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Western lawmakers are crying foul over new Interior Department guidelines that resurrect the controversial Wild Lands policy that was killed by Congress in April 2011. Bureau of Land Management manuals uncovered by Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah) and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) include language nearly identical to the draft proposal put forth by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar in December 2010. The “Wild Lands” policy was intended to identify and manage wilderness areas while circumventing the normal — and transparent — congressional process. Pulling manuals from the BLM site on July 31, the lawmakers compared the policies and found the new language...

While the White House and its media water-carriers try to distract the American public with gay-marriage talk and half-century-old tales of Mitt Romney's prep school pranks, the inconvenient truth remains: President Obama is responsible for perpetrating jaw-dropping, job-killing scientific fraud. And his minions are still trying to cover it up. New internal e-mails disclosed by the House Natural Resources Committee this week show that a supposedly exculpatory report on the administration's doctored drilling moratorium analysis — issued by the Department of Interior's Inspector General's office — was itself incomplete, misleading and unsubstantiated. Even more damning, the documents reveal that...

The Obama administration will soon issue sweeping new environmental safety rules for hydraulic fracturing on federal land, setting a new standard that natural gas wells on all lands eventually could follow. The rules, which are likely to be unveiled by the Interior Department within days, are designed to address concerns that the method of extracting natural gas known as "fracking" can contaminate groundwater. Among other things, they create new guidelines for constructing wells and treating waste water, according to a draft of the proposed rules reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. ~~snip~~The fracking rules apply to natural gas drilling on...

To save the imperiled spotted owl, the Obama administration is moving forward with a controversial plan to shoot barred owls, a rival bird that has shoved its smaller cousin aside. The plan is the latest federal attempt to protect the northern spotted owl, the passive, one-pound bird that sparked an epic battle over logging in the Pacific Northwest two decades ago. The government set aside millions of acres of forest to protect the owl, but the bird’s population continues to decline — a 40 percent slide in 25 years. A plan announced Tuesday would designate habitat considered critical for the...

An Interior Department official said Thursday the agency will ask independent experts to review allegations by a federal judge that the testimony of two department scientists was so inconsistent and contradictory it amounted to deliberate deception. U.S. District Court Judge Oliver Wanger attacked the credibility of the biologists last month shortly before retiring from the bench. At a hearing on a motion in a court case involving delta smelt protections, Wanger called one of the scientists a "zealot" and accused the agency of engaging in "bad faith."

With a House Republican loading political ammunition in a national fight over government science, Interior Department officials said Friday they would stand by the work of two scientists whose integrity was attacked recently by a federal judge overseeing the Delta water wars. U.S. District Judge Oliver Wanger, in a lengthy and strongly worded assault Sept. 16, said the two scientists deliberately misled him when they urged him not to weaken new rules meant to help imperiled Delta smelt in wet years like this one. He called one scientist, Jennifer Norris of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a "zealot" who...

WASHINGTON — The Utah men who were the first in the nation to swing a legal sledgehammer to controversial wildlands policy No. 3310 are celebrating its demise, saying it's gratifying to see how the right kind of pressure can effect such a reversal. "It's tremendous. It's the best news I have heard for a long time," said Uintah County Commissioner Mike McKee. "We are very pleased." Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on Wednesday directed the Bureau of Land Management to abstain from designating any "wildlands" on public lands under its purview. Instead, he said the federal agency will work with Congress...

Paste your document here For the third time in a few months a federal report exposes how the U.S. government prioritizes environmental preservation over national security by keeping Border Patrol agents out of wildlife refuges that are heavily transited by Mexican drug and human smugglers. Among them is a popular smugglers’ corridor, the 2,300-acre San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge, used by an illegal immigrant who murdered an Arizona rancher last spring. For years, Border Patrol agents have been prohibited by the Interior Department and the U.S. Forest Service from actively patrolling such areas because it threatens natural resources. Motorized...

Two weeks ago, we asked whether Interior Secretary Ken Salazar considered himself above the law by ignoring court orders to resume the permitting process for deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Now we learn that Salazar may have misled Congress and the public on the number of drilling permit applications he is ignoring. Yesterday, Senator David Vitter (R-LA) accused Salazar, along with Michael Bromwich, the director of the new Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Regulation and Enforcement, of using bogus figures. During Congressional testimony on March 2, and on other occasions, Salazar and Bromwich used much lower figures...

The Obama administration late Friday appealed a judge's orders directing the Interior Department to act on several Gulf of Mexico deepwater drilling permits. The appeal is the latest salvo in the ongoing fight over the speed with which Interior is – or isn't – letting oil drillers get back to work after last year's BP oil spill. Gulf state lawmakers and the oil industry have accused the department of enacting a "de facto" moratorium against new drilling, while Interior says it needs to ensure safety and environmental protections are in place. Friday's appeal challenges rulings by Judge Martin Feldman of...

