Feds call off oil, gas lease sale
Opponents cite global climate change
A federal oil and gas lease sale in the Rio Grande drainage of southern Colorado that had been scheduled for Thursday has been postponed over concerns raised by environmentalists, elected officials and the Colorado Division of Wildlife.
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) had announced the sale of more than 175,000 acres in March, the bulk of which are in Rio Grande and Saguache counties. On Friday, the agency said it was bowing to widespread opposition to the sale and deferring the lease sale of 144,000 acres in Rio Grande National Forest.
The decision comes on the heels of a protest filed over the BLM’s April 16 sale of oil and gas leases in New Mexico. A coalition of environmental groups and the Western Environmental Law Center say the BLM hasn’t taken into account the cumulative effect of oil and gas development on global climate change:
Sloppy industrial practices make oil and gas drilling the second-largest source of greenhouse gas pollution in New Mexico, but the Bureau of Land Management intends to open up another 100,000 acres of the state to the oil and gas industry without considering the impacts of climate change and without requiring the use of the latest technologies to cut global warming pollution.
Conservationists are shifting the debate over oil and gas development across the West from the preservation of a single species here or there to the potential impacts that development could have on entire landscapes due to climate change.
“We’re really trying to change the nature of this debate and get the BLM to start looking at the bigger picture here,” Nichols told the AP. “Even though these are individual state lease sales, regionally it adds up.”
Comments:
Posted 05/08/2008 17:29 with
1. The headline misleads. The BLM didn’t ‘call off’ the sale, they went ahead with some of it Thursday and ‘put off’ the rest of it. Those leases could be up for sale as soon as August, according to BLM spokesman James Sample, in the Denver office..
2. The story leads the reader to believe the action to defer the sale was in response to the claim that the BLM has not considered impacts on global warming. Not true, according to Sample, and also according to the AP story to which you have supplied a link. That story correctly says the decision was taken to determine whether leases “be withdrawn or issued with conditions…to protect…wildlife.”
Says Sample: “We deferred the sale of the Rio Grande parcels mainly to check on impacts for wildlife and some air and water quality concerns, but not for the …climate change complaint.” The deferred auctions, he says, “could be back on as early as August or November once we’ve analyzed all the protests.”
R.E. Cox/Abiquiu
Posted 05/09/2008 08:28 with
Thanks for the comments. Your first point is well taken. The difficulty with headline writing is that sometimes they can be read two ways. In this case, the hed is correct in that a lease sale was called off. Yes, other leases were sold as scheduled, and yes, the deferred sale may one day be held. But the point is that the vast majority of leased acreage was pulled off the table over environmental concerns.
Your second point stems from a misleading sub-hed, which perhaps might have led some to misread the story. The Colorado sale deferral “comes on the heels of” a protest filed over a separate lease sale in New Mexico, which was the protest based on climate change concerns.
We’ll try to rein in our headlines.
Joel Gay