Ray Ring

Senior Editor

The New Yorker magazine broke the story with a very funny 700 words, and then The New York Times added a few more grins in its longer piece. Basically, a bunch of congressmen who are either indicted or enmeshed in scandals — including Idaho Sen. Larry Craig and Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens — happen to live on yachts in a marina neighborhood in D.C.

As the New Yorker’s opening line says:

There’s something about politicians and boats.

Jodi Peterson

Associate Editor

Wyoming wildlife is eating itself out of house and home, according to the Rocky Mountain News. Apparently pronghorn and deer can’t find enough forage, and they’re chewing sagebrush, mountain mahogany, and bitterbrush down to the nubs. And the cause of this problem? Well, says the state, people just aren’t shooting enough of said deer and pronghorn:

Fewer hunters, fewer lands to hunt on and fewer hunting permits are all to blame, (Wyoming Game and Fish officials) say.

No mention of the 26,900 wells that energy companies have drilled in Wyoming, or of the 51,000 more planned for the next 10 years. No mention of the fact that the BLM plans to issue about 4,500 drilling permits in the state this year (a 300 percent jump since 2002). No mention of the thousands of acres already lost to sprawl, or the additional 2.6 million acres of Wyoming ranchland the American Farmland Trust estimates will be swallowed up by 2020. Nope, it’s not that we need more habitat — we need less wildlife.

It’s almost not shocking anymore. The Las Vegas Review Journal is reporting yet another major setback in the federal government’s plan to build a high-level nuclear waste repository in Yucca Mountain: a fault line running directly beneath a concrete pad where the Department of Energy plans to temporarily store spent nuclear fuel rods. (Read the RJ’s coverage here.)

Yucca Mountain is iconic among flubbed government projects (see our earlier story “Can Nevada bury Yucca Mountain?“). To create a checklist for bad project management, look no further:
Overbudget? Check (more than $7 billion dollars have been sunk into the project).

Behind schedule? Check (19 years if it opens by the DOE’s revised target date of 2017).

Fudged data? Check (in 2005 Congress uncovered emails indicating that workers had made up dates and fabricated quality assurance data – see our earlier coverage here).

Stolen supplies? Check (the DOE has been pilfering Nevada’s water against the state’s will for months).

(Read on …)

Jodi Peterson

Associate Editor

Not only has the Department of Interior given carte blanche to energy companies who want to drill on Western lands, it’s failed for years to collect billions of dollars in royalties from those companies (see our earlier story “Taking the law into their own hands” about Interior Department auditors who filed their own fraud claims against energy companies after becoming frustrated with agency inaction).

The New York Times has the story:

Prepared by the Interior Department’s inspector general, Earl E. Devaney, the report said that investigators found a “profound failure” in the agency’s technology for monitoring oil and gas payments.

It suggested that the agency was too cozy with oil companies and that internal critics had good reason to fear punishment.

“It demonstrates a Band-Aid approach to holding together one of the federal government’s largest revenue-producing operations,” Mr. Devaney concluded.

(Read on …)

Jonathan Thompson

Editor in Chief

It’s official: This summer was hotter than a June bride in a featherbed, hotter than a fox in a forest fire, even hotter than a habanero topped Hatch green chile cheeseburger. Anyone who stepped out of their air-conditioned homes and offices anywhere from Boise to Phoenix, anytime from June to mid-September, probably already guessed that. But now the numbers have been crunched by the NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center.

Some of the findings include: Summer 2007 was the sixth warmest on record since 1895; this was the warmest summer ever for Utah and Nevada, and was in the top 10 for 11 other states; and the entire West was warmer than average, aside from Washington and Oregon, which fell in the “normal” range.

That meant a lot more air conditioners were running, meaning that the nation’s residential energy demand was 8 percent higher than under “normal” climate conditions (meaning more power plants burned more coal and spewed out more carbon dioxide creating warmer temperatures … ) Meanwhile, drought persisted across most of the West (in spite of above normal summer precipitation in California and Arizona).

In related news: Oceans are expected to rise by about one meter, in the next 50 to 150 years. If you’re curious how that might affect your beachfront home, check out this cool page from the University of Arizona.

Jonathan Thompson

Editor in Chief

Iowa and New Hampshire are getting most of the attention thus far from presidential candidates. That’s to be expected. But thanks to a January Nevada caucus, campaigners are also spreading out across the Silver State. Democrat Bill Richardson has spent some time there in the hopes that his Western roots will give him a high placing in Nevada, and some momentum going into the Feb. 5 super primary. Barack Obama’s supporters are also campaigning in Nevada and, according to this L.A. Times piece, running into some surprises:

Harper looks down at him and, after a pause, explains that they’re working for the Obama campaign and that the person at the address is listed as a supporter. “Good,” the man says, touching his right hand to the small of his back, “because I’ve got my .44 back here.”

(Read on …)

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Matt Bai, in an LA Times column, reveals some reasons for the Democratic Party’s power base getting increasingly Western:

This new progressive movement, which now exerts a strong gravitational pull on the direction of Democratic politics, is a national phenomenon, but much of its financing and intellectual energy comes from the West. The Democracy Alliance, a secretive group of about 100 millionaires and billionaires who have thus far poured more than $100 million into building what they call a “progressive infrastructure,” has its strongest presence in California and Colorado. (Rob Reiner and Norman Lear are among the Hollywood cognoscenti who are “partners” in the alliance.)

(Read on …)

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

It’s more evidence that our highest court has been transformed: Justice John Paul Stevens now leads the court’s “liberal” wing, an angry minority.

Stevens was appointed 32 years ago by Republican President Gerald Ford. “I’m pretty darn conservative,” he tells writer Jeffrey Rosen, in a long profile in The New York Times Sunday magazine.

Rosen reports:

Stevens … is an improbable liberal icon. “I don’t think of myself as a liberal at all,” he told me during a recent interview in his chambers, laughing and shaking his head.

… He said (he) only appears liberal today because he has been surrounded by increasingly conservative colleagues. “Including myself,” he said, “every judge who’s been appointed to the court since Lewis Powell” — nominated by Richard Nixon in 1971 — “has been more conservative than his or her predecessor. Except maybe Justice Ginsburg. That’s bound to have an effect on the court.”

With George W. Bush’s justices — John Roberts and Samuel Alito — tightening the far-right grip, Stevens finds himself in the minority in many close, 5-4 rulings. He either writes, or arranges for others to write, dissenting opinions that are increasingly “fierce” and “scathing” of the majority, Rosen reports.

Rosen’s insightful look inside the Supreme Court — and into the national politics — is here. It’s also a look into our future. No matter how much ground the Democrats retake in Congress and the White House, we’ll probably be living under the current 5-4 majority on the Supreme Court for many years to come.

The city of Prineville, Ore. just became the first government entity to shell out a pile of cash under Measure 37, a state “takings” law passed by voters in 2004. The law is designed to compensate landowners when zoning and other land use restrictions reduce their property values. City manager Robb Corbett handed over the landmark $180,000 check on Sept. 12th.

The recipients? Eighty-year-old Grover Palin and his wife Edith, who purchased property with a view of downtown Prineville in 1963 and planned to build their retirement home. At the time, there were no construction restrictions on the lot, but the city’s regulations have changed. Last year, after telling the couple they could not build their dream house, the city council agreed to pay them $47,000.

The Palins then upped the ante by proposing to build a hotel on their property, which increased their projected losses and more than doubled their payment. The city opted not to protest the couple’s new claim and instead signed the check, saying “if government comes in and regulates the use of property, then the property owner should be compensated.”

In November, Oregon voters will decide on another measure (this time, number 49) that would modify the law, clarifying private landowners’ rights to build homes and limiting large developments.

Read the Statesman Journal’s coverage of the Palins’ windfall here, or read more about Measure 49 here.

Check out HCN’s coverage of Measure 37 here and here, or get a perspective from one of our “writers on the range” here.

Jodi Peterson

Associate Editor

In March of 2005, we wrote about efforts to open a former nuclear blast site for natural gas drilling (see “Drilling could wake a sleeping giant“). In 1969, the Atomic Energy Commission detonated a 40-kiloton bomb 8,400 feet underground at the Project Rulison site in western Colorado. The experiment was an attempt to release natural gas, but the gas produced was too radioactive to be used. Thirty-five years later, energy companies began extracting natural gas from the area around the site. Locals worried that the operations might contaminate their drinking water with radioactive isotopes.

