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Inspector Finds Broad Failures in Oil Program
Edmund L. Andrews, New York Times
The Interior Department’s program to collect billions of dollars annually from oil and gas companies that drill on federal lands is troubled by mismanagement, ethical lapses and fears of retaliation against whistle-blowers, the department’s chief independent investigator has concluded.
The report, a result of a yearlong investigation, grew out of complaints by four auditors at the agency, who said that senior administration officials had blocked them from recovering money from oil companies that underpaid the government.
The report stopped short of accusing top agency officials of wrongdoing, concluding that the whistle-blowers were sometimes unaware of other efforts under way to recover the missing money and that they sometimes simply disagreed with top management.
But it offered a sharp description of failures at the Minerals Management Service, the agency within the Interior Department responsible for collecting about $10 billion a year in royalties on oil and gas. Many of the issues, including the complaints by whistle-blowers, were initially reported last year by The New York Times.
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.
(25 September 2007)
Canada’s oil nationalism
Financial Times
Cries of “O Canada” have not all been of the patriotic kind recently. An independent panel has recommended that Alberta jack up the province’s tax-take from the energy sector. Stocks in Canadian oil majors have plunged as a result.
Reports of the sector’s doom are much exaggerated, but it is easy to see why the reaction has been so dramatic. Alberta’s reserves may be second only to Saudi Arabia’s – albeit in the form of oil sands rather than conventional crude. To some, they offer hope of countering the market power of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.
Sudden change in fiscal regimes is bad for planning. Yet it is hardly surprising that a resource-rich government wants a bigger slice of the pie when oil is topping $80 a barrel.
(25 September 2007)
Mountain Top Removal Coal Mining Destroys Environment and Communities (Audio and text)
Melinda Tuhus, Between the Lines
Interview with Vernon Haltom, co-director of Coal River Mountain Watch
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While recent media headlines focused weeks of attention on the six coal miners tragically trapped in a collapsed mine in Utah, another coal-related story has been unfolding for years in Appalachia that has generated very little media coverage: The physical destruction of mountains to mine the coal underneath. The practice of mountain-top removal blasts the tops off mountains and dumps the soil, rock and waste in valleys below. So far 1,000 miles of West Virginia streams have been buried. The process contaminates the water, fouls the air, and threatens the continued existence of many rural communities.
A coalition of groups opposing the practice points to a federal study showing that between 1992 and 2002, 380,000 acres of mountaintops were destroyed. Yet less than five percent of these flattened areas have seen any economic development, which was one of the benefits coal companies maintained would result from destruction of the mountains.
After the Utah disaster, the Bush administration proposed easing federal restrictions on mountain-top removal, which already operates under very little regulation. Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with Vernon Haltom, co-director of Coal River Mountain Watch. He explains why his group labels mountain-top removal “eco-terrorism” and what opponents are doing to fight the practice.
(21 September 2007)
Contributor Rick Dworsky writes:
Our dependency on coal leaves a wide swath of destruction in various ways that are often not apparent to the general public.
