NWF: Keystone XL Tar Sands Vote a Test of Climate Commitment

March 22-The U.S. Senate is set to vote today on what’s known as the Hoeven amendment, a non-binding amendment that expresses support for building the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline regardless of its impacts on wildlife, climate change, and clean water.

Larry Schweiger, president and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation, said today:

“We’re coming off America’s hottest year on record as the cleanup from climate-fueled superstorm Sandy is still ongoing, and what’s the Senate hard at work on? Earning its low approval rating by capitulating to polluting special interests with a meaningless vote on the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

Check out more on Keystone XL

Westerners Praise Salazar Plan to Protect Water from Costly Oil Shale Speculation

March 22-Westerners praised the Salazar oil shale plan released by the Interior Department today for its smart approach to protecting water and local communities from costly oil shale speculation.

“We commend Secretary Salazar for developing a commonsense plan that makes public land available for research but requires results and environmental safeguards before any commercial leasing can proceed,’’ said Michael Saul, attorney with the National Wildlife Federation. “This new plan aims to ensure that we won’t risk precious water, air quality, fish, wildlife and the regional economies that depend on those resources on a gamble that might never pay off.”

The plan requires that companies conduct successful research operations of oil shale and prove oil shale’s economic viability before the Bureau of Land Management will consider commercial development. Companies will also be required to put proper safeguards in place to protect water supplies, land, wildlife, air quality and local economies.

For more on Carbon Pollution, visit  Stopping Carbon Pollution

Obama Administration Delivers on Longstanding Promise to the American People Drakes Estero Receives Full Wilderness Protection 

November 29-The National Wildlife Federation applauds the Obama Administration and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar for granting full wilderness protection to Drakes Estero, the ecological heart of Point Reyes National Seashore in northern California. This decision guarantees vital protection to the hundreds of fish and wildlife species that rely on the Estero and fulfills a longstanding promise to the American people.

“This is the right decision for people and wildlife,” said Larry Schweiger, president and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation. “Secretary Salazar honored this historic agreement with all Americans to protect marine wilderness, and this legacy will be enjoyed for generations of people and wildlife to come.”

For more on this historic decision, check out the following blog post:

• Victory for California’s Harbor Seals!

EPA Takes Tough Stand with Suspension of New BP Contracts

November 28-The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced today its temporary suspension of BP from new contracts with the federal government, citing “BP’s lack of business integrity as demonstrated by the company’s conduct with regard to the Deepwater Horizon blowout, explosion, oil spill, and response.”John Kostyack, vice president for wildlife conservation of the National Wildlife Federation, said today:“The federal government should throw the book at BP for its criminal and negligent actions, using the full weight of the criminal and civil laws.  Today’s decision helps to send a loud and clear message: Recklessly damaging America’s natural resources will be met with harsh penalties.The Environmental Protection Agency’s move is a tough accountability measure designed to deter oil companies from cutting corners on safety and putting profits ahead of people, like BP did in the Gulf oil disaster.

For more on the BP Settlement, check out these blog posts:

• Lagniappe for the Mississippi River Delta—and the Gulf of Mexico
• Thanksgiving: A Note of Gratitude to NWF Supporters
• Gulf Dolphins are Still Dying—Don’t Let BP Off Easy

Newly Announced Atlantic Offshore Wind Energy Leases Mark Progress

November 30-The U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management today announced plans to sell leases for preliminary offshore wind energy development activities in two areas of federal waters recently identified and reviewed off the coasts of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Virginia. The leases will be sold through a competitive auction in 2013. Catherine Bowes, senior manager for new energy solutions at National Wildlife Federation, said today: “Today’s announcement is a major step forward in America’s pursuit of offshore wind energy. Properly-sited clean energy like offshore wind is critical for protecting wildlife from the dangers of climate change, and we applaud the Obama Administration for taking action to advance an important new clean energy source for America.

For more on clean energy, check out the following blog post:

• Sandy’s Mandate: Time to Get Serious About Clean Energy

Report: Water Under Pressure
November 29-What Oil Shale Could Mean for Western Water, Fish and Wildlife–For more than a century, efforts to wring oil out of rock formations in the Rocky Mountain West have waxed and waned. The deposits underlying northwestern Colorado, southwestern Wyoming and northeastern Utah have been portrayed as “the Saudi Arabia’’ of oil shale, a vast source of domestic energy that would cut U.S. dependence on foreign oil, create many jobs and produce millions of dollars of revenue for state and local governments.

That same area, the 16,000-square-mile Green River Formation, is home to some of the nation’s most valuable fish and wildlife habitat. Colorado’s Piceance Basin boasts North America’s largest migratory mule deer herd and some of the country’s largest elk herds. The huge tracts of public land also support greater sage-grouse, Colorado River cutthroat trout, black bear, bald eagles and mountain lions. Hunting, fishing, other wildlife-based activities and outdoor recreation are cornerstones of the regional economy and integral to the area’s lifestyle, heritage and identity.

