Nada Culver is Senior Counsel at The Wilderness Society, which works to preserve wilderness and other public lands in the United States. She joins me here in Denver.

Nada Culver, Senior Counsel at The Wilderness Society.

AMY GOODMAN: Here on democracy now, and democracy now.org, the war and peace report. We are on the road in Denver, Colorado. We’re broadcasting on over 100 stations, college and community TV stations. Public access TV and PBS. Most TV satellite networks, on dish network, channel 9145. On link TV, also on channel 375. Our headlines are also available in Spanish for any radio station to take. Our transcripts are also available of every show at democracy now.org. I’m Amy Goodman.

As we turn now to the rise in gas prices, Americans are facing increasing costs to expanding energy exploration at home. Well, last month both President Bush and Republican presidential candidate John McCain called for lifting bans on offshore oil drilling. Bush’s proposal included removing the ban on drilling in the national arctic wildlife refuge. McCain says he will support the lifting of the ban. While offshore drilling has drawn national attention, less has been made of oil and gas drilling on public land within the United States. This despite figures showing the amount of oil and gas drilling in the United States has reached a new high. The Wilderness Society recently reported more than 44 million acres of public lands are leased for oil and gas development. Last year the Bush administration approved over 7100 drilling permits, a new record. According to The Wall Street Journal, more rigs are operating in the U.S. than at any point in over two decades. But in states across the country, local residents are organizing to halt what they call the destructive effects of oil and gas drilling in their communities. This includes here, in Colorado. Last year, a survey of more than 275 energy companies ranked Colorado as the world’s most attractive investment area for oil and gas exploration. A public backlash has forced a wave of pending measures, these include a three-month ban on drilling in wildlife breeding grounds, invoking more than $200 million in tax breaks for the oil and gas industry.

Nada Culver, a Senior Counsel at The Wilderness Society, which works to preserve wilderness and other public lands in the U.S. joining me here in Denver Free Speech TV studios. Welcome to Democracy Now, Nada, talk about the state of drilling, not offshore that has gotten a lot of attention now, but on-shore.

NADA CULVER: The bulk of the drilling you talked-about, 44 million acres, to give people some perspective, that’s the size of the state of Missouri roughly. It is hard to comprehend when we talk about just millions of acres and thousands of permits. And what has been going on out here, we have seen the bulk of that in the five Rocky Mountain states, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Montana and Wyoming where we’re seeing more than 30 million acres under lease. And at the same time, we’ve see unprecedented rollbacks in environmental protection, things that would protect water, wildlife, air, wilderness: things that are unfortunately right now, by this administration, they are characterized as impediments to drilling.

AMY GOODMAN: Who is doing the drilling?

NADA CULVER: Right now there’s a host of oil and gas companies doing the drilling, but what ties it together is it is managed by the federal government. The federal government owns millions of acres of oil and gas and they lease it out to for-profit companies who drill it for their profit, which would tie to their record profits, while a portion of it does go to the American people as well.

AMY GOODMAN: What can be done at this point, do you feel, and what are the communities where this is being played out, where people are objecting? And what are the communities where they support it?

NADA CULVER: It is pretty much the communities on the ground where we are having the oil and gas developments, are almost uniformly asking for some measure of sanity and some measure of balance. We have communities like Pine Dale, Wyoming, where there has been a prize mule deer herd. And in four years of drilling the mule deer reduced 46%. A remote county where they’re having ozone warnings because their air quality is like Los Angeles or Huston. In Colorado, we’re having water contamination from oil and gas. And what we have seen is citizens getting involved like never before, trying to protest leases and ask for more protections. And we’re seeing the states themselves, the state of Wyoming, asking, requiring, oil and gas companies to notify owners before they drill on their land and tried to reach an agreement. The state of New Mexico, stopping oil and gas companies from just putting waste materials into pits in the ground that are unlined. We are seeing a real groundswell, especially in the Rockies where we are seeing an impact on the ground.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the moratorium? The calls for the moratorium on drilling?

NADA CULVER: There has been a number of different calls for a moratorium on drilling. Once again kind of a restore the balance. I mean with the 44 million acres under lease—the sad part of that is that12 million has gone into production. So there has been a question as to why we continue to lease more and lease more and issue more permits when we have thousands of permits unused on millions of acres sitting by, and yet what we get are more calls for more leasing, more drilling permits, and more rollbacks of environmental protections. Right now there are not any moratoriums in place on federal lands, but some states and some counties like in New Mexico have actually enacted their own bans on further leasing.

AMY GOODMAN: How did they do that? And what are the forces arrayed against them?

NADA CULVER: Well, they passed an ordinance to indicate that they do not want any more leases issued in their county, and they will impose things like requirements for protecting watersheds on wildlife. And each time, what uniformly happens is that there is an immediate outcry that the sky is falling, we will all go hungry, go cold, go naked in the streets because this will be the final straw and there will never be any oil and gas production and all the oil and gas companies will leave those states. And so far they have left New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana over different ones. And yet, they really haven’t, so that is the uniform of what’s arrayed against these places, that are really just seeking a measure, I think, of sanity. And instead we get very hysterical rhetoric from the oil and gas companies. Right now in Colorado, despite this poll you just cited that this is the best place, all of a sudden we are considering some very realistic and reasonable restrictions and protections for our water and wildlife. And all of a sudden, Colorado is the worst place, and they’re all going to have to leave. Except that all just said they were leaving New Mexico for protecting water, and Wyoming for protecting private property holders , and Montana for protecting water.

AMY GOODMAN: What actually happens with onshore drilling?

NADA CULVER: In terms of the process?

AMY GOODMAN: Yes. And what happens to the land?

NADA CULVER: Once a lease is issued, it is good for 10 years at least. And it can be held indefinitely as long as indication of production. So once it is turned over to an oil and gas company, it really precludes other uses, things like wildlife habitat or recreation or wilderness. And those are the things that we focus on, at The Wilderness Society, all the other uses for the public lands and all the other values that they hold. What we’re seeing now with the amount of drilling that is happening, we see wildlife habitat fragmented into unusable size. In other words, there are so many pipelines and well pads and roads that animals like mule deer and elk cannot survive. We see, for instance in nine mile canyon in Utah, a place renowned as an outdoor museum of rock art. The dust and chemicals used for dust suppression for oil and gas trucks are destroying these amazing pictographs that have survived for thousands of years. So those are some of the types of destruction we see from the mass scale of drilling.

AMY GOODMAN: Nada Culver, I want to thank you for being with us, from The Wilderness Society, based here in Denver, Colorado.

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