Will Colorado's Oil and Gas Commission coddle an industry, or protect our air, water and wildlife for when the boom goes bust?

On Monday, I waited for two hours to put in my two cents before the Colorado Oil and Gas Commission. I spoke in support of their efforts to adopt modest proposals to protect air, water, wildlife, and communities from the coming 22,000+ oil wells slated to be drilled here in the coming two decades.

In line just ahead of me, a young man told a compelling story. He grew up in Trinidad, Colorado, a small town a dozen miles north of the New Mexico border. When coal mines in the area went bust, he said, life in Trinidad got hard. A natural gas boom in the last decade had breathed new life into the area, and gave him a good paying job. He worried that the Commission's proposed rules would drive the gas industry out and turn Trinidad into a "ghost town."

Utah land management plans - covering 11 million acres - will invite off-road vehicle destruction, energy development in spectacular, fragile landscape.

The Denver Post reported last Sunday about a series of nasty schemes that the Bush Administration hopes to finalize in its remaining 200-odd days in power. 

The article, entitled "Bush prepares parting shots," describes a number of infamous proposals, including efforts to rewrite rule for all of our national forests to provide less protection for wildlife.  Earthjustice has been fighting that one for years, with much success.

But Bush's appointees are masters at trying to undermine environmental protection by focusing on the obscure, the minutia of regulation and administration.

The Bush administration has had a strange way of uniting folks in the West.  In particular, hunters, sportsmen, local communities, local businesses and enviros have come together to fight back when the "drill it all" mentality of the oil businessman president ran into treasured publc lands.

And in surprising places, this coalition has staved off the onslaught.  On the Rocky Mountain Front in Montana - home to the nation's second largest elk herd, bighorn sheep and grizzlies - the coalition won a ban on new oil and gas leases from Congress. 

Far to the south, at Otero Mesa in New Mexico - a desert grassland wilderness - a hunter-enviro coalition with huge support from Governor Bill Richardson has worked for years to slow the BLM's plan to lease the area.  Earthjustice has worked with this coalition, filing a lawsuit pending in appeals court to protect the area.  Years after the fight over Otero began, the area still hasn't been drilled.

Photos tell story of the energy boom's threat to wild Wyoming.

Aah, summer!  Time to hit the road and visit some our crown jewel national parks here in the West.  It's time to enjoy the trees, the canyons, the birds, bees, and bears, the ranger talks, the smog. 

The smog?  Yep, get ready for it.  Because if the EPA has its way, the tremendous views from Mesa Verde, Zion, and other national parks will become more obscured with haze.

Drink? Or drive? That may sound like questions to ask a a prospective designated driver before a night on the town. It may soon be the stark choice faced by an entire region.

That's because Shell Oil is planning to build giant oil shale extraction plants in western Colorado. The dirty little secret of oil shale development is that it takes huge amounts of electricity to bake rocks to turn shale into oil. Huge amounts. So much that Shell may have to build ten or more new natural gas (or coal) fired power plants to assist in turning rock to oil.

Advocates for off-road vehicles (ORVs) — dirt bikes, three-wheelers, and all-terrain vehicles — like to say that their recreation is all about the three F's: "family, freedom, and fun."

Now they've decided to add "lung disease" to the list.

In California, a 48-square-mile area of Bureau of Land Management Lands known as "Clear Creek" apparently has rather dirty air when the soil gets kicked up by ORVs. The area is loaded with naturally occurring asbestos, a mineral that has tiny fibers that can lodge in lungs and cause cancer. The Environmental Protection Agency recently finished a multi-year study in which it concluded driving in the area five times over 30 years could lead to lung cancer, as the L.A. Times reported.

In the late 1980s, the country celebrated the 200th anniversary of our most important legal text: the U.S. Constitution.

To do so, a commission was established, headed by respected former Chief Justice Warren Burger. And to lead a celebration in Washington, D.C., an equally distinguished American was chosen: Wayne Newton.

Wayne Newton!!?? The original Las Vegas lounge lizard? What were they thinking?

Over the last few months, I visited two of our flagship National Parks — Death Valley in California, and Zion in Utah.

Both share some of the less-than-inspiring features of many national parks: the miles of paved highway, the acres of park land devoted to borrow pits, maintenance yards, employee housing, and snack bars, and the occasional hordes of tourists on paved trails talking on cell phones or plugged into iPods in an apparent effort to distract themselves from the scenery. "Front country" is not always a pretty sight.

The Navajo Nation — America’s largest Native American reservation — has breathtaking scenery, disheartening poverty, and a lot of sunny, windy days. So it was good news both on and off the Rez that the Nation has contracted with an East Coast renewable energy firm to build 500 megawatts of wind power generation there.

The bad news is that the Nation’s leaders appear to be still wed to a mercury-spewing, global warming nightmare of a coal-fired power plant known as Desert Rock. Just days before the Nation signed its contract for wind power, it sued the EPA for not taking time to carefully review the air permit for the coal plant.