A couple of weeks ago, New Mexico traded its “toss up” status in the presidential election for “leaning Democrat.” And as of yesterday, the Rasmussen prediction market showed a 58% chance of an Obama/Biden victory in the Land of Enchantment. After many near-too-close-to-call election years, political winds seemed to be blowing moderately leftish. Tom Udall […]
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MMS does Denver
In the hours since the Interior Department released its report on sex, drugs, and multi-million-dollar corruption in the Minerals Management Service, news of the scandal has gone viral in the blogosphere, which means that every possible joke about drilling here, drilling now, the lubrication of government, and/or bureaucrats getting probed has already been made, repeatedly. […]
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Mark Udall’s gonna steal your water!
Two weeks ago, in a move he very quickly came to regret, John McCain told a Colorado reporter that the Colorado River Compact, which governs the river’s allocation between the “upper basin” states of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico and the “lower basin” states of Arizona, Nevada, and California, “obviously needs to be renegotiated.” […]
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Colorado gas commission backpedals on drilling rule
Remember the HCN story about the hullabaloo over the the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission’s attempt to strengthen the environmental regulations governing oil and gas development? The Glenwood Springs Post-Independent reports that the commission is dropping one of the most controversial of the proposed rule changes — the one that would have allowed the […]
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Fending off the gold diggers
Today the Colorado Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on a case that could take away local government discretion on mining operations. The court must decide whether counties have the right to prohibit open-pit cyanide gold mining by adopting land-use regulations. (The Colorado Mining Association, an industry group, sued Summit County after it passed such […]
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Score one for whistleblowers
A federal whistleblower will finally get a settlement from the agency that fired him four years ago. Former BLM staffer Earle Dixon, who was in charge of cleanup at the abandoned Yerington copper mine in Nevada, says he was fired in October 2004 after one year of work for informing local residents and the media […]
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Read our tweets
The High Country News team is jumping headlong into the Web 2.0 world. Our most recent social networking adventure is happening on Twitter — an online application that allows our reporters and editors to provide short, quick updates, via cell phone or computer, about our work as it unfolds. In addition to writing blog posts, […]
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New GOP tax policy?
Like most Americans, I can’t say I know much about the governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin. But I have read that during her relatively brief tenure, she’s been a reformer who fought to raise taxes on oil companies, and then used the money to distribute $1,200 checks to Alaska residents. This could be a winning […]
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Winning the West: HCN @ the DNC
What’s a Colorado journalist to do when, for the first time in a century, the Democratic National Convention comes to your state? The first impulse of the newshound: Go to Denver, of course, and get yourself a scoop (not to mention free food). Then comes that slightly bitter aftertaste when you realize that there are […]
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The Roan lease price was high, but not high enough
The auctioning of the Roan Plateau’s nearly 55,000 acres of gas leases netted a record $114 million last week, as the BLM put “the most biodiverse lands in Colorado” up for sale. The highest per-acre price was $11,800, for leases below the rim of the Roan; the average was about $2100 per acre. Unless a […]
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Smoke Trails
Have you noticed? Each year with the coming of fire season comes also a slew of guest commentaries and editorials in western newspapers promoting the idea that the current fire, smoke and destruction are the result of environmentalists’ lawsuits which have locked up the forests resulting in a build up of brush and tees that […]
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Kiss your tail goodbye, desert pupfish
The Bush administration is preparing to deliver a sucker punch to the Endangered Species Act. A new proposal would hand over the responsibility of protecting endangered species from federal projects like dams and highways to the federal agencies themselves. Under current law, agencies such as the Bureau of Land Management and the Corps of Engineers […]
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Celebrating local history
Organizing events is not one of my strong points; it’s work enough to organize words. Nonetheless, for most of the past 14 years, I’ve been more or less in charge of Anza Day in Poncha Springs, Colorado. Actually, it’s such a small event that it should be called “Anza Two Hours,” but it still takes […]
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Not a moment too soon
“I can attest to the fact that (the Department of Interior) gets in your blood, but I can also say that it does not necessarily turn it green.” — Paul Hoffman, a deputy assistant secretary of the Interior, announcing his resignation this week. Hoffman, who got his post thanks to Vice President Dick Cheney, regularly […]
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Owl be seeing you, too
Many thanks to San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll, for his piece about High Country News titled Owl be seeing you. Carroll praises Kim Todd’s story on the spotted and barred owls — Hostile Takeover, published in our August 4 issue — and waxes eloquent as he recaps the main points of Todd’s feature. He […]
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Southern California’s Briny Beast
The long-suffering Salton Sea, notorious for its massive bird and fish die-offs, is finally to be put on an intravenous drip. A key committee in California’s state Assembly approved a bill last week that would provide $47 million to begin restoring the salty sink to some semblance of health. The full Assembly is expected to […]
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Owl tales
Kim Todd’s feature – Conservation quandary in the August 4th edition – zeros in on key ethical questions which arise within the context of endangered species management in general and northern spotted owl (NSO) management in particular. But readers who are not familiar with the conflicts over forest management in the Pacific Northwest and northern […]
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Learning from tourists
My idea of a perfect vacation is one that does not involve my driving a car, and I managed that on a couple of earlier trips to Oregon with planes, trains, and my daughters’ cars — one lives in Eugene and the other lives in Bend. This time around, starting nearly a fortnight ago, I […]
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What the frac’ is in those fluids
In the gas industry’s “frac’ing” process, approximately a million gallons of fluid, under extremely high pressure, is injected underground, and, with explosives, creates fractures in the strata, freeing natural gas from its underground chambers. Manufacturers of frac’ing fluids are allowed to keep their formulas proprietary, but they are required by the Occupational Safety and Health […]
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Fate of four Klamath River dams under negotiation
PacifiCorp – the Buffett-Berkshire Hathaway company which owns and operates the Klamath Hydroelectric Project – is in confidential negotiations with the federal Department of Interior and the States of California and Oregon concerning the fate of the Project and its five dams. Word has come from inside the talks that an “agreement in principle” to […]