Former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt

Bruce Babbitt, Bill Clinton's Interior Secretary for eight years, gave a speech  attacking the current GOP Congress for its anti-environmental jihad.  That's not news.

But he also told the Obama administration it wasn't doing enough to protect western wildlands, and laid out a blueprint for positive steps the president could take to be an environmental champion.  That's news.  And it's welcome news.

What happens when you get thrown under the bus.

Since the GOP won a majority in the House in 2010, the Obama administration has gone into "go-slow" mode - or even has taken a U-turn on presidential initiatives on air pollution and climate change.  The Los Angeles Times took aim at this in a tough May 20 editorial headlined: "In the 2012 campaign, environmentalists don't matter."  It opens:

Shortly after his party's "shellacking" in the midterm election, President Obama ordered government agencies to ensure that new regulations took economic growth into consideration and that old ones be revoked if they "stifle job creation or make our economy less competitive." Five months later, it's becoming pretty clear what he meant: The environment and public health will be thrown under a bus for the sake of his reelection in 2012.

Ouch! 

And this hurts all the more because Earthjustice is feeling the tire marks.  Many of the issues on which the administration is attempting to appease polluters and House radicals are those we've worked on for years, including:

The trajectory of sea ice. From "Arctic Sea Ice Blog"

The Arctic Sea Ice Blog earlier this month posted this alarming chart, showing polar sea ice on a downward trajectory.  Based on computer models that incorporate observed sea-ice data, the Arctic Ocean could be entirely ice-free during the month of September by about 2016, and could be ice-free year-round by the early 2030s.

Are polar bears getting desperate?  Maybe so.  A recent news report suggests at least one pairing of a grizzly and polar bear in the wild has resulted in a hybrid "pizzlie."

Sunset Trail roadless area, Colorado.

Colorado is the most populous, developed state in the Rocky Mountain West. Despite all the cities and towns, highways, oil rigs and second homes, about 4.4 million acres of roadless national forest remain. And that’s in addition to the 3 million-plus acres of existing wilderness.

These roadless lands - which safeguard clean water, wildlife habitat and recreation - are currently protected across the West (except Idaho - long story) by President Clinton’s 2001 “Roadless Rule.”   That Rule bars commercial logging, road construction and most mining. The Rule does have carefully narrow provisions that allow some logging where needed to reduce fire risks in some forest types.  But Clinton's Rule remains the gold standard for protecting roadless lands.
 
President Obama's Forest Service, however, is working to undermine the Rule in Colorado. 

H.R. 1202 would put bald eagle nests on the chopping block

How should America's 190 million acres of national forest be managed?  Nine Republican congressmen, led by Rep. Stevan Pearce of New Mexico, have the answer in a bill introduced last month:  Forests are for logging. And to hell with everything else.

The bill, H.R. 1202, is short and not-so-sweet. The meat of the bill is a single sentence: 

Notwithstanding any other law, rule, or regulation … the Secretary of Agriculture shall permit any person who applies to carry out a timber activity on National Forest System land to carry out such activity. 

What does this mean?  It means the Forest Service MUST allow ANY logging proposal anyone brings to them.  It doesn’t matter what the impact of the logging is. It doesn’t matter if the logging proposal would otherwise violate laws meant to protect, say, community drinking water supplies.  It doesn’t matter if it would cost the U.S. Treasury millions.  The Forest Service has to approve the logging and the roads that go with it.  Period.

Drilling a methane drainage well at the Elk Creek Mine, 2008. Bureau of Land Management photo.

In 2009, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar issued an order taking aim at climate change, saying: "The Department is ... taking the lead in protecting our country's lands and resources from the dramatic effects of climate change....  The realities of climate change require us to change how we manage the land, water, fish and wildlife ... and resources we oversee."  Bold stuff.

Sadly, the Department has done little to apply this directive to coal mining, a huge source of climate-change-inducing greenhouse gases. 

Something like a third of the nation's coal is mined from public lands managed by Ken Salazar's Interior Department.  And all of that coal goes up in smoke, mostly in power plants that spew out a huge chunk of the country's climate-change-causing greenhouse gases. 

Former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson

There's a lot of backward movement on the environment in Congress these days.  EPA is under assault for trying to regulate greenhouse gases.  The Interior Department's efforts to protect some wildlands are also being attacked.

But why should Congress have all the fun?  Here in the Rocky Mountain West, the 2012 elections also brought some backsliding.

New Mexico has seen perhaps the most dramatic reversal.  Bill Richardson, who retired in 2012, was a vigorous force for conservation.  Most memorably, he fought the Bush Administration's decision to drill and fragment Otero Mesa, one of the last intact areas of desert grassland in the US.  Earthjustice, The Wilderness Society, the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance and others joined him in that fight.  And, with Richardson leading the charge, we won, sending the Bush decision back to the drawing board, where it remains to this day.

Richardson was replaced in 2011 by Susana Martinez, who promptly moved in the opposite direction.

Ronald Reagan.

Ronald Reagan, who would have turned 100 this month, famously (almost) said "You've seen one redwood, you've seen them all."  From that comment alone you could tell about his commitment to the environment. Or lack thereof.

His legacy as president has been getting a more nuanced treatment, lately.  But aside from helping save the ozone layer, his environmental legacy is largely abysmal.  Joseph Romm argues in this post on Grist.org that President Reagan helped set back the future of green energy in the US for years.  It's a setback we're still striving mightily to recover from.

Rep. John Upton

Jim DiPeso, executive director of Republicans for Environmental Protection, has a nice blog post describing the latest machinations of the GOP (and coal state Sen. Jay Rockefeller) taking aim at the EPA.  Gingrich wants to abolish the agency that has helped clear the air and clean the water.  (He's apparently nailing down the all-important "don't need to breathe or drink" demographic).

Strip mine in Wyoming's Powder River Basin. USGS photo.

In the not-too-distant past, Interior Sec. Ken Salazar issued a bold call to action for his department. With authority over hundreds of millions of acres of public lands and the vast majority of coal, oil, and gas owned by taxpayers, he stated that his department would be "taking the lead" in protecting the nation's wildlife and water from climate change, and that doing so would "require us to change how we manage the lands."

DOI had a great chance recently to live up to the secretary's words by changing the way it manages the nation's coal - a key contributor to climate change. 

Sadly, his staff has concluded that doing nothing is easier than leadership or change.Here's the background: