Earth Justice’s UnEarthed blog:

Some ominous news about the Arctic from the Obama administration almost escaped attention yesterday, amid Copenhagen climate conference hoopla and the EPA’s determination that greenhouse gases are a public health hazard.

Sec. of Interior Ken Salazar announced that Shell Oil Co. has been granted conditional approval by the Minerals Management Agency to drill three exploratory wells next year in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska’s northwest coast. Approval comes even though the government has yet to resolve legal problems with a Bush-era five year leasing plan opening vast areas of the Arctic Ocean seabed to oil and gas activities.

Here is the press release, via DOI.

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar today announced that the Department’s Minerals Management Service (MMS) has approved, with conditions, Shell Gulf of Mexico, Inc.’s Exploration Plan to drill three exploratory, information-gathering wells in the Chukchi Sea.

“A key component of reducing our country’s dependence on foreign oil is the environmentally-responsible exploration and development of America’s renewable and conventional resources,” said Salazar. “By approving this Exploration Plan, we are taking a cautious but deliberate step toward developing additional information on the Chukchi Sea.”

In 2008, Shell’s subsidiary paid $2.1 billion for leases during Chukchi Sea Oil and Gas Lease Sale 193. The 2008 sale was included in the previous Administration’s 2007-2012 Five-Year Oil and Gas Leasing Program to cover leasing for oil and gas in the Outer Continental Shelf for that five-year period. The Exploration Plan now approved allows Shell to drill up to three exploration wells during the July-October open water drilling season.

Shell proposes activities using one drill ship, one ice management vessel, an ice class anchor handling vessel, and oil spill response vessels. The closest proposed drill site is more than 60 miles to shore and approximately 80 miles from Wainwright, Alaska.

“Our approval of Shell’s plan is conditioned on close monitoring of Shell’s activities to ensure that they are conducted in a safe and environmentally responsible manner,” added Salazar. “These wells will allow the Department to develop additional information and to evaluate the feasibility of future development in the Chukchi Sea.

The 2007-2012 OCS plan is currently undergoing review in response to a U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit order which required additional environmental analysis. The Secretary’s decision on the remaining plan is forthcoming.

Via the EPW website, here is the agenda for the first hearing:

Full Committee hearing entitled, “Legislative Hearing on S. 1733, Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act.”
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
09:30 AM EDT
EPW Hearing Room – 406 Dirksen

Witnesses

Opening Remarks

Panel 1

The Honorable John F. Kerry
United States Senator (D-MA)

Panel 2

The Honorable Steven Chu
Secretary
United States Department of Energy

The Honorable Ray LaHood
Secretary
United States Department of Transportation

The Honorable Ken Salazar
Secretary
United States Department of the Interior

The Honorable Lisa Jackson
Administrator
United States Environmental Protection Agency

The Honorable Jon Wellinghoff
Chairman
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission

New York Times:

The Department of the Interior has frozen oil and gas development on 60 of 77 contested drilling sites in Utah, saying the process of leasing the land was rushed and badly flawed.

The 77 government-owned parcels, covering some 100,000 acres in eastern and southern Utah, were leased in the last weeks of the Bush administration. But the leases were immediately challenged by conservation groups, and in January a federal judge blocked drilling on the ground that the Interior Department had failed to follow its own procedures for reviewing the appropriateness of lands designated for oil and gas extraction.

An Interior Department review team then presented Secretary Ken Salazar with a recommendation that drilling be allowed to proceed on 17 of the 77 parcels. But it also said that the leases on eight parcels should be withdrawn and that 52 should be subjected to further study because of potential threats to wildlife and air and water quality.

Here is the BLM report:

BLM_Utah77LeaseParcelReport –

Washington Post:

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar launched the Obama administration’s first coordinated response to the impacts of climate change Monday, which he said would both monitor how global warming is altering the nation’s landscape and help the country cope with those changes.

Salazar will lead a new “climate change response council” that will coordinate action among the department’s eight bureaus and offices. A secretarial order will create eight “regional climate change response centers” in areas ranging from Alaska to the Northeast and build landscape conservation cooperatives that will create strategies for the eight regions with the help of state and local groups, and other federal agencies.

Here is the Secretarial Order:

DOI Secretarial Order –

First, here is the map of impacted areas:

Petition_Application_for_Withdrawal –

Press release from DOI below.

Read the rest of this entry »

The headline they used: Ken Salazar starts over at Interior Department.

Here are a few more appropriate headlines, based on their interview.

Salazar Accuses Bush Interior Department of Skirting the Law:

“After almost four months in the job, I have concluded that there was the skirting of the law and shortcuts that occurred in many different things and in different ways,” he said. “Shortcuts were taken to try to get to a policy.”“I knew there was going to be a mess to clean up,” he added. “I knew that there were problems in this department that had to be dealt with. It was one of the things that I told the president that I would do. And so I wasn’t surprised by what I found.”

Salazar Pushed Bold Energy Agenda at Interior Department:

“We have a huge amount to contribute to that agenda here in the department because we control 20 percent of the land mass,” he said. “We have driven through the tangles of the jurisdictional disputes and have now finalized the rules for the development of offshore wind [power] here in the United States. We’re doing the same thing with solar and wind onshore. … We are on the verge of what I think is going to be a major step forward with respect to the whole renewable energy world.”Salazar said wind and solar energy could mean “hundreds of thousands of jobs — and they’re good jobs that are going to be here in the U.S.” He said that at the moment, the bigger economic opportunity is in wind, “because the wind industry has been much more developed in this country than has solar.”

Interior Secretary Salazar ties Clean Energy to National Security:

“There are global and national imperatives that are driving this agenda,” he said. “One is our national security, two is our environmental security and three is our economic security. … So those are the drivers, and I think there’s broad consensus — including some Republicans on board — saying we have to deal with those major challenges of our time. … You’re going to see a lot of that happening. It’s a new day for the country with respect to energy.”

Despite Politico’s insistence on focusing on substance over style, the article is worth reading.

Press release via email:

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced today that he will retain a special rule issued in December for protecting the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act, but will closely monitor the implementation of the rule to determine if additional measures are necessary to conserve and recover the polar bear and its habitat.

“To see the polar bear’s habitat melting and an iconic species threatened is an environmental tragedy of the modern age,” Salazar said. “This administration is fully committed to the protection and recovery of the polar bear. I have reviewed the current rule, received the recommendations of the Fish and Wildlife Service, and concluded that the best course of action for protecting the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act is to wisely implement the current rule, monitor its effectiveness, and evaluate our options for improving the recovery of the species.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Yahoo:

WASHINGTON – The Obama administration will again require federal agencies to consult with the government’s wildlife experts before taking any actions that could impact threatened or endangered species.

The Interior and Commerce departments said Tuesday they have revoked a last-minute rule change by the Bush administration that ended the consultation requirement. Environmentalists had argued that the Bush action severely reduced protection under the federal Endangered Species Act.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said by reimposing the requirement on agencies, it ensures that animals, fish and plants in danger of extinction “receive the full protection of the law.”