House Republicans today began a week of what will no doubt be heated hearings aimed at blocking Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s Wild Lands order that directed the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to protect millions of acres of federal land for its wilderness value.

Issued in December of last year, Secretarial Order 3310 compels the BLM, which manages more public land than any other federal agency, to take public input from locally affected communities and then use its existing land planning process to designate appropriate areas as “Wild Lands” and manage them accordingly.

Western lawmakers, mostly Republicans, are up in arms about what they perceive as the federal government locking up public lands, blocking energy extraction and mining interests and killing jobs in areas already hard-hit by the global recession.

“Millions of acres of multi-use land in the West are at risk of being locked up if the administration carries out this [wild lands] policy,” said Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash. Hastings chairs the House Natural Resources Committee, which held a hearing today on Salazar’s order. Next up is a hearing on the Department of Interior’s budget on Thursday, followed by a BLM budget hearing on Monday.

Salazar, a former Colorado senator and attorney general, says he’s simply restoring balance to BLM land management policies after the federal agency was stripped of its comprehensive wilderness policy during the Bush administration in 2003 by then Interior Secretary Gale Norton, also a former Colorado attorney general.

“Americans love the wild places where they hunt, fish, hike, and get away from it all, and they expect these lands to be protected wisely on their behalf,” Salazar said in a release at the time of his order. “This policy ensures that the lands of the American public are protected for current and future generations to come.”

BLM Director Bob Abbey said his agency is merely doing what the public requires it to do.

“The new Wild Lands policy affirms the BLM’s authorities under the law — and our responsibility to the American people — to protect the wilderness characteristics of the lands we oversee as part of our multiple-use mission,” Abbey said.

Also today, Rep. Denny Rehberg, R-Mont., and Rep. Raúl Labrador, R-Idaho, held a press conference with Idaho Gov. Butch Otter to both blast Salazar’s Wild Lands order and announce pending legislation that would require congressional approval of new “Wild Lands” and national monument designations in Montana. The bill will be titled the Montana Land Sovereignty Act.

“A lot of the policy that’s being imposed on Western states like Montana and Idaho is really hurting job creation and delaying economic recovery,” Rehberg said in a release. “Between usurping our wolf management, hatching secret plans to designate millions of acres of new national monuments and the systematic denial of access to our own natural resources, it’s not surprising some have referred to this as a ‘war on the West’”

Matthew Garrington, the Denver-based deputy director of the Checks and Balances Project, an online accountability and transparency project focused on drilling issues, said oil and gas companies have “locked up over nearly 30 million acres of public lands in the Intermountain West administered by the BLM.” He adds that, according to BLM statistics, for every one acre of land protected as wilderness there are 42 acres of BLM land leased for drilling.

“This whole idea that there’s not enough access [to BLM land] just is not true,” Garrington said. “In fact, it’s the opposite. The oil and gas industry is doing a speculative land grab and sitting on 20 million acres of public land.” The industry is currently only using a little over a third of the BLM land it has leased for drilling, Garrington added.

The tradition of having a cabinet member or other high-ranking government official miss the speech goes back nearly 50 years. It is done as a protection against the unthinkable so that someone will be instantly in charge of the government if required.

Wrote The Washington Post Tuesday:

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar will serve as the Obama administration’s “designated survivor” this evening, the White House has announced.

With most of the federal government’s senior leadership slated to sit in one room together during the State of the Union address, presidents routinely select at least one Cabinet secretary to skip the big speech to ensure a smooth transfer of power in the event of a catastrophic event.

The tradition dates back at least to the 1960s and the White House first publicly released the names of designated absentees during the Nixon administration, according to the Senate Historical Office.

Salazar is not the first Coloradan to have the honor. Interior Secretary Gale Norton did the deed in 2002, and Transportation Secretary Federico Pena did it in 1995.

Ken Buck at Estes Park tea party event Tuesday. Photo by Joseph Boven/Colorado Independent

“Today [Sen. Michael Bennet's] campaign manager says that I am an extremist. I’m an extremist? I’m sorry I am not in Washington D.C. with $100 trillion of unfunded liability or a $13 trillion national debt. The folks in D.C. are the extremists if they think that is normal,” Buck said.

Buck appeared to be responding to a statement by Bennet campaign manager Craig Hughes, who told the Denver Post, “Rest assured, http://blogs.denverpost.com/thespot/2010/07/05/hot-off-the-presses-michael-bennet-yard-signs/ it will soon be easier to see a Bennet yard sign than it will be to find any sign of moderation from extreme candidates Ken Buck and Jane Norton.”

The Colorado Democratic Party has recently unleashed a campaign noting, among other things, both Buck and Norton’s call to eliminate the Department of Education, their backing of Arizona’s illegal immigration law, statements indicating a general dislike of social security , and support of the Personhood Amendment, which would give full legal protections to zygotes.

In addition, Democratic Party officials have raised concerns over Buck’s adherence to Tim DeMint as a mentor and fundraiser. And Democrats further launched an attack on a recent advertisement by Norton, who was also criticized by Republican Ali Hasan, for a campaign commercial in which she appears to challenge President Barack Obama for saying, “We are not at war with Islam.” The commercial uses the sound of jet engines to take the viewer back to the 9/11 attacks.

“We have to keep America free, safe and sovereign,” Norton said, not commenting on extremist accusations. “I assert you don’t keep us safe by reading terrorists their Miranda rights, you don’t keep us safe by shutting down Gitmo, and you certainly don’t keep us safe by calling the War on Terror the overseas contingency operation. Call it what it is.”

Buck proclaimed that if elected he would introduce constitutional amendments to force a balanced federal budget and create term limits for legislators. “It is time Republicans started acting like Republicans when they go to Washington,” he said.

“Nancy Pelosi thought it would be OK for [Congress] to buy a fleet of Gulf Stream jets so that they didn’t have to fly commercial with the rest of us. There is only one kind answer to that kind of arrogance folks. That is a constitutional term limit,” Buck said.

According to the Wall Street Journal , the jets referred to by Buck reportedly are used primarily by the executive branch, though senators and military officials use them for flights. Eight planes were purchased in total, with four being requested by the Defense Department to replace an aging fleet. Legislative staff said the cost savings would amount to one extra plane.

Norton commented that jobs and government cuts would be a major feature of her agenda, and added Colorado had suffered huge job losses because of oil and gas regulations.

Oil and gas companies in the state have said regulations have been only part of the reason for their drilling slowdown in Colorado. A larger component has been the decrease in oil and gas prices globally and the opening up of more accessible markets elsewhere in the country.

“We have to repeal Obama-care, cut discretionary spending by 20 percent, balance the budget without raising taxes, no earmarks, no to bailouts, no to cap and trade. We need to drill in ANWR and we need to drill on the Roan Plateau,” Norton said.

Despite a relative state of calm between the two candidates, Buck said the Republican Party is flawed and needs to be changed through grass-roots groups. He asked tea partiers to stand by him in fighting lobbyist interests that he says are taking part in the race. The statement appeared to be a backhanded slap at Norton, whose campaign has been well served by lobbyist dollars and who Buck’s campaign has called a “Washington insider.”

Here’s the entire TAI post, which correctly points out the Armey nod solidifies Buck’s already solid bona fides among Colorado’s conservative tea party elements:

Dick Armey, former Republican House Majority Leader and chairman of FreedomWorks PAC, endorsed Weld County District Attorney Ken Buck as the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Colorado Tuesday. FreedomWorks is a political action committee that has organized many of the tea party protests and “trains and mobilizes hundreds of thousands of volunteer activists,” according to its website. Buck has been the favorite over fellow Republican Jane Norton among tea party coalitions in Colorado and beyond.

“Ken Buck is the clear choice for true conservatives in this election,” Armey said. “He has enough common sense to recognize that a nation cannot tax its way to growth, or spend its way to prosperity. There is a shortage of that kind of thinking in Washington right now.”

Buck praised Armey’s group in a statement. “FreedomWorks PAC has a strong record of helping conservatives get elected…I’m thrilled to have such a respected grassroots organization on our side.”

