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 [...]

Read this post »

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 [...]

Read this post »

Conflicted?

The Interior Department on Tuesday announced that they’re going to scrap their plans to finalize regulations that would impose further top-down controls on hydraulic fracturing by the end of this year. Perhaps it’s just another case of a wildly inefficient, delay-prone, bungling bureaucracy taking its sweet time, but I’d wager this is a sign of [...]

Read this post »

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 [...]

Read this post »

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 [...]

Read this post »

We're here to help.

Hey, no bigs. It’s just a 100-year-old company and California’s only surviving cannery, a sustainable, family-owned operation employing 30 people. The Drakes Bay Oyster Company has been in a seven-year fight with the federal government and environmental groups over whether it’s 40-year lease would be renewed this week. The Lunny family, which owns the oyster [...]

View the video »

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 [...]

Read this post »

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 [...]

Read this post »

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 [...]

Read this post »

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 [...]

Read this post »

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 [...]

Read this post »

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, [...]

Read this post »

"I guarantee you, if John McCain had been President ..."

Not exactly a stunner, you say?  Well, you’d be right, but it’s probably worse than what Jones admits here, too.  Not only did they pull their punches towards the President in 2010, they tried to shift the blame for the Deepwater Horizon spill to the Bush administration, even though Barack Obama and his Interior Secretary [...]

Read this post »

Speaking of "fairy tales"...

While President Obama himself has already switched gears from his deliberately misleading energy-messaging kick, moving on to the momentarily greener pastures of student loan financing, his many administrative minions are of course still busily doing his bidding in their specialized areas. Behold the brazen words of my environmental nemesis, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, during a [...]

Read this post »

Transparency promise is put to the test

President Obama’s offshore drilling moratorium following the 2010 oil spill caused widespread job losses and a significant drop in energy production in the Gulf of Mexico. Two years later, a U.S. House committee wants to know why the administration misled the public about the drilling ban. The House Natural Resources Committee yesterday issued its first [...]

Read this post »

Plus, Ramirez on beaming sunshine at the White House.

I know, I know — the White House claims they don’t have any drilling moratorium in place.  They claim that they want to increase domestic oil production.  As Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) explains to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, their actions don’t match their rhetoric.  After Salazar insisted that the administration has been processing permits and [...]

Read this post »