Advocates for the West won a significant victory yesterday when a federal judge overturned the Federal Government’s policy which curtailed public participation in oil and gas leasing decisions.
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Categories: The Force of the Horse, Uncategorized
AMEN!! FINALLY SOME JUSTICE! 🐴
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Next up: how to get loss-leading grazing leases voided in our last legal wild horse and burro areas. This does set a precedent. Wild horses and burros are in fact declining (see recent roundups with hundreds of adults and next to no foals), their habitat is leased out to competing for-profit interests which take primacy in forage and water access (against the law and further detrimental to federally protected wild horses and burros), and all the cost burdens are foisted onto an unwilling taxpaying public.
At an absolute minimum no livestock should be allowed to graze legal wild horse and burro areas — which constitute only around 12% of all the public land upon which livestock grazing leases are allowed. This is a reasonable and fiscally sound direction to take both the wild horse and burro program and the livestock grazing program. Let’s do it!
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The law supports what you say: legal reduction of private/corporate domestic livestock grazing pursuant to 3 C.F.R. 4710.3-2 and 43 C.F.R. 4710.5(a), in order to accommodate the current wild horse population level. The USFS authority to reduce livestock grazing pursuant to 43 C.F.R. 4710.5 in order “to provide habitat for wild horses or burros.”
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So why isn’t this happening? Why can’t anyone in Congress grow a spine? Again, I think we need to ask these questions specific to our wild horses and burros of EVERYONE running for office this year, and vote them out if they dodge or waffle on answering. The stakes are too hight and the time is too short now. They need to speak up or stand down.
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Bernhardt Aims to Give Oil Industry Free Pass to Kill Birds
January 30, 2020
Statement of Alan Zibel, Research Director, Public Citizen’s Corporate Presidency Project
WASHINGTON Note: The New York Times reported today that the U.S. Department of the Interior is expected to release a draft rule dropping the threat of punishment to energy companies that break a law protecting migratory birds. The expected proposal will give leeway to corporations to kill birds as long as they do so unintentionally. A former client of Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, the Independent Petroleum Producers Association, specifically requested this action in a September 2017 letter to former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke.
When powerful corporate interests tell the Department of Interior to jump, officials there routinely ask “how high?” This particular giveaway is a direct request of a former client of Interior Secretary David Bernhardt and proves once again that the Trump administration is intent on attacking conservation laws in every way possible.
If this rule had been in place at the time of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill, which killed more than one million birds, BP would not have had to pay $100 million in fines for violating federal laws that protect birds. Bernhardt has no interest in holding big energy companies accountable.
http://www.mtoutlaw.com/peace-in-the-valleys
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Thank you, Thank you, to the fair minded Judge.
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“It’s time to bring outdated oil and gas leasing policies into the 21st century”
https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/energy-environment/485512-its-time-to-bring-outdated-oil-and-gas-leasing
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