FreeLists / tn-bird / [TN-Bird] News-Arctic Refuge, public lands(long)

["Dev Joslin" <devjoslin@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

The following is a news article from the LA Times on bills concerning use of 
the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and other public lands, of interest to 
many birders.  It not intended as a political statement, just information:


House Drops Bid to Open Refuge, Coasts to Drilling
?  GOP concessions to moderates may ease passage of a budget bill. But a 
mining measure could mean the sale of Western public lands.

By Richard Simon, Joel Havemann and Bettina Boxall, Times Staff Writers
WASHINGTON ? In a rare victory for environmentalists in the House of 
Representatives, Republican leaders Wednesday night abandoned a measure to 
open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling.

They also jettisoned a provision to relax a long-standing ban on new energy 
exploration off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. However, they apparently 
left in the budget package a mining law provision that would permit the sale 
of public lands in the West for private development.

A rewrite of the Mining Law of 1872, it has drawn less attention than the 
Arctic drilling provision but could have a farther-reaching effect on public 
lands. Drafted by the House Resources Committee, the measure would allow the 
sale of potentially millions of federal acres, including national park and 
forest holdings.

Such a law could mean "the biggest privatization of federal land in the last 
100 years," said John Leshy, who was the Interior Department's top lawyer in 
the 1990s and is now a professor at UC Hastings College of the Law. "Nothing 
like this has ever surfaced before."

The proposal would lift an 11-year-old congressional moratorium on mining 
patents, letting mining companies buy federal land with valuable mineral 
deposits for nominal fees. It would also make it easier to purchase federal 
land for nonmining uses, dropping the requirement that the acreage contain a 
valuable mineral discovery. And it would let the public stake new claims 
next to existing mining claims and buy that adjacent land for economic 
development unrelated to mining.

The concessions to moderate Republicans on drilling in the Arctic National 
Wildlife Refuge grew out of the party leadership's effort to salvage the 
broad spending-cut bill to which the oil-drilling and mining measures were 
attached.

Even with the drilling provisions gone, today's House floor vote on the 
bill, which would cut more than $50 billion over five years from federal 
benefit programs, will probably be close.

A spokesman for House Resources Committee Chairman Richard W. Pombo 
(R-Tracy) said Pombo was inclined to oppose the bill "if it does nothing to 
increase domestic energy supplies and lower prices."

Wednesday's developments do not kill the prospect of drilling in the Arctic 
National Wildlife Refuge. The Senate included drilling in its spending-cut 
bill, passed last week, and the provision could survive an eventual 
House-Senate compromise.

Still, the House action was an odd twist in the decades-old fight over the 
oil beneath the refuge. The House has been far less friendly to 
environmentalists than the Senate in recent years and has endorsed Arctic 
drilling, only to see the Senate kill it.

"We win for now," Sierra Club lobbyist Melinda Pierce said. "It's going to 
come back, no doubt. For them, they win once and it's all over. For us, we 
win, and we just live to fight another day."

In a letter to GOP leadership this week, about two dozen moderate House 
Republicans said they would not vote for a bill that contained the provision 
on Arctic drilling, which would threaten a "national treasure." The 
spending-cut bill is "far too important to jeopardize" by including it, they 
wrote.

A spokesman for REP America, a group of Republican activists who support 
environmental conservation, praised the legislators who opposed the 
provision.

"We are particularly pleased that many of them have already warned 
leadership against trying to put Arctic drilling back into the legislation 
in conference with the Senate," said David Jenkins, government affairs 
director of REP America.

Drilling supporters estimate that 10 billion barrels of oil lie beneath the 
refuge's tundra. The United States consumes about 20 million barrels of oil 
a day. Drilling opponents contend that opening the area to oil exploration 
would endanger wildlife and spoil a unique environment while doing little to 
bring down gasoline prices, because it would be years before any oil 
discovered could reach the marketplace.

Supporters wanted to attach the drilling measure to the budget bill to get 
around filibusters that in the past have blocked such provisions. Halting a 
filibuster takes 60 votes, but budget legislation cannot be filibustered ? 
meaning the bill would need a simple majority, 51 votes.

Although the mining proposal from the House Resources Committee excludes 
national parks and wilderness areas, a caveat recognizes "valid existing 
rights" ? which critics say means that pockets of national park land could 
be sold. There are 903 mining claims, averaging 20 acres each, in the park 
system nationwide that predate the parks' establishment. Most of those 
claims are in California, including 432 in the Mojave National Preserve and 
286 in Death Valley National Park.

The House Resources Committee's top Democrat, Rep. Nick J. Rahall II of West 
Virginia, asked the House Rules Committee to drop Pombo's language from the 
budget measure, saying it would "turn what is supposed to be a mining law 
into a general real estate sales program for Western public lands."

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) cited the possibility of land sales in a 
letter Wednesday that called for Pombo to withdraw the proposal. "I am 
deeply concerned that you propose to sell off significant parts of America's 
treasured public lands, including areas in national parks, wilderness areas 
and national forests, as part of the House budget reconciliation bill," 
Feinstein wrote.

Pombo's office did not return calls for comment Wednesday.

The coastal drilling language dropped from the budget bill would have ended 
a 24-year congressional moratorium on new oil and gas drilling off 
California and most of the rest of the nation's shoreline. The proposal, 
promoted by Pombo, would have allowed states to open federal waters, which 
begin three miles from the coast, to new drilling in exchange for a larger 
share of oil or gas royalties. States desiring to retain protections could 
have petitioned the Interior Department to maintain the drilling ban for 
renewable periods of five years.

At a House Rules Committee hearing, Democrats lambasted the spending-cut 
bill, which was written by eight other House committees and assembled into a 
single piece of legislation by the Budget Committee.

"You're on your own with this one," the committee's top Democrat, Louise M. 
Slaughter of New York, warned Republicans. "I don't think you're going to 
get a single Democratic vote."


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