News
Management of national parks, forests and other public lands will shift significantly as Interior Department agencies in an Obama administration emphasize consensus building, tighter restrictions on drilling and funding aimed at conservation priorities.
The new direction will especially affect the West, where environmental and industry groups anxiously await the changes to come from the White House and the expanded Democratic congressional majorities next year.
Bankrupting the American coal industry, as presidential candidate Barack Obama has reportedly suggested, would crash the already strained U.S. electrical grid, turn America's lights out and increase America's reliance on foreign energy even more, according to the Democratic chairman of Americans for American Energy.
Denver, CO – A new study shows that environmental groups play the leading role in blocking necessary improvements to the U.S. power grid, which the study found is increasingly at risk for major brownouts and blackouts beginning in the summery of 2009.
Revisiting the recent lifting of offshore oil and gas drilling bans will be the first order of business next year for the House Natural Resources Committee, Chairman Nick Rahall said Friday.
The Congress of Racial Equality's national spokesman Niger Innis took the Stop the War on the Poor campaign to an unlikely front: Alberta. "We say the economic frontier is the last frontier for achieving racial equality in society," Mr. Innis says. "And access to affordable energy ... is what we consider to be the master resource for the economic survival for our community. Rising energy prices represent an immoral war on the poor, because it keeps people poor."
Democrats allowed a decades-old ban on offshore oil and gas drilling to expire this week in order to pass a $600 billion continuing resolution package, but the fight over the moratorium may not be over yet.
Americans for American Energy (AAE) declared victory today after Congress moved to drop moratoriums on the development of new deepwater oil and natural gas resources off of American shores in the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), as well as lift the Commercial Leasing Moratorium on U.S. oil shale development. These two signature issues have been top priorities for AAE for the past year and a half.
Potential illegal coordination between U.S. Interior Department officials and several national environmental groups, currently being investigated by the Interior Inspector General, should also be investigated by Congressional oversight committees, according to Americans for American Energy.
Democratic Rep. Mark Udall of Colorado says the shifting of attention to the economy rather than energy is working to his benefit in the Senate race against former Republican Rep. Bob Schaffer. But Schaffer, who has focused almost exclusively on energy during the campaign, said the two issues cannot be separated.
Pro energy development group is calling for Congress to investigate possible illegal coordination bewteen an arm of the Interior department and lobbyists for environmental groups.
Voters' hard slapdown of Amendment 58 raises doubts about Gov. Bill Ritter's efforts to reap greater financial benefits from Colorado's energy boom.
The measure, defeated by a ratio of about 3-to-2, sought to kill a tax credit for the oil and gas industry that saves it some $320 million annually in payments to the state on the fossil fuels taken from beneath the ground.