Now the long-awaited report on the odds of radioactive contamination has been released. The Glenwood Springs Post-Independent has the story:

Under the new study, the DOE used conceptual flow and transport models to simulate tritium migration. The agency says the most likely pathway for radioactive contamination from the detonation zone to the surface would be via a producing gas well, through water vapor tainted by tritium.

The … study found there was a 95 percent chance of no contamination by (tritium) at a hypothetical well producing gas just outside the current drilling exclusion area at the site.

With 27 wells now pumping away within three miles of the blast hole, that seems to be good news. But even a five percent chance might be too great of a risk, considering what our reporter Jennie Lay found:

Tritium is the “primary contaminant of concern over the next 100 years, because it is one of the most mobile radiologic contaminants and is found in abundance” at the test site, according to a March 2000 Energy Department report. The report also notes that “no proven and cost-effective technologies exist for the removal of radioactive contamination from groundwater at these depths.”

Jodi Peterson

Associate Editor

Two new studies show that the U.S. Forest Service is wasting huge amounts of money and, sadly, firefighters’ lives to defend homes in the WUI, the wildland-urban interface where more and more Westerners choose to build. The agency says it spends up to a billion dollars a year protecting homes in the woods — and last fall, five firefighters died trying to save a vacation home that had been classified as “nondefensible.”

Headwaters Economics just released a study on the costs of firefighting in the WUI. Some highlights:

• Only 14% of forested western private land adjacent to public land is currently developed for residential use. Based on current growth trends, there is tremendous potential for future development on the remaining 86%.
• One in five homes in the wildland urban interface is a second home or cabin, compared to one in twenty-five homes on other western private lands.

(Read on …)

Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Sometimes, tragedy has amusing moments — especially when the tragedy is self-imposed, as seems to be the case with Idaho Sen. Larry Craig getting accused of soliciting gay sex in a Minneapolis airport bathroom.

Jeanne Huff at the Idaho Statesman, with the headline above, has some fun reporting:

When you go to Minneapolis, you might put the Mall of America, the statue of Mary Tyler Moore or maybe even the zoo on your list of things to see.

Now tourists are asking about a new destination in the Twin Cities, says Karen Evans, information specialist at the information counter at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.

A common request is, “Excuse me, can you please tell me where the Larry Craig bathroom is?”

Evans was just 15 minutes into her shift Friday afternoon and already had heard the request four times.

“It’s become a tourist attraction,” Evans said with a smile. “People are taking pictures.”

The tourism story is here, the latest from the senator is here, and my previous post on the amusing politics is here.

In another hundred years, cattle grazing on Colorado’s eastern rangelands may find themselves munching on mouthfuls of shrubs instead of native grasses, according to a recent study by researchers from the USDA and Colorado State University.

In 1997, the scientists built six clear, open-topped plastic chambers three and a half meters across on short-grass prairie land northeast of Fort Collins. Over the course of their five-year experiment, they continuously pumped carbon dioxide into three of the chambers, raising the average concentration during the day to twice what is currently found in the atmosphere and simulating conditions they expect to find at the end of this century.

Scientists have long suspected that rising levels of carbon dioxide, combined with fire suppression and overgrazing, are contributing to a pattern of woody plants and shrubs edging out native grasses on rangelands around the world. Now they have hard evidence. In the chambers with increased CO2, the researchers found significantly more of a small, shrubby plant known as fringe sage – bad news for ranchers. “It’s not a particularly palatable forage species for domestic livestock,” says Jack Morgan, a plant physiologist with the USDA. “Some wildlife like it, though.”

While pronghorn and sage grouse might not mind the invasion, range managers need to sit up and take notice, according to Morgan. “Knowledge of global change and how it might be affecting grasslands is very underappreciated by the rangeland community,” he says. “If we hope to manage the land intelligently, we better understand it.”

Read the Denver Post coverage here and the LA Times coverage here. Or check out the study itself, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.