In April, Buck received the endorsement of Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), who runs his own PAC, the Senate Conservatives Fund, which is not associated with the Republican Party and does not support “liberal Republicans” but seeks to elect “strong conservative candidates.”

Norton, on the other hand, has received endorsements from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the American Conservative Union PAC and the Family Research Council PAC.

But with the FreedomWorks endorsement, Buck is now the clear favorite of a mobilizing arm of the tea party, which may indeed help turn out voters in November.

“When people here think Norton, they may be picking the wrong one. It’s a familiar name,” Wiens said. “I would imagine that when they’re asked, I think a lot of people would say they’d probably vote for a Norton, no matter who the Norton is.”

Politico:

Jane Norton

[I]n the Centennial State, the Norton name is a GOP institution. Besides the Senate candidate, there’s Jane Norton’s husband Tom, a former U.S. attorney; former Interior Secretary Gale Norton, who served as state attorney general; former state Senate president Tom Norton and University of Northern Colorado President Kay Norton.

They’re not all related, but that doesn’t mean the many Nortons don’t benefit from each other’s prominence.

As readers have pointed out, in fact, Jane is married to Mike Norton, who has also worked in Colorado politics, not Tom Norton.

Former Interior Secretary Gale Norton has been embroiled in an influence-peddling scandal this past year. In 2006, the department she headed awarded oil shale leases on federal land worth potential hundreds of billions to a subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell. Months after the deal, Norton resigned and was hired soon thereafter by Shell as an in-house lawyer.

On a conservative talk radio show two weeks ago, host Richard Randall called Norton “Gale.” He apologize, explaining to listeners that the slip up was bound to happen and he was just glad that it was now behind him.

Wiens also explained that he dropped more than $540,000 of his own money into his campaign last quarter to counter the Washington lobbyist money Norton has been raking in since she entered the race.

“With Washington money getting so quickly involved in the campaign, I took it upon myself to level the playing field, which I’ve done.”

Wiens entered the race in the fall. He is running in the primary against Norton and Weld County D.A. Ken Buck. Norton has led by a significant margin in state polls and received early support from the national GOP and Sen. John McCain. Grassroots Republicans decried her candidacy, maintaining that she had been coronated in September by the national party without regard for events on the ground in Colorado, where Buck, for example, had already been campaigning for months.

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Scott McInnis (screengrab: 9 News)

Ethics Watch Names Colorado’s Top Five Ethics Scandals of 2009

Ethics Watch’s second annual Top Ethics Scandals list does not attempt to rank these scandals in a particular order — they are all outrageous.  Based on news reports, egregiousness of the situation, and the timeline of attention each situation received, the following are Ethics Watch’s Top Five Ethics Scandals of 2009:

1) Gubernatorial Quasi-Candidate Scott McInnis Leaves Damning Voice Mail: As early as May 2009, former Congressman Scott McInnis (R-Grand Junction) was expected to run for governor, but had not publicly announced his candidacy nor filed the appropriate registration. However, McInnis was busy making campaign calls, indicating he was running for governor, had his team in place, and was putting together a 527.  Under pressure from Ethics Watch and the media, McInnis quietly filed his paperwork for candidacy on May 19, but questions still remain as to the activities he was conducting prior to registering as a candidate, and potential coordination with a 527, which would violate state election laws.

2)  CSU Board of Governors Hands Plum Job to One of Their Own in Secret Meeting: As vice president of the Colorado State University (CSU) Board of Governors, Joe Blake participated in a decision to create a chancellor position separate from the president position.  Mr. Blake formally submitted his application for this very position on April 29.  On May 5, the CSU Board of Governors had a closed-door executive session meeting during which they decided that Mr. Blake would be the sole finalist for the chancellor position.  That meeting was ruled to violate Colorado Open Meetings laws.  CSU paid three media outlets $19,000 in legal fees and released the tapes of the closed-door session.

