~~ Click HERE to break out of someone else's frames! ~~
Enviros blast energy plans
HELENA – Spokesmen for five environmental groups on Monday denounced President’s Bush’s proposed energy plan as bad for Montana and could jeopardize such treasures as the Rocky Mountain Front.
Bush announced his policy last week, saying America faced “a darker future” without his more aggressive plan to drill for oil and gas and bring nuclear power back into the mix.
The environmental groups also unveiled a television advertising campaign that ran on Sunday television talk shows and will run this week on Helena television and is running in a total of 16 states.
The spot depicts an auction in which the oil-drilling rights to the Arctic Wildlife Refuge and other unprotected lands are auctioned off to the highest bidders to increase oil and gas production, build more coal plants but fail to lower energy prices. It strongly suggests that Bush is rewarding big energy donors to his 2000 campaign.
“Bush’s big supporters clean up, while we’re cleaned out,” the announcer says. “A better plan? Efficiency – the cleanest, cheapest energy solution. Tell President Bush his energy plan is one we just can’t afford.”
“It seems like it’s back to the future,” said C.B. Pearson, Montana field representative or the National Environmental Trust. “In the ’70s, it appeared that Montana had the potential to become an energy colony.”
Besides the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, first on the target list for expanded oil and natural gas production could be the Rocky Mountain Front, the 100-mile range of mountains south of Glacier National Park, Gloria Flora said. She is the former supervisor of the Lewis and Clark National Service, who issued a controversial order in 1997 upheld by federal courts banning oil and gas drilling on the front for 10 to 15 years.
Although Bush’s plan doesn’t specifically mention Montana, Flora said she is confident the Bush administration wants to revisit that decision to explore and drill for natural gas. A better solution, she said, would be to open the capped gas wells in Eastern Montana, although it is not nearly so tantalizing for the oil and gas industry as the front.
She also raised doubt about whether the United States indeed faces an energy crisis.
“I really question whether this is a true energy crisis, a true lack of supply or a fomented lack of supply, said Flora, who now lives in Helena and has formed a new group, Sustainable, Obtainable Solutions, that works on sustainability of public lands.
She cited a 1999 National Petroleum Council report that showed that 97 percent of public lands are open to natural gas development and 60 percent are open to oil development.
“Why are we going after the 3 percent and the 40 percent?” Flora said. “Why are we not pursuing efficiencies.”
Oil and gas companies that backed Bush have been preparing to capitalize on his policies by buying back their own stock over the past six months, she said.
Public lands should be preserved for people’s great, great grandchildren, Flora said. She said allowing oil and gas development on these remaining public lands is “very, very poor policy and it is immoral to do this for future generations.”
Flora also chided former Montana Gov. Marc Racicot, who now works part-time as a lobbyist for Enron Corp., one of the nation’s largest energy companies.
“I found that patently offensive to hire an ex-governor ... to work against the opinions of the people of Montana,” Flora said.
Jim Posewitz of Orion, the Hunter’s Institute, spoke passionately about the importance of the Rocky Mountain Front for the Montana and National Wildlife federations.
He told how the Montana group and other organizations have preserved more than 200 additional square miles of crucial wildlife habitat to the Rocky Mountain Front only to face another challenge.
“The energy addicts, those arguing for strength through depletion, have visited the Rocky Mountain Front before,” Posewitz said. “James Watt wanted to open the front and explore the Bob Marshall Wilderness. Then as now, it was a time when political conservatives could muster neither the courage nor the will to conserve.”
“Today, we are accorded the privilege of responding to the first threat being brought against this fish and wildlife masterpiece in the new millennia,” Posewitz said.
David Ponder, executive director of the Montana Public Interest Research Group, said Bush’s energy plan “is dirty, dangerous and it doesn’t deliver for consumers. It’s a recipe for more drilling, more spilling, more asthma attacks, more nuclear waste and more global warming.”
He said Bush’s plan offers no relief to consumers facing rising energy prices and rolling blackouts but instead rewards polluters that have created the problems and are now reaping record-setting profits after contributing record amounts of campaign money to Bush.
Tim Stevens of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition said the 18-million acre greater Yellowstone ecosystem is “all jeopardized by the Bush energy plan.”
 
Images on this page created by the author Credit for the individual articles is given the respective authors. |Email|Home|Wildlife Backgrounds|THE PREDATOR|
|
