[Davis Democrats] FW: parting plunder --the redrock lands being auctioned to fossil-fuel speculators by Friday, Dec.19

[John Chendo]

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Subject: parting gifts from George Bush



December 14, 2008 NY Times
OP-ED GUEST COLUMNIST
Final Days Fire Sale

By TIMOTHY EGAN
Imagine if President Bush, on his last day in office, invited his friends to
lift the Lincoln portrait from the White House Dining Room, take the 18th-
century furniture from the Map Room and ‹ for good measure ‹ poison the Rose
Garden on the way out.

In essence, he is doing the same thing this month with land that belongs to
every American ‹ the magical redrock country of the Southwest.

Well before it was a bumper sticker and a chant at Sarah Palin rallies,
³drill, baby, drill² became the overriding mission of the political hacks
who oversee more than 200 million acres of public land for Bush. At a
frantic pace, they have opened up to oil and gas leasing canyons of golden
slickrock, mesas once known only to hunters and pronghorn antelope, and
little hideaways near the open-aired art galleries of the Anasazi.

Take what you want, they said ‹ and get while the getting is good. It was a
plunderfest that produced a gangster culture, with dozens of high-level
Interior Department employees exchanging sex, cocaine and gifts with the
industry they were supposed to be doing arms-length business with, according
to a scathing and quickly forgotten report this year by the agency¹s
inspector general.

At the time of the report, with gas reaching $4 a gallon, many people
shrugged and said we need the oil ‹ drill, baby, drill. Now gas is selling
for a pittance, but that hasn¹t stopped the fire sale. Everything must go!

On Election Day, the Bush administration announced it would open 360,000
acres of public land in Utah to oil and gas leasing, including about 100,000
acres near Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, and Dinosaur National
Monument.

As with the $700 billion bailout that Bush insisted had to be given to the
very bankers, insurance companies and other tassel-loafed failures who got
us into the economic meltdown, the president now wants every dead-ender in
the energy business to have one last treat.

Solitude and ageless stone may not be commodities as easily quantified as a
couple of thousand barrels of oil. But to the American inheritance, they are
the equivalent of those first-edition Audubon books and presidential
portraits in the White House.

The administration never even consulted with the parks before announcing
they would have oil and gas rigs on their borders.

The giveaways went far beyond public land. For the coal industry, the
parting gift was a federal rule that makes it easier to dump mining waste
into streams. Anyone who has spent time in Appalachia of late has seen the
handiwork ‹ entire mountaintops lopped off in an end-of-days rush for a
dirty fossil fuel.

On Thursday, Bush handed out another goodie: a rule that largely frees
federal agencies from having to consult independent biologists before
constructing something that could lead to the extinction of birds, fish or
other endangered species.

Following a storm of outrage by park officials and the incoming Obama team,
the government has now backed off from some of the more egregious sales in
the Southwest. But on the upcoming Friday before Christmas, it will still
auction off more than 150,000 acres near some of the most stunning scenery
in the world.

In a concession, officials promised that oil and gas operations would be
camouflaged ‹ the rigs and drills painted a desert red so that visitors to
the wildlands of Utah would not have industrial clutter marring their sunset
picture.

It would be one thing if we needed the fuel. Of nearly 9,000 oil and gas
permits approved on public land in Utah, barely a third of them have been
drilled. The way this game works is that oil companies buy the leasing
rights ‹ in some case for as little as $2.50 an acre ‹ then wait for Saudi
Arabia to force another oil price spike. Then they drill.

And the impact on price or domestic supply? Nothing. Even if all the
accessible oil and gas were taken from federal land in Utah, it would have
zero impact on prices, according to several studies.

But the loss is incalculable ‹ ³geologic architecture that has inspired our
American character,² and places where ³the curvature of the earth is not
only seen but felt,² as the ever-lyrical Terry Tempest Williams wrote in a
recent essay in The Los Angeles Times.

So why do it? Because they still can. The only urgency is Jan. 20.



€


Maureen Dowd is off today.


Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

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