Ken "Beano" Salazar

Thursday, January 14, 2010
News

Salazar announces tougher rules on drilling

New rules an echo of county’s shouts, will slow process
By Matthew Beaudin/Matthew Daly
Telluride Daily Planet/Associated Press
Published: Thursday, January 7, 2010 8:10 AM CST
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar signaled an end to long standing oil and gas leasing rules on Wednesday, announcing a host of policy changes designed to bring more scrutiny and greater public voice to how leases are awarded on the nation’s public lands.

The changes will be felt heavily across the western states, which have sprouted towns and schools as yield to the oil and gas boom.

“We don’t believe we ought to be drilling anywhere and everywhere,” Salazar said at a news conference yesterday in Washington. “We believe we need a balanced approach and a thoughtful approach” that allows development of oil and gas leases on public lands while also protecting national parks, endangered species and municipal watersheds.

Salazar, a former Democratic senator from Colorado, criticized the Bush administration for what he called a “headlong rush” to lease public lands. Early last year, Salazar suspended 60 of 77 leases in Utah approved in that administration’s waning days.

The changes announced Wednesday are intended to bring greater consistency and public engagement to onshore oil and gas leasing, Salazar said, with a goal of reducing legal challenges that have cost taxpayers millions of dollars and energy companies months or even years of delays.

About 1 percent of oil and gas leases on public lands were protested in 1998, he said — a figure that jumped to about 40 percent in 2008. The main reason for the increase was that leases were offered in places where they should not have been or without enough agency scrutiny or public participation, Salazar said.

“In the prior administration the oil and gas industry was the king of the world. Whatever they wanted happened,” Salazar said, adding that those days are over.


BT comments: This guy is an Obama appointee, therefore he represents Obama's approach to our energy needs as a country. Keep in mind that our energy needs correlate directly with our national security as well as the prosperity of our country.
With all of the cries for clean energy why would Salazar shut down virtually all drilling for natural gas? A resource that we may well have in abundance that could begin to ween us off of all the other sources of energy that we have to import. Meanwhile, he wants to build wind farms. Does that sound like a proposal worthy of 21st century America? But just know that this is backward thinking only on the surface. These things are being done with great purpose. Obama and his ilk (and/or appointees) want to see America taken down a few pegs. This is just one more way of making the United States more dependent on other(many hostile) countries and less resilent and prosperous. Just another battle in Obama's war on free market capitalism. Salazar is Obama's Beano solution to keeping anymore gas from being drilled, found or sold to the US public. And that's the way President Obama wants it. Remember that.