Tag: Ken Salazar

Republican lawmakers, at least in Colorado, are fond of pointing to America’s vast domestic fossil fuel reserves as a largely untapped means of ending the nation’s dependency on overseas energy imports. But there isn’t a lot of talk these days about getting other countries hooked on our homegrown power sources. According to the second-quarter earnings report for Arch Coal, the St. Louis, Mo., company that owns Colorado’s West Elk Mine, 2011 is expected to be a banner year – based at least in part on increasing overseas exports.

Republican lawmakers this session have been steadily hammering on Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s onshore oil and gas drilling reforms that were first announced in January of last year and finally implemented in May.

Five representatives of a coalition of 250 small businesses in the Colorado River Basin called Protect the Flows have been in Washington the last two days meeting with congressional leaders and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to advocate for policies that maintain sustainable water levels in the river and its tributaries.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar Thursday gave the nod to four major solar and wind energy projects on public and private lands in California and Oregon, kicked off the environmental review process for three more projects and outlined the next steps in mapping out “solar energy zones” on public lands in six western states, including Colorado.

After an Arizona Republican this week successfully attached a mining rider to a spending bill that would torpedo Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s ban on new uranium mining claims within 1 million acres of the Grand Canyon, Arizona business, sportsmen and conservation groups are once again rallying behind the moratorium.

Conservation groups were elated Wednesday by a U.S. District Court decision in Wyoming affirming the Interior Department’s ability to weigh environmental impacts when issuing oil and gas leases on public lands – as long as it does so in a timely fashion.

For those who say the American Southwest is up a creek without a paddle in terms of the future water supplies in the Colorado River Basin, they can take comfort in the fact that at least Interior Secretary Ken Salazar now has one.

What Republican Congressman Cory Gardner hopes to do for offshore oil and gas drilling in Alaska, his fellow Colorado GOP House member Mike Coffman is looking to do for onshore drilling on federal lands across the country -- strip away perceived environmental regulatory hurdles. Coffman dropped his Facilitating American Security Through Energy Resources Act (FASTER) bill on Monday and immediately got blowback from environmental watchdog groups.

A California solar panel complex that officials say will be the largest of its kind in the world after its completion broke ground Friday in a ceremony that featured U.S. Dept. of Interior Sec. Ken Salazar and Gov. Jerry Brown.

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced today that more than 1,850 local governments around the nation will receive payments totaling $375.2 million under the Payments in Lieu of Taxes (PILT) program this year to compensate them for non-taxable federal land in their jurisdictions.