For more on Oil Shale, check out the following blog post:

• The Energy Future is Now: Extend wind tax credits

And now here are highlights from NWF in the news:

• Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Expert says swift action needed to calm climate
• Public News Service: BP Suspended from New Off-Shore Contracts
• UPI:  NWF: EPA ban for BP sends ‘loud’ message
• CoEXIST: How Nonprofit Social Media Can Connect Supporters To The Cause
• E&E Energywire: Outdoors coalition launches campaign to support cautious development

For more visit www.nwf.org/news

A glaring headline in Colorado newspapers just one day after the election spotlights one of many reasons I hope it really won’t be business as usual.

Wind energy is just one of many alternative and renewable energies available to reduce fossil fuel consumption. Credit: Imagefusionstudio

Vestas to lay off another 3,000 by next year
-The Denver Post

Vestas is the Danish wind-turbine producer with operations around the globe. The company opened four manufacturing plants and a research office in Colorado. Vestas was drawn by former Gov. Bill Ritter’s promotion of “a new energy economy” and the state’s renewable energy standard, approved by voters in 2004 and later strengthened by legislators.Lately, Colorado’s new energy fortunes have undergone a reversal. Vestas has reduced its workforce from 1,700 to about 1,200 this year and will close its research office. More reductions in its global workforce are on the way.
The biggest reason, says Vestas, is the uncertain fate of the U.S. wind energy tax production credit. The tax credit, set to expire Dec. 31, is mired in the dysfunction of D.C.

“Even if the PTC should be extended now, I don’t think we’re going to see a normalized U.S. market next year because we are so late into this year,” Vestas CEO Ditlev Engel told The (Greeley) Tribune.

We’ve seen this kind of backtracking before. The Solar Energy Research Institute, now the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, opened in Golden, Colo., in 1977 while Jimmy Carter was president. Renewable energy was on a roll. Denis Hayes, organizer of the first Earth Day, headed the lab. Scientists were optimistic that renewable energy could supply more than a quarter of the country’s power by 2000 with some help from incentives enjoyed by other forms of energy.

Then, Ronald Reagan defeated Carter and wasted little time in changing course. The renewable energy lab’s budget plummeted from$124 million in 1980 to $59 million in 1982. The staff was cut from 950 to 350. Solar tax credits were phased out. And in 1986, Reagan had the solar-thermal panels installed by Carter removed from the White House roof.

Oil shale test project in northwestern Colorado. Photo by David Ellenberger

Will History Repeat Itself?

We’ll never know if this country would be the world’s No. 1 wind-turbine maker today if Washington hadn’t pulled the plug on renewable energy. How much cleaner would our air be? What about climate change? Would we be making headway rather than reeling from destructive storms that are growing worse as the world grows warmer? Would we be marveling at the latest technological, environmentally- and wildlife-friendly breakthroughs rather than trying to figure out how wildlife and plants will survive hotter, drier climates?

Those willing to let the production tax credits die rail against government picking winners and losers when it comes to energy. Yet some of these same people ignore science and logic by trying to make a winner out of something like oil shale, still just an idea despite a century of trying to squeeze kerogen (a precursor to oil) out of rock deposits in Colorado, Wyoming and Utah. They’d be happy to make big chunks of our public lands—much of it prime fish and wildlife habitat—available to companies before the technology is proven and the impacts are known

Energy, especially in a global economy, is complicated. A glut of natural gas has driven down prices, widening the gap between the cost of gas-fueled and wind-fueled power. But gas prices are historically volatile and if people are serious about an all-of-the-above energy strategy, solar and wind power must be in the portfolio.

Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper is among a bipartisan group of governors urging Congress to extend the wind-power tax credit. Colorado Sens. Mark Udall (petition here) and Michael Bennet (petition here) are among the members of Congress working for extension of the wind tax credit and urging public support.

You can support clean energy and help wildlife that are threatened by climate-fueled mega-fires by speaking up for clean energy tax credits .

But it will take more than laissez faire to blast the oil out of the rock buried deep in the Rocky Mountains. A big challenge is that it’s not oil, but kerogen: fossilized material that didn’t get enough heat or pressure to turn into oil. It needs to be heated—a lot—to finish the process that nature didn’t.

“That makes oil shale a half-baked energy source,” says Kate Zimmerman, the National Wildlife Federation’s senior policy adviser on public lands.

An oil shale test site in NW Colorado, owned by Shell Oil. Photo by Dave Ellenberger/NWF.

And yet another problem with oil shale is its name—it’s confusing. It’s often mixed up with shale oil, which really is oil that’s trapped in rock formations. Drilling horizontally and hydraulic fracturing—injecting water, chemicals and sand at high pressure to create fractures—have made it easier to tap shale oil.

The Bureau of Land Management is considering an oil shale plan on public lands in the Rockies and is taking public comments until May 4. Tell BLM to protect wildlife, fish, and air and water quality from the impact of this unproven energy source.

