The room was a brawl waiting to happen. Horseback riders sat next to mountain bikers. ATV, jeep and motorbike enthusiasts took their seats across from wilderness, hiking and “quiet trail” advocates. Even a survey of peoples’ heads revealed the potential tension: There were cowboy hats and shiny, banker-like pates; spiky mullets and hair flattened by […]
Energy & Industry
Posted inMay 12, 2014: Parks for All?
Carbon Cost Consistency
Thank you for your nuanced reporting in “Ripple Effect” and “Betting on Coal” (HCN, 3/17/14). We particularly enjoyed Emily Guerin’s account of Shonto Energy and the young minds “bucking the brain drain.” The interviews reminded us of efforts in West Virginia to get the competence and confidence of the people out from underneath King Coal. […]
Posted inArticles
Public Record: Cliven Bundy
Court and federal documents chronicle a long history of grazing battles.
Posted inApril 28, 2014: Two-Wheel Revolution
How we export our water to Asia
A precious resource leaves the West in the form of alfalfa hay.
Posted inGoat
A new era of clean air regulation is dawning
Court rulings are not typically repositories of poetic prose. But they occasionally contain beautiful little gems, like this quote from the King James Bible, embedded in Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s majority opinion in a clean air case the Supreme Court ruled on this week: “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound […]
Posted inWotr
Cliven Bundy needs to pay his grazing bills
Whatever you’ve read or seen on television, a new “Sagebrush Rebellion” of public-land ranchers against the federal government has not erupted in rural Nevada. What’s happened there can best be described as the last act of a long-running dispute between a delusional rancher and a hapless federal agency, the Bureau of Land Management. Unfortunately, the […]
Posted inGoat
North Dakota, BLM look to curb natural gas flaring
Temperatures were in the single digits on North Dakota’s Standing Rock Reservation in early February when Debbie Dogskin began to take off her clothes. In the throes of late stage hypothermia, people act irrationally as cold clouds their thinking. The 61-year old was found dead in a friend’s mobile home, an empty propane tank outside. […]
Posted inGoat
“Production vs consumption” in Moab
Moab, Utah seems to be coming full circle. Early prospectors discovered useful minerals – uranium, vanadium, potash and manganese – near the farming and ranching outpost, and in the 1950s, Moab became known as the “Uranium Capital of the World.” Thirty years later, the boom was over, the mines closed down, and homes stood empty. […]
Posted inArticles
Photos of a standoff
Armed militia members join a Nevada rancher to protest a cattle roundup from public land.
Posted inGoat
A pipeline built years ago may start to export Rocky Mountain gas to Asia
In the summer of 2010, construction began on the Ruby Pipeline, a 680-mile interstate artery for carrying as much as 1.5 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day from the Opal Hub in southwestern Wyoming to the Malin Hub in southern Oregon. The project crossed sensitive sagebrush plains and something like 1,000 creeks and […]
Posted inWotr
Former Interior secretary blasts gas industry pressure
Former Interior Department Secretary Bruce Babbitt visited the University of Colorado recently to talk about oil and gas drilling on federal public lands. Not surprisingly, he didn’t pull any punches. Babbitt criticized the agency he oversaw during the Clinton years, the Bureau of Land Management, for its handling of drilling on 250 million acres of […]
Posted inGoat
Can cacti help San Joaquin Valley farmers survive a drought?
When I finally got a hold of John Diener, the busy 62-year-old farmer was en route to his organic broccoli field in central California’s San Joaquin Valley. I could picture the scene: a truck bouncing over a dusty track, golden morning sunlight, rows of bright green plants meeting a blue sky. The vision was idyllic. […]
Posted inGoat
Coast Guard blames Shell for beached Arctic drill rig
On New Year’s Eve, 2012, Royal Dutch Shell’s Kulluk drilling platform ran aground off a southern Alaskan island called Sitkalidak. Last week, the U.S. Coast Guard released a 152-page report dissecting the incident in minute detail and squarely pinning the blame on the oil company and its contractors. The company had used the Kulluk – […]
Posted inArticles
The energy haves and have-nots
Will rooftop solar owners get off the grid — and leave other power users in the dark?
Posted inArticles
KDNK Radio speaks with Judith Lewis Mernit
California’s 38 million residents need energy, and since they don’t want it from coal plants, communities in the West are trying to seize an opportunity to export their renewable energy California’s way. In this episode of Sounds of the High Country, KDNK’s Eric Skalac spoke to Judith Lewis Mernit who wrote about California’s energy needs […]
Posted inGoat
How will British Columbia power its liquified natural gas industry?
Vladimir Putin’s Crimean escapades have politicians demanding the U.S. ramp up its natural gas export capacity, thereby breaking – or so the theory goes – Russia’s energy stranglehold on Europe. As HCN’s Jonathan Thompson and others have pointed out, though, President Obama can’t turn gas into a geopolitical weapon by snapping his fingers: Export facilities […]
Posted inWotr
The next energy boom to hit southeast Utah is “unconventional oil”
The Uinta Basin in northeast Utah is changing fast. Its lower reaches are already pockmarked with some 8,000 oil and gas wells, but so far, the top of the high southern rim — the area known as the Book Cliffs — has avoided much of the industrialization found to the north. But that could change, […]
Posted inWotr
Illegal pot farms that damage land should make room for legal entrepreneurs
If you care about protecting clean water, endangered species and public health, then you might want to consider legalizing marijuana for recreational use. That’s because so much of the stuff is now being grown illegally on our public lands in places dubbed “trespass grows.” These secretive and often well-guarded farms do enormous environmental damage and […]
Posted inArticles
Locals resist a Bakkenization of the Beartooths
South-central Montanans oppose new drilling, forewarned by fracking’s impacts in other states.
Posted inMarch 17, 2014: When California Kicks Coal
Go West, clean megawatts
Nevada stakes its renewable energy future on California.