Energy chief stuns environmentalists with renewable energy approach

Nevada’s energy chief wants to take Federal Lands and hand them over to energy companies.

Jim Groth, an appointee of Governor Jim Gibbons, published a declaration which calls for turning the State of Nevada into an energy colony and he doesn’t think it should be subject to National Environmental Policy Act requirements.

“The greatest thing holding Nevada back from achieving economic success right now is the need to satisfy onerous policies or laws and have the ‘right’ paperwork in order,” Groth writes in his “declaration.”

Nevada has become the latest target of energy producers and transmitters of all stripes. Gigantic solar and wind plants as well as geothermal plants have been proposed on public lands. El Paso Corp’s Ruby Pipeline has received preliminary permission to pass through northern Nevada’s most pristine sage grouse and pygmy rabbit habitat. There are also a number of proposed transmission lines to support these developments.

Public lands are not a renewable resource and the kind of development proposed in Nevada will have devastating impacts on wildlife there. It is time to make a major push towards rooftop solar and conservation rather than these centralized power plants on public lands which require transmission lines that lose power getting the electricity to where it is used.

Energy chief stuns environmentalists with renewable energy approach.
Las Vegas Sun

Buy a Coke, save a park? It could happen in Idaho

This is an editorial in the Magic Valley Times-news. Corporate sponsorship of state parks?

“There may come a time — and it may come sooner rather than later — when a corporate logo on a front gate of a public park in Idaho doesn’t look so bad.
In any case, let’s keep our minds open.” Times-News

Buy a Coke, save a park? It could happen in Idaho

This recession is being used not to test out money-saving ideas, but to steal things and get things done that would never have a chance. I’d say there are plenty politicians and groups that are OK with our misery. It’s not just that we have lemons and they want to make lemonade.

Western Lands Project monitors public land privatization

Privatization does not always happen directly. Western Lands Project looks at the sneaky ways-

Wilderness Dedux. From the Goat Blog in High Country News.

In recent years we have seen the emergence of “quid pro quo” Wilderness, where Wilderness is designated only if some developors are authorized to do something bad in exchange. This was not the way Wilderness designation used to take place. It was done simply top protect a pristine place. Conflicts were worked out. If they could not be, the Wilderness proposal died.

Now proposals are made with the intent of weakening the act itself in exchange or facilitating some unrelated project. Western Public Lands has a free book (as a download). This book ($10 if you want a printed version) looks at the details of five of these wilderness proposals so to “illustrate the elaborate machinations and distortions” that we find in them. A number of these involve privatization in exchange for Wilderness designation.

How public wildlife became something for sale

Everyone should read this, in part because I think a major effort to privatize wildlife and to have livestock associations assume de facto control of state wildlife departments is afoot.

How public wildlife became something for sale. By Mark Henckel. Billings Gazette Outdoor Editor

This article is precisely about what Robert Hoskins, Mack Bray and many others have been writing about on this blog.

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Related story. The battle for access. Billings FWP commissioner’s proposal ignited latest flare-up. By Mark Henckel. Billings Gazette Outdoor Editor