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Tag: arctic drilling
Interior Nominee Zinke Would Review Obama’s Limits On Oil Drilling

Interior Nominee Zinke Would Review Obama’s Limits On Oil Drilling

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to run the Department of the Interior, Representative Ryan Zinke of Montana, said during his confirmation hearing on Tuesday that he would review President Barack Obama’s moves to limit oil and gas drilling in Alaska and some other parts of the country if confirmed.

“Yes,” he said in response to a question from Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska about whether he would review drilling limits on federal land in her state as head of the department.”The president-elect has said that we want to be energy independent. I can guarantee you it is better to produce energy domestically under reasonable regulation than overseas with no regulation.”

“We need an economy,” he added.

The Interior Department oversees territories covering a fifth of the United States’ surface from the Arctic to the Gulf of Mexico. This comprises sensitive wildlife habitats, iconic landscapes, rich deposits of oil, gas and coal and important pasturelands for ranchers.

The former Navy SEAL commander, an avid hunter and angler, emerged as a surprise pick to head the department, in part because he has embraced federal stewardship of national parks, forests and refuges. This diverges from the Republican Party’s official position to sell off acreage to states that might prioritize drilling, mining, ranching and forestry.

But he has also fought for increased energy development on federal lands, a position that has worried conservationists but which fits neatly with Trump’s vows to bolster the U.S. energy sector by scaling back regulation and opening up more publicly held land to development.

Over the last eight years, the Interior Department has sought to limit industry access to federal lands and played a key role in Obama’s agenda to combat climate change, as it proposed rules aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions from energy production on federal land.

Obama’s Interior Department banned new coal mining leases on federal property early in 2016. More recently the agency placed parts of the offshore Arctic and Atlantic off-limits to drilling and declared national monuments that protect large parts of Utah and Nevada from development.

Zinke said he believed Trump could “amend” Obama’s moves to declare millions of acres as national monuments.

Zinke was the first of three Cabinet heads Trump has chosen to oversee his environment and energy portfolio to face Senate scrutiny this week.

Trump’s pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, was to testify on Wednesday, and Trump’s choice for Energy secretary, former Texas Governor Rick Perry, was to testify on Thursday.

CLIMATE DEBATE NOT SETTLED

Zinke also said during his hearing that he believes that humans contribute to global climate change but that there is still debate over what should be done about it. “I do not think it is a hoax,” he said.

Before running for the White House, Trump called climate change a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese to weaken U.S. businesses, a position he has since defended.

In his opening remarks, Zinke struck a moderate tone, saying that he recognizes that some federal lands require strong protection. He also called himself an “unapologetic admirer of Teddy Roosevelt,” a former Republican president who pioneered public land conservation.

He said, however, that “a preponderance” of U.S. federal lands are better suited for “multiple use using best practices, sustainable policies and objective science” – a nod to U.S. industries that depend on access to public acreage.

As a first-term congressman, Zinke pushed to end the coal-lease moratorium, saying it had resulted in closed mines and job cuts, and he introduced a bill expanding tax credits for coal-burning power plants that bury carbon dioxide emissions underground.

(Editing by Richard Valdmanis and Cynthia Osterman)

IMAGE: FILE PHOTO: U.S. Representative Ryan Zinke (R-MT) arrives for a meeting with U.S. President-elect Donald Trump at Trump Tower in Manhattan, New York City, U.S., December 12, 2016.  REUTERS/Brendan McDermid/File Photo

Obama Administration Bars New Oil Exploration In Arctic Waters

Obama Administration Bars New Oil Exploration In Arctic Waters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Obama administration on Friday blocked new exploration for oil and gas in Arctic waters, in a win for environmental groups that had fought development of the ecologically fragile region.

The Department of the Interior released a 2017 to 2022 leasing plan that blocked drilling in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas off northern Alaska. It also limited petroleum development in the Cook Inlet off south-central Alaska.

Environmental activists have battled drilling in Alaska to protect whales, walruses and seals, and as part of a broader movement to keep remaining fossil fuels in the ground.

The Interior Department said the plan was “balanced,” and left 70 percent of economically recoverable oil and gas resources open to drilling, mostly in the Gulf of Mexico.

The plan focuses on the best areas “with the highest resource potential, lowest conflict and established infrastructure – and removes regions that are simply not right to lease,” Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said.

President Barack Obama, who last year became the first sitting president to cross the Arctic Circle, has made fighting climate change and protecting the Arctic priorities in his administration.

But President-elect Donald Trump, a Republican who takes office on Jan. 20, 2017, has vowed to open resources to petroleum development and could take steps to reverse the decision.

Oil interests have pressured the administration to explore for energy in the Arctic. Jack Girard, the head of the American Petroleum Institute industry group, said the decision “puts the U.S. at a serious competitive disadvantage.”