3) The Independent Ethics Commission’s Troubles with Transparency: The Colorado Independent Ethics Commission (IEC) was created to be the premier ethics body in Colorado.  Instead of setting an example of how a state commission should act, the IEC spent much of 2009 unsuccessfully defending itself from allegations that it was illegally operating in secret.  In May, the IEC was ordered by a Denver District Court Judge to release records subject to an Ethics Watch open records request and to pay Ethics Watch’s attorneys’ fees.  In September, another Denver District Court Judge ruled that the IEC was in violation of Colorado’s open meetings laws, and ordered the IEC to release records from the meetings to a media outlet.  And finally in December, a third judge ruled that the IEC debated an advisory opinion in secret, again violating open meetings laws.

4)      Gale Norton’s Questionable Oil Industry Work: In September 2009 the Department of Justice issued subpoenas as part of an investigation into Bush administration Interior Secretary and former Colorado Attorney General Gale Norton.  The Department of Justice is reportedly investigating whether Gale Norton used her position in the Interior Department to benefit Royal Dutch Shell by allowing her department to enter into three potentially lucrative amendments to oil leases with Royal Dutch Shell on federal land in Colorado, then took a job as an adviser to the oil-shale division of Royal Dutch Shell.

5) Representative Pommer’s Campaign Finance Violations and “Bad at Paperwork” Defense: Representative Jack Pommer (D-Boulder), a candidate in the 2008 general election for the Colorado House of Representatives, missed filing four separate campaign finance reports between October 2008 and January 2009.  After media exposure of the delinquency, Pommer filed his report on April 6, 2009, and claimed that he was simply “bad at paperwork.”  The Secretary of State’s office imposed fines of more than $4,000 on Pommer.

The full report, including the actions Ethics Watch took in response to the lapses, can be found online at www.coloradoforethics.org.

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Issued as amendments to six existing research and development leases on public lands (five in Colorado and one in Utah), the 11th-hour Bush regulations set the ground rules for moving forward with commercial oil shale production if and when oil and gas companies arrive at viable technologies capable of affordably squeezing kerogen from shale rock and sand in western Colorado, eastern Utah and southwestern Wyoming.

Some estimates place oil shale reserves in the region’s Green River Formation at up to 1 trillion barrels of oil that could then be refined into petroleum. Kerogen is the organic material trapped in the shale that can be extracted at extremely high temperatures.

But the process remains highly speculative, and environmentalists who have legally challenged the Bush rules say the current technology requires far too much water for arid western lands to support, too much electricity that would further exacerbate global warming and that the process degrades sensitive Rocky Mountain landscapes with adverse impacts on wildlife and tourism.

“We want to avoid the booms and busts of the past,” said Salazar, a former U.S. senator from Colorado, referring to a devastating oil shale bust on the Western Slope in the 1980s. “We want to ensure the potential development is done in a way that is environmentally appropriate, and we want to assure that the American taxpayers get a fair return for the potential development of America’s public lands.”

The Bush rules called for a royalty rate starting at 5 percent to be paid by oil and gas companies to the federal government for the use of public lands. Critics claim that rate is far too low.

“There is a question about how those royalty rates could actually be set when these very important fundamental questions [about technology, water and power] have not been answered,” Salazar said, adding the 11th-hour process was done without public scrutiny and was too favorable to a handful of companies currently holding leases.

“These lease addenda conveyed lucrative benefits to the leaseholders to the exclusion of others,” he said, reading from a letter he sent to the inspector general today. “Further, the addenda were executed at the very end of the last administration and were issued in contrast to the underlying leases without any opportunity for public review or comment.”

Royal Dutch Shell holds three of the Colorado R&D leases and is currently part of an ongoing investigation by the Justice Department of former Bush Interior Secretary Gale Norton, who later accepted a job with Shell. The DOJ is investigating whether Norton, a former Colorado attorney general, gave favorable treatment to Shell in exchange for a position with the company.

“There are serious questions about whether those lease addenda are legal or whether they should be rescinded,” Salazar said, although he said he’ll reserve judgment until the inspector general’s report is completed. At that point he said Interior will either defend the rules, modify them or rescind them.

Salazar also announced the Bureau of Land Management will begin accepting an unlimited number of applications for a new round of R&D leases of up to 640 acres, or approximately one square mile. Energy companies have up to 60 days to apply for those leases, which will be managed under a new set of guidelines.

Besides being smaller than the existing leases, which are for more than 5,000 acres each, companies issued a new lease would have to submit a plan of development within nine months, and once approved by the BLM, would then have to get all state and local permits for development within 16 months.

The development plans, Salazar said, will have to address key concerns about water and power consumption and environmental impacts on wildlife, air and water quality and local communities. Water, he stressed, especially in the Colorado River Basin, is a key concern.

“This is an obviously important question in Colorado and Utah, which are arid states with limited water supplies where commercial oil shale development would have major impacts on agriculture and other uses,” Salazar said.

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Experts estimate up to one trillion barrels of oil could be squeezed from the shale rock and sands, but the process consumes huge amounts of water and carries with it potentially devastating environmental impacts.

On its way out the door last fall, the Bush Interior Department tried to lock in rules that would require oil shale royalty rates for production on public lands starting at about 5 percent – far below traditional oil and gas royalty rates because of the speculative nature of the resource.

In its ongoing investigation of former Bush Interior Secretary Gale Norton, who later signed on as an attorney with Dutch Royal Shell – one of the leading researchers of oil shale production in Colorado – the Times turned up e-mails where Norton tips her hand on the strategy she suggested for locking in royalty rates despite changing administrations.

Norton, who’s being probed by the Obama Justice Department for allegedly using her Interior post to secure a job at Shell, said she thought Obama Interior Secretary Ken Salazar might be more inclined to defend the Bush rates because of legal challenges from environmental groups.

But a Shell official questioned that approach because it could seem as if they were admitting the 11th-hour process was flawed and because the rates were too low.

Oil shale production involves either mining shale and super-heating it to force out the kerogen, or organic matter, in order to refine it into petroleum; or heating the shale underground in what’s known as in-situ production. Both methods require huge amounts of water and electricity, and environmentalists argue research and development funds would be better spent on renewables.

Another speculative source of future energy – shale gas – was debunked by an expert this week at the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas conference in Denver. Arthur Berman, a geological consultant from Texas, said shale gas plays may not be nearly as promising as some proponents claim, and that speculation on the resource may be the next energy bubble to burst.

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The ASPO-USA meeting of energy industry observers who say the world is nearing peak-oil production and soon will not be able to meet ever-growing demand was the perfect forum for Ritter to talk up his aggressive agenda of enticing renewable energy companies to the state and promoting clean energy research in state colleges and universities.

But debunkers of the peak-oil theory say it’s at least 40 to 100 years away, especially given technological advances that will make squeezing oil from shale sand and rock in western Colorado and other parts of the Rocky Mountain West more economically viable.

Critics of oil shale production, however, say it’s way too environmentally destructive, consumes far too much water, and ultimately does nothing to address global climate change. Billions in oil-shale research, especially given a recent Justice Department probe of former Bush administration Interior Secretary Gale Norton, would be better spent on renewable energy development, critics claim.

Proponents of expanding fossil-fuel production into largely untapped and unproven arenas such as oil shale often dismiss renewable sources such as solar, wind, hydro and biomass as technologically too far behind to significantly reduce traditional fuel consumption.

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A coalition of environmental groups including the Center for Biological Diversity, Colorado Environmental Coalition and the Sierra Club sued in January to block 11th-hour Bush administration rule making by the Bureau of Land Management that set parameters for oil shale leasing and development on millions of acres of public lands in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming.

According to the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, this is the fifth extension granted the government in this case, mostly due to the transition between the Bush and Obama administration in the Interior Department. But progress is reportedly being made on a settlement.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who blocked oil shale development as a Colorado senator, has suspended any new research and development leases for the controversial extractive process, which is still unproven on a commercial scale.

Shell Oil holds three research leases in Colorado but is now embroiled in a controversy involving former Bush Interior Secretary Gale Norton, who’s being investigated by the Justice Department for allegedly providing favorable treatment to Shell in exchange for a job.

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