The Interior Department on Monday approved the first Gulf of Mexico deepwater drilling permit since imposing a freeze after the BP oil spill began. The permit — awarded to Houston-based Noble Energy — follows months of criticism from Republicans, drill-state Democrats and the oil industry, who alleged that Interior was dragging its feet. But department officials maintained they were taking needed steps to lessen the chance of another disaster. “This permit represents a significant milestone for us and for the offshore oil and gas industry, and is an important step towards safely developing deepwater energy supplies offshore,” said Michael...

A federal panel investigating the Deepwater Horizon disaster said Friday that its probe might not be complete until July 27 — 15 months after the well blowout that killed 11 workers and triggered the nation’s worst oil spill. The joint inquiry by the U.S. Coast Guard and the Interior Department had already received one extension and had planned to wrap up work by the end of March. But delays in testing the blowout preventer that failed to stop gushing oil at BP’s doomed Macondo well prompted the government to ask for more time. “The condition of the BOP, as well...

A Louisiana federal judge critical of Interior Department offshore drilling restrictions on Thursday gave the department 30 days to decide whether to issue five deepwater drilling permits for Gulf of Mexico projects. Judge Martin Feldman’s order features his latest attacks on drilling restrictions imposed after the BP oil spill, alleging that permitting delays have “become increasingly unreasonable.” Interior lifted a formal ban on deepwater permits in October but has yet to resume permitting. Thursday's order mandates decisions on five permit applications in which Ensco Offshore Co. – one of the companies that has sued Interior over drilling restrictions – has...

Three Republican senators demanded Friday that the White House explain last-minute editing changes to an Interior Department report on the BP oil spill that falsely implied that a group of independent experts had endorsed a political decision to temporarily halt all deepwater oil drilling. The senators, members of the Environment and Public Works Committee, called for hearings into the matter, contending that the White House had manipulated science for political ends, a claim Democrats frequently made about the George W. Bush administration. The Interior Department’s inspector general issued a report this week asserting that officials in the office of Carol...

WASHINGTON -(Dow Jones)- The U.S. Interior Department is taking steps to eliminate conflicts of interest within its various branches in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, announcing Friday it has created a new office to collect billions of dollars in oil and gas revenue. The newly formed Office of Natural Resources Revenue will take over revenue collection from the offshore-drilling regulatory branch, known as the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement. That agency formerly oversaw both revenue collection and permit approvals. Last year, the bureau disbursed more than $10.6 billion of revenue to the U.S. Treasury,...

Having been enjoined by Judge Feldman (no relation) from trying to halt oil drilling based on inadequate scientific basis, the Administration's Secretary Salazar, tried to pull a fast one by simply issuing another moratorium. Judge Feldman has refused to play along: The federal judge who struck down the Obama administration's initial six-month moratorium on deepwater oil-drilling dealt the government another blow on Wednesday. U.S. District Court Judge Martin Feldman denied the government's request to throw out a suit challenging the drilling halt that had been filed by offshore-oil-service companies. Justice Department lawyers had argued the lawsuit was moot because the...

WASHINGTON — Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, introduced a bill Wednesday seeking to end the Interior Department's current practice of denying the U.S. Border Patrol access to wilderness and other protected federal lands along the Mexico-U.S. border. He said that would ensure that Interior's policies "no longer enable dangerous criminals to co-opt federal border lands as their drug trafficking highways." Bishop for months has been calling for Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to change the policy on his own. Bishop, the ranking Republican on a subcommittee that oversees national parks and public lands, visited the border earlier this year and said he...

Energy The administration asked for public comments on a plan to expand offshore drilling. When they came in 2-to-1 in favor, the Interior Department sat on the news. Time for a "Texas tea" party? When you ask for public comment on a major policy issue, at some point you should make the results public, not hide them until you can figure out a way to spin the public reaction to support a conclusion you've already drawn. On its last business day in office, the Bush administration published a proposed draft of a five-year plan to lease areas in the Atlantic...

Under a House Democrat-crafted bill described as a “sweeping” reform of federal drilling rules, oil and natural-gas companies would pay more to drill on federal lands and have less time to access the resources. The measure, crafted by House Natural Resources Democratic staff, raises the royalty fees oil and gas companies pay to drill on federal lands for the first time since the 1980s. It also shortens the duration of federal leases to access those federal resources from 10 years to five. The proposed changes are likely to draw vocal complaints from oil and gas companies that have already been...

The University of Utah student who disrupted an oil and gas drilling lease auction last month says he has raised $14,000 of the $45,000 he needs to pay the federal Bureau of Land Management to hold 13 parcels he won. Tim DeChristopher won the parcels and ran up the bidding on others in an effort to foil the Dec. 19 auction, which drew controversy from the start because of concerns the drilling could damage Utah's wild lands and would be too close to some national parks. DeChristopher said he never had any intention to develop or pay for the parcels....