Many of us were dismayed when Obama appointed former rancher Ken Salazar to Interior (Rep Raul Grijalva would have been so much better).
It showed a remarkable lack of insight -- the calculus appeared to be that issues relating to our public lands would take a back seat, and that appointing a conservaDem from the West, who wears bolo ties and cowboy hats (even to formal events), would be a good substitute for actual transformative policy.
Indeed, while Salazar talks a good game ("boot on the throat" type comments) about cleaning up the sex-and-lobbying scandal at Minerals Management Service (MMS, the agency in part responsible for vetting oil/gas leases, and part of Interior), his actions are par for the (Bush) course. Delist grey wolfs? Sure. Don't list polar bears? No problem. Need more off shore drilling? Let's open the whole east coast up!
But it's this Gulf oil spill that really brings the problem home. The buck needs to stop somewhere. And the buck should stop with Salazar. He needs to resign. And Obama needs to appoint someone who is not beholden to big oil and who will bring a science-based, conservation-minded approach to Interior.
Get this... oil companies themselves sued Salazar's MMS for inadequate safety investigations.
In one instance late last year, an oil company complained about the inadequacy of the agency's safety investigations. In November, ATP Oil & Gas Corp. sued MMS alleging it was incomplete in investigating a fatal accident at an ATP rig. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., alleged an MMS investigator misstated the accident's location, didn't interview the two eyewitnesses to the event, and told ATP to take corrective action within 14 days without identifying problems that needed to be fixed.
As for the current BP spill, Salazar's Interior "exempted [BP's drilling operation] from a detailed environmental impact analysis last year". As this terrific blog notes, the categorical exclusion analysis that was done is the same kind "done for constructing short fences, or repairing a government campground."
Anyway, there's no use crying over spilt milk, right? (Snark.) Perhaps what Salazar's Interior did after the most recent oil spill should be how we judge him?
Well, this is where things get even worse.
Remember when Obama said that all off-shore drilling permits would be halted?
As other diarists have noted, Salazar's Interior can't even limit the rubber-stamping for those measly 30 days! (Not to mention their solution consists of dumping 100s of thousands of gallons of a toxic "secret sauce" to disperse the spill.)
And here's the icing on the cake. One would have thought that because of this disaster, other controversial oil drilling leases would have been halted.
But no.
Salazar's Interior has just opened Colorado's North Park to gas and oil drilling:
Over the protests of conservation groups, federal land managers are moving to open 11,160 acres of North Park for gas and oil drilling.
The valley between the Zirkel and Medicine Bow mountains sustains antelope, elk, moose, bighorn sheep, raptors, trout and sage grouse.
But the Department of the Interior's Bureau of Land Management — despite recent vows to emphasize conservation — decided the nation's need for domestic oil justified the decision to allow drilling in the North Park area.
(By the way, for the weird justification for why we should do this at the end of that piece, here is a good rebuttal.)
Mr. Salazar. Please do the right thing. Resign.