conservation

You need a scoreboard to keep track of the litigation vortex that has tied up conservation of national forest roadless areas for the better part of a decade.

The latest salvo was a ruling August 12 by U.S. District Judge Clarence Brimmer, who tossed out the Clinton roadless rule, which was reinstated in 2006 after Judge Elizabeth LaPorte tossed out the Bush roadless rule, which was adopted in 2005 after a 2003 Brimmer ruling tossed out the Clinton rule, which was adopted in 2001.

Got all that? In the national forests, all roads lead to the courthouse.

The good news is that the uncertainty created by the litigious interregnum has resulted in the Forest Service approving few new roads in the 58 million acres of roadless areas.

It’s good news because the national forest system has too many roads as it is. Roads cost money to build and maintain, they damage fish and wildlife habitat, and they degrade watersheds that supply clean drinking water for 60 million people. The Forest Service has better things to do with its limited funds than expand its too-large road network.

The bad news is that management by court edict is a bad way to run the forests. Rangers can’t manage land rationally when they’re on a lawsuit roller coaster.

Legislation might be the only way to fix the problem. Legislation offers the certainty and political buy-in that is not possible with administrative rules that can be erased by executive fiat or sued out of existence.

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The Antiquities Act, passed in 1906, is one of the lesser known gems of federal conservation law.

At four paragraphs, it is a model of statutory brevity. In execution, however, the Antiquities Act has been a powerful legal tool. Presidents from both parties have used the law’s authority to establish national monuments protecting America’s great heritage treasures – from the Statue of Liberty in the country’s biggest metropolis to the remotest wild lands of the West.

Off and on, presidential use of the Antiquities Act has driven conservation opponents and members of Congress to distraction. They have tried, and mostly failed, to curtail the president’s authority.

In 1950, a Democratic Congress revoked the president’s authority to apply the Antiquities Act in Wyoming, after a political firestorm over Franklin Roosevelt’s use of the law to protect an area that is now part of Grand Teton National Park.

Nearly five decades later, Bill Clinton drove congressional Republicans nuts when he took up Bruce Babbitt’s suggestion that he use the Antiquities Act to create a conservation legacy for his presidency. Riders to drain the ink from Clinton’s monument proclamation pen were attached repeatedly to appropriations bills, but none were enacted into law.

Now, along comes Senator Mary Landrieu, a Louisiana Democrat, for another go at weakening the Antiquities Act. ...

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The "drill here, drill now, pay less" crowd went into a tizzy when oil prices dropped this past week on word that oil demand is forecast to drop as a result of the shaky economy.

See, we told you so, the bloggers and bloviators crowed. Oil prices fell on a projected decrease in demand. Projected increases in supply tied to, say, lifting the ban on oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, would accomplish the same thing. So let's get to drilling everywhere and stop listening to the hippie-dippie greenies moan about their precious caribou.

The premise of the argument is that opening protected areas to drilling would influence oil market psychology favorably. Maybe, but there are no guarantees.

In April, Brazil announced that undersea formations off its coast may hold a monster oilfield, perhaps 33 billion barrels -- enough to supply all global demand for more than one year. Brazil is a stable, friendly country whose state-owned Petrobras oil company knows a thing or two about deepwater oil production. The news should have electrified the oil market. Yet prices barely budged.

Perhaps traders know that demand reductions can hit the market a lot faster than new supplies. Opening a new oilfield requires many steps, none of them trivial undertakings. You have to find oil by searching promising locations. Exploratory wells must be drilled, flow tested, and evaluated.

Not every promising location is guaranteed to become a profitable oilfield. For example, the costs of getting deepwater fields into production can hit 10 digits. Even with prices at $130 to $140 per barrel, oil companies will pick their spots in order to keep their service costs down.

Once oilmen decide to open a production field, financing must be arranged and logistical details sorted out. Production wells must be drilled and prepared. That requires rigs and skilled crews, which are stretched to the limit around the world. Shipyards that build deepwater drilling rigs are fully booked. If you want one, take a number and get on the waiting list. You may have to wait two to four years for your drill ship to come in. And it won't be cheap.

Even more time will be necessary for the "unconventional" resources that the drill here, drill now crowd says are hydrocarbon cornucopias just around the corner. Rigging and producing oil sands and shale fields in the central Rockies will be highly capital and energy-intensive.

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