It’s covered in the Capsule, but it deserves repeating: From all of us here at the National Wildlife Federation, thank you to the tens of thousands of people who packed the National Mall for Sunday’s Earth Day concert & rally and to the hundreds of thousands more who signed the Earth Day Revolution Declaration of Energy Independence.

Also in this week’s National Wildlife Federation Climate Capsule:

• NWF asks the Senate to move now on a clean energy & climate bill
• The latest on the oil spill off the Gulf Coast
• Should we dig into oil shale & tar sands? Dirty the Global Warming Denier Sock Puppet adds a different underground energy source to his diet.

Watch this week’s Climate Capsule:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Want the Climate Capsule emailed to you each week? Click the yellow “subscribe” button in the upper right of the Climate Capsule archive.

Heard any kooky global warming denier arguments lately? Email us & we’ll have Dirty sock puppet them.

Photo via Flickr’s Talk Radio News

It seems perfect that we have all the oil we need for the next hundred years right in our own backyard.

That backyard, however, is literally my backyard. I grew up in western Colorado virtually on top of where this treasure waits for us. It is my home, along with hundreds of thousands of other people. We live here for the slow pace of life, for the clean air, the pronghorn and mule deer outside our living room windows, the cold, clear rivers and the simple beauty of this land. For people who have not seen this area, it may seem an easy trade but we who live here ask that the nation proceeds slowly on oil shale.

In Canada we’ve seen tar sands development (similar to oil shale) rip up large swaths of wildlife habitat, leaving it a virtual moonscape. In the US, new technologies are being tested to extract oil from shale rock while it is still underground. However, too many questions still remain about the environmental impacts of oil shale development, the largest of which is how much water it will use.

Water is vital to your life, my life and the lives of every creature on this earth. Water is also one resource we just cannot produce more of. Right now, the amount of water needed to develop oil shale will drain the habitats of native fish, destroy agricultural communities and put us all at risk. Ways to reduce the amount of water needed to develop oil shale are on the way and we need to wait for them before gambling on this precious resource.

We all use oil and know its importance even as we explore new, alternative fuel sources. And, with such a large prize waiting beneath us, oil shale promises to remain a potential energy source well into the foreseeable future. But for now, we need to be patient and not put the homes and water of thousands of Americans and wildlife unnecessarily at risk.

There’s still work to do on oil shale and other public lands issues! Please spread the word about public lands with an eCard!

See what tar sands development looks like in Canada: National Geographic – The Canadian Oil Boom

However, this growing interest in oil shale development is two steps back in the wrong direction.

The process of extracting, heating and processing the shale rock that produces oil intensifies the burden on the West’s already strained water resources, places well over 2 million acres of our wildlands at stake, and threatens vital habitat for wildlife such as mule deer, black bears and the bald eagle.

Although America’s need for energy is undeniable, we need to decide if our western lands should continue to serve a tired, old, dirty energy industry.

That’s why earlier this year, the U.S. Interior Secretary imposed a temporary halt on further leasing of public lands to companies looking to extract oil shale and he’s now asking for public input on whether the federal oil shale program should proceed.

The current regulations for oil shale development do not have anywhere near the appropriate environmental or financial standards needed to protect U.S. taxpayers, our climate, the precious water in the Rockies or the millions of acres of wildlife habitat that provide some of the best opportunities for outdoor recreation out west.

So, please join me today in urging the U.S. Interior Secretary to focus on promoting cleaner sources of domestic energy that will help to protect wildlife and our communities.

Drilling for oil and natural gas, and mining for coal, has already taken a dramatic toll on our country’s public lands, wildlife habitat and natural resources.

Now Congress is considering a proposal to develop a new dangerous energy source–oil shale–for millions of acres of America’s public lands.

Some technologies for oil shale production can generate up to five times as much CO2 as conventional gasoline, which means it would continue to fuel global warming–the already single greatest threat to wildlife.

As if driving up global warming pollution weren’t enough of a calamity for wildlife and the natural resources we all depend on, here’s what else is at stake with increased oil shale production:

• OUR WATER: Oil shale production will require upwards of 300 million gallons of water a day. This is scarce water we already need for drinking, agriculture, livestock and wildlife.
• OUR WILDLIFE: Oil shale development would put at risk at least two million acres of wildlife habitat and continue to raise the harmful impacts of global warming pollution for wildlife and their habitats.
• OUR WAY OF LIFE: Preserving America’s public lands is an important part of our country’s conservation tradition. Oil shale development threatens to dramatically change the face of some of our most treasured places.

It’s quite disappointing to see Congress considering a move that would be such a backward direction for the real energy solutions we need and deserve.

The current ban on commerical oil shale development expires on September 30. In the lead up to this date, please ask your Members of Congress to extend the ban on developing this dangerous source of fuel.

Whether it’s oil shale or offshore drilling, our country’s leadership must stop chasing the last barrel of oil and start pursuing our clean energy future.