Green groups don’t mind Dem drilling

Environmental groups have railed for years against President Bush and the Republican Congress, calling on them to resist drilling the nation’s public lands.

But now that Democrats are pushing a bill to speed up drilling in those areas, environmentalists have neither revved up the outrage nor endorsed the effort.

{mosads}The green groups say they’re quietly supportive of the attempt to divert the debate away from drilling off the nation’s shores and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And they don’t think the Democrats’ “Use It or Lose It” legislation can speed up drilling on public lands because there aren’t enough drilling rigs to drill new wells anyway.

But few, if any, have taken formal positions on the bill.

“I’m not sure it would be helpful if environmental groups said, ‘We support the bill,’ ” said Karen Wayland, legislative director for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “But we do support drilling where leases already are rather than opening new protected areas.”

Other environmentalists are wary of any effort to ramp up drilling, even in areas already set aside.

“It would be a disaster to have everyone drilling as fast as they can,” said Steve Smith, assistant regional director of The Wilderness Society in Colorado.

But he sees the House Democrats’ signature energy legislation less as a way to increase drilling and more as a way to prevent oil and gas companies from stockpiling leases they get from a friendly Bush administration.

“I see it as more a challenge to this backlog of leases and permits,” Smith said. “Companies are trying to get them and keep them in storage.”

Starting in June, Democrats have twice tried to pass the “Use It or Lose It” legislation, which would take aaway the leases of companies that don’t “diligently” work to produce oil or gas on the public lands. And they may try again this week.

“Let’s be clear: Democrats support increasing the domestic production of petroleum and other energy resources,” said House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.).

A Democratic House leadership aide indicated that environmental groups are intentionally staying out of the fight.

“If they came out strongly for us, it would raise a lot of questions,” the aide said.

Congressional Republicans said the Democrats’ new rhetoric is hypocritical, and that their “use it or lose it” push is just a smokescreen.

And while environmental groups have remained strategically quiet, GOP allies have cried foul.

“If you need new reasons to oppose the domestic production of oil, gas or coal, you’d be a fool not to consult the environmental community and borrow some of the twisted logic and sensational campaign slogans that have made it so successful over the last several decades,” said Brian J. Kennedy, spokesman for the Institute for Energy Research.

The legislation could come up again this week as part of a new Democratic energy package. But some Democrats say they might pivot away from the “use it” bill this week and focus more on a new legislative vehicle that could siphon off enough Republican support to actually survive a supermajority vote, such as releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR).

Aides said a call to release oil from the reserve could gain a wider swath of support.

Pelosi and other Democratic leaders have not said what the final SPR bill will look like, nor have they said what energy measures — which could also include a speculation bill — will be brought to the floor this week or under what rules.

Public Citizen’s Energy Program may have come the closest to taking a stand against the “use it” legislation. Director Tyson Slocum said his organization had no official position, but if members ask, they are not recommending a vote in favor of the bill.

Drilling on lands set aside for production won’t lower gas prices, he said, and does nothing to move the nation toward conservation.

“I understand why the Democrats have done it — they’ve become convinced that they need to support some kind of drilling,” Slocum said. “Is this what they want, or is it that they really don’t want more OCS [Outer Continental Shelf] drilling?”

The Wilderness Society has led the way in documenting what it considers to be a backlog of leases. The group issued a report in 2004 documenting that only 40 percent of the 54,000 oil and gas leases overseen by the Bureau of Land Management were producing oil or gas.

But the report was not supportive of more drilling on those non-producing leases.

“If the current inventory of non-producing leases were placed into production, the scale of drilling on public lands would increase dramatically, as would degradation of lands where drilling is wholly inappropriate,” stated the report, titled “Drilling in the Rocky Mountain West: Not So Fast.”

The Wilderness Society issued another report in May documenting what it called the “rush to lease” under the Bush administration.