Russia and Norway have also explored the Arctic, though Exxon Mobil wound down drilling in the Russian north in 2014 due to U.S. sanctions over Moscow’s aggression in eastern Ukraine.

Fierce winds and frigid waters make the Arctic treacherous for drilling equipment. After spending billions of dollars to explore the Alaskan Arctic, Royal Dutch Shell retreated in 2015 after suffering a gash in one of its ships and environmentalists had uncovered details of an old law that forced the company to cut exploration there by half.

The U.S. Coast Guard complained when Shell was drilling off Alaska that it had been forced to divert resources, including a vessel that fought cocaine trafficking, to keep operations in the region safe.

Environmentalists applauded the new lease plan, which built on a similar decision in March when the government removed much of the Atlantic ocean from oil and gas leasing for five years.

“This is excellent news for our oceans, from the Arctic to the Atlantic,” said Jacqueline Savitz, deputy vice president for U.S. campaigns of Oceana, an international advocacy group.

(Reporting by Timothy Gardner; editing by Cynthia Osterman, G Crosse)

IMAGE: U.S. President Barack Obama holds a news conference at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, U.S. August 4, 2016.  REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

Obama Unleashes Drilling Rigs While Fighting Global Warming

Obama Unleashes Drilling Rigs While Fighting Global Warming

By Sean Cockerham, McClatchy Washington Bureau (TNS)

WASHINGTON — Is President Barack Obama trying to have it both ways?

Obama is playing the roles of both climate change warrior and driller-in-chief: At the same time he hails the campaign against climate change he announced last week, he’s opening the Arctic and Atlantic oceans to drilling and is on track to lease massive amounts of coal in the West.

Renowned climate scientist James Hansen said he’s planning to write an analysis of the president’s global warming policies “probably entitled ‘Delusions at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,’ or something like that.”

Hansen, who is NASA’s former lead climate scientist and is now at Columbia University, co-authored a controversial study published last month raising the possibility that global warming could result in a 10-foot sea level rise in the next five decades and inundate coastal cities.

Former U.S. Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt said in an interview that Obama’s climate record is mixed.

“They are in fact subsidizing the production of coal on federal land and oil and gas. And that really is not good,” said Babbitt, who served under President Bill Clinton.

He said Obama has “remarkable achievements” — including the Clean Power Plan announced last week to limit carbon emissions from power plants, vehicle fuel efficiency standards, and a climate agreement with China — that are focused on limiting demand for planet-warming fossil fuels.

But Babbitt sees a reluctance to address the supply of fossil fuels.

Obama calls his approach an “all-of-the-above” energy policy, including oil, natural gas, coal, and renewables. While Obama’s industry critics complain he is waging a war on coal and pursuing a radical environmental agenda, the president is opening up new frontiers to drilling rigs.

Obama agreed to let Shell explore for oil this summer in the environmentally sensitive Arctic Ocean. The president also proposes a 2021 drilling lease sale off the coasts of North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia, areas long closed to fossil fuel development.

The Bureau of Land Management also is proposing a plan for the Powder River Basin of Montana and Wyoming that would continue the federal coal leasing program and could result in 10 billion tons of coal being leased to mining companies over the next two decades.

David Konisky, an associate professor in the school of public and environmental affairs at Indiana University, said he sees the federal approach as more of a collection of individual agency decisions than a comprehensive Obama administration strategy guiding decisions on fossil fuels and climate.

“My sense is that there is not an overall road map here — with fossil fuel development on public lands, coal in the Powder River Basin, and oil in the Arctic, and then also trying to limit emissions from cars and trucks and power plants,” Konisky said. “There’s a bit of a dissonance going on.”

Interior Secretary Sally Jewell touted increases in oil drilling as well as renewable energy development in a recent speech. She called it a balance of “managing our resources to help drive our nation’s economy, without taking our eye off the America we want to hand our children.”

Jewell also pledged reforms that include changes to the federal coal leasing program, in which “companies can make a winning bid for about a dollar a ton to mine taxpayer-owned coal.”

Obama has disappointed his environmentalist allies in the past, though, and many of them are awaiting his decision on approving the Keystone XL pipeline before judging his climate legacy.

Bill McKibben, founder of the climate group 350.org, said “the president is finally taking credible action on the demand side of the equation, by beginning to reign in coal-fired power plants — that’s good to see.”

“But to meet the demands set by science, he has to be at least as strong on the supply side of the equation,” argued McKibben, who teaches at Middlebury College. “The decisions to open the Arctic to drilling and lease more of the Powder River Basin for coal mining are historic tragedies in that regard.”

Photo: U.S. President Barack Obama (R) greets guests after his remarks on climate change at Everglades National Park, Florida, April 22, 2015. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst