Squawk.

When it comes to enforcing the environmental laws concerning certain species of federally-protected birds, the Obama administration and their environmentalist allies have been impressively diligent in charging oil companies, coal plants, and power stations when said birds get tangled up in their power lines or drown in their waste pits; in the past five years, [...]

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Downsizing, the wrong way.

Just in case you thought the administration had finished drumming up frightening reasons for why Congress really needs to get their stuff together and undo sequestration, never fear. The past few summers, we’ve watched some truly catastrophic wildfires rage across the American landscape, and the Departments of Interior and Agriculture would like you to know [...]

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Sequester? What sequester?

The federal government is in debt up to their (our!) eyeballs, and yet it has more land on its hands than it knows what to do with (except, you know, bar private individuals and citizens from putting the lands to productive uses). The federal estate covers almost a third of the surface area of the [...]

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Fiat.

As keen as President Obama and the White House are to take credit for the fact that oil imports are down and domestic production is going strong, this isn’t due to any especial efforts on behalf of his administration as much as it is due to state and private endeavors — unfortunately, it’s all too [...]

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Awesome.

Now, you might be tempted to wonder: Who could possibly find a reason to raise a partisan uproar over this? Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad for escaping slaves. Charles Young and the Buffalo Soldiers. The Rio Grande del Norte in New Mexico. The San Juan Islands off Washington State. The state of Delaware. These [...]

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Tragedy strikes.

I am mystified as to why I am supposed to interpret this as a bad thing. Gains made in the last four years to build dozens of renewable energy projects on public lands and create a regulatory framework for offshore wind production in the United States could be stymied by the large federal budget cuts [...]

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Classic.

Oh, the sweet, sweet irony of environmentalist infighting. The Obama administration (while somehow finding every excuse in the world to dawdle and delay on major economy-impacting items like federal drilling permits, hydraulic fracturing rules, and the Keystone XL pipeline) decided to make an especial project out using public lands for utility-scale solar plants. The Interior [...]

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Putting our money where his mouth is.

Sorry to barrage you with the tiresome train wreck of platitudes that was President Obama’s State of the Union address last night, but this little fact-check nugget just caught my attention and you know I can’t let it go without commenting. Now, four years ago, other countries dominated the clean-energy market and the jobs that [...]

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Two birds with one stone.

Not a bad choice, for a couple of reasons.  Barack Obama will replace outgoing Interior Secretary Ken Salazar with Sally Jewell, the CEO of outdoor sports and clothing giant REI, the White House will announce today: President Barack Obama on Wednesday will nominate business executive and former engineer Sally Jewell to lead the Interior Department, [...]

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Well, that's a relief.

…Just what we’ve all been so eagerly waiting for, I’m sure. The U.S. identified about 192,000 acres of government-owned land in Arizona that are suitable for commercial-scale solar and wind farms. The agency also established the Agua Caliente Solar Energy Zone, 2,550 acres in the state with strong sunlight and few resource conflicts that are [...]

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Opportunities.

It won’t be official for another two months, says the Denver Post, but Ken Salazar will leave Interior and return to Colorado.  The man who provided the obstruction to Gulf drilling and killed tens of thousands of jobs, even after a federal judge demanded that the Obama administration cease and desist, may be looking for [...]

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Double standard.

The environmental lobby has used the Endangered Species Act and its many wildlife-related legal brethren to accomplish any number of their radical goals, including designating lands as untouchable wilderness and bringing the pain on oil and gas companies for any infractions, real or imagined. The golden eagle, the spotted owl, the sage grouse, and etcetera [...]

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Yes, yes it is.

Over the weekend, Department of Agriculture Secretary Vilsack lamented that rural America is becoming less of a power-player in the United States’ political landscape. A month after an election that Democrats won even as rural parts of the country voted overwhelmingly Republican, the former Democratic governor of Iowa told farm belt leaders this past week [...]

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Poverty in perpetuity.

Little noticed in all of the continuing fiscal-cliff hullabaloo today, the Obama administration held their annual White House Tribal Nations Conference with the Department of Interior on Wednesday — and if ever there was a specific, targeted example of the long-term results perpetuated by the type of persistent big-government help the Obama administration wants to [...]

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But, rain check on some of that offshore drilling.

So, the Department of Interior‘s plans to develop solar projects on public land — a.k.a., on public assets that the government is disallowing from being put to more productive uses — against which I’ve so often railed? Welcome to my nightmare. The WSJ reports: The U.S. will offer up federal acreage off the coasts of [...]

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Well, that didn't take long

In the final days of the election I made what turned out to be a clearly futile effort to demonstrate that the future of energy production, as well as the associated jobs and economic boost which go with it, could be significantly affected by the outcome. One candidate had a substantially pro-energy policy which included [...]

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Well, that's a relief.

Because none of the hydra-like heads of the Obama administration’s ever-growing bureaucracy can ever be really complete without it’s own personal council of green-energy-promotin’, climate-change-science-pushin’ environmentalist types, the Interior Department is all set to get their special board of eco-advisers to help them inform their decisions on future policy-making, whoop-de-doo. Human Events has the scoop: [...]

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You will take what we give you, and you will like it.

In addendum to my weekend post about the Department of Interior focusing its bureaucratic efforts on fast-tracking their program for quickly approving permits for solar panels on public land — yippee ki-yay — I’ve just spotted this specific example of the ways in which the Obama administration is trying to take credit for the oil [...]

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Agendas.

Well, that’s a relief! Even while the Obama administration continues to dither about finishing those environmental reviews on ostensible-but-still-elusive proof of groundwater contamination from fracking,; and continues to deny oil and gas companies access to America’s own wildly abundant resources; and owns over a third of the United States’ surface area which puts the land [...]

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Irony?

To begin: There are multiple different types of people who fall under the category of “environmentalists.” There are the vaguely green-loving, usually urban-dwelling, smugly ‘hip’ types who accept the latest eco-trends (like electric cars and hemp grocery bags and wind energy) as automatic wisdom from on high without doing any research or critical thinking of [...]

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Yes, because who cares about oil and gas when solar panels have created so many productive private-sector jobs! Wait, what...?

I already expended all of my outrageous outrage over this particularly irksome program of the Interior Department’s doing when I discovered it last October, but here’s still more of the same baloney: The Obama administration will open public lands in six western states to more solar projects as part of a solar energy road map [...]

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Bombshell: Bureaucrats don't always make for the best conservationists.

Please, Secretary Salazar — spare us the dramatics. The Republican budget is a “death knell” for conservation programs, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said Wednesday, according to The Associated Press. AP reports Salazar “at times struck a political tone” while touring the Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge near Boynton Beach, Fla. “A great fear I have is [...]

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Right, so... why are we cutting our nose off, again? To spite our face?

On Monday, Obama’s Department of Interior released a new report detailing how energy development on federal lands helped to create 1.5 million jobs and contributed $275 billion to the economy in just the last fiscal year. To that, I have only one thing to say: Ya’ think?! The Interior Department claimed its activities contributed a [...]

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A convenient excuse for your own folly.

Environmentalists aren’t ones to let a good crisis go to waste. Colorado is burning, and as we might all infer from the vociferous insistence of the green lobby, there are few ecological or weather-related disasters that we shouldn’t blame on climate change in some form or another. Colorado and U.S. Forest Service firefighters are battling [...]

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Unbelievable.

There are few things that can make me quite as outrageously perturbed as the unmitigated gall of a big-government bureaucrat presuming that he knows better than everybody else. I often make the case that when it comes to energy-and-environment issues specifically, big government is an especially poor steward in which to place your environmental faith, [...]

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