dead to rights
This is what the story's about.
Seven oil and gas drillers are choosing the company that will study how much drilling should be allowed on 1.5 million acres of public land in northwestern Colorado and will pay most of the study's costs.
So far, so good.
The arrangement has sparked protests from environmental groups that the U.S. Bureau of Land Management is giving too much power to industry.
"This gives the industry excessive influence over the BLM office," said Nada Culver of the Wilderness Society. "It's not even behind the scenes."
But officials at the BLM's White River Field Office in Meeker say there are safeguards in place to make sure the study doesn't take an industry perspective.
Fair enough. So, just how important is this study to the approval process?
The arrangement comes as the Bush administration and Congress are pushing the BLM and other agencies that administer public land to increase domestic production of energy.
The two-year environmental-impact study, estimated to cost $4 million to $6 million, will be largely paid for by a consortium of seven oil and gas companies. The companies are:
EnCana Oil and Gas (USA)
Exxon Mobil Corp.
Williams Production RMT Co.
XTO Energy Inc.
Pioneer Natural Resources USA Inc.
Riata Energy Inc.
Chevron USA Inc.
The BLM and the industry group agreed on the names of four contractors to seek out for the study. The contractors send their proposals to the companies, which then choose the contractor. No firm has yet been chosen.
Once a contractor is picked, control returns to the BLM, said the agency's project manager, Jane Peterson, and the contractor may communicate with the companies only through the BLM.
BLM spokeswoman Jaime Gardner said that if the companies were to choose an unacceptable contractor, "we'll have to work together to find a contractor who works for both of us."
Giving industry this sort of role in an environmental study - called "third-party contracting" - has been used before to harness the money of private companies to speed up studies of the Silverton Mountain ski area and the Pinedale Anticline oil and gas project in Wyoming, Peterson said.
Okay, it's there about three or four grafs down. Sorta. But - what makes a contractor unacceptable? And what happened with the Silverton and Pinedale Anticline studies? Were they favorable to industry in those instances too? How much was at stake there? Do those instances parallel this one at all?
But the process was not used for the ongoing study of Colorado's energy-rich Roan Plateau. In that area, the BLM paid a contractor with taxpayer dollars to study the effects of drilling.
While environmentalists are criticizing the plan, it enjoys congressional support. Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., praised what he called the "unique partnership" at an October hearing in Washington, calling it a "shining example of out-of-the-box thinking."
Right, well, moving on.
The current plan for BLM- administered lands surrounding Meeker would allow for 1,100 wells. But oil and gas companies would like to drill as many as 15,000 wells over the 15- to 20-year life of the plan.
At that rate, they would hit the 1,100 mark in one to three years. If that happened, the BLM might have to reject companies' permit applications because the impact had not been sufficiently studied.
Walter said that after discussions with industry, BLM officials realized something needed to be done to take the growth into account.
Okay, this is key here. The life of the BLM's current plan is 15 to 20 years. Over the span of about two decades, the BLM is proposing 1,100 wells.
The collection of oil companies the Post lists above are pushing for 15,000 wells over that time period, or around 1,000 wells per year. Once more, with feeling. The BLM says 1,100 over 20 years. Big Oil wants 1,000 a year, for 20 years.
Isn't it obvious, then, why Big Oil's offering to commission another study? Is a second opinion even part of this process? And why all the dissembling - "discussions with industry"?
No doubt, the science behind that study will be "sound": Chris Mooney, who wrote "The Republican War On Science," says most of the worst offenders of "science abuse" - industries, pols, and orgs who make the results of scientific study into show trials by pitting scientists who accept fringe theories against flagbearers for the consensus, and who also dumb down research by ignoring the tenents of scientific study - are corporations and big businesses who lean on government contacts to include "sound science" (studies and theories that can be spun) and disparage "junk science" (studies and theories that can't) in government decision making by exaggerating half-baked research. Research, no matter how specious, that can be made to sound as though scientific consensous on a topic is far from solid (see Warming, global).
But back to this piece. Why no word about what's at stake? For Big Oil? For Coloradans? For the land? We get a sense this is part of a trend, but what's the size and shape of that trend? An undercurrent? Or a tidal wave of "discussions" with industry?
As part of a small case study I did this past semester on framing and perspective in environmental stories, I interviewed a local reporter on the enviro beat who admitted that for stories on environmental issues, the normal, or at least intended daily format doesn't really fit the bill, and generally, environmental stories get told better in a longer format, "where the facts are more clear," and it isn't necessary to bring in other voices to split hairs over just how much arsenic is acceptable in a glass of water or why a mercury-poisoned fish is still edible.
So instead of different perspectives that collectively inform us and broaden our understanding of an event and any possible outcomes, pieces like the above end up all he-said-she-said, a format better suited to a story which involves a limited number of stakeholders. This isn't the case with environmental journalism; indeed, in enviro reporting, facts can often betray the formats available to daily reporters. This is important, because as Ben Bagdikian has written, media makes our reality. And if our sense of what's real around the environment is unclear, the choices we allow ourselves on enviro issues will be muddled or narrow as well.
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