Interior Chief: Public Land Offers Fix for Energy Crisis

Calling California’s power panic a wake-up call for the nation, Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton said Thursday that the crisis justifies the need to expand efforts to extract oil, gas and coal from public lands.

“I think the energy problems in California are a reality check for a lot of people,” Norton said. “People are realizing that we need to plan ahead to have the energy resources available for the long term. People might occasionally forget that we need to have oil wells in order to have fuel for our cars. But you can’t forget that for very long.”

In a wide-ranging interview, Norton described her difficult dual role as caretaker of much of the nation’s public lands and as a key member of a White House task force seeking to develop a new national energy strategy.

“Our challenge is to find a way to provide the energy resources we need for a dynamic economy and jobs, and at the same time preserve our national treasures,” she said.

Clearly, Norton shares President Bush’s enthusiasm for expanding oil and gas production on public lands. Earlier this week, Bush made a similar case for drilling on public lands, indicating that even monument lands, the vast majority of which are off limits for energy extraction, are on the table.

“[T]here are parts of the monument lands where we can explore without affecting the overall environment,” Bush told reporters Tuesday. However, he stressed that the “precious part” of these monuments, “the part that the people uniformly would not want to spoil, will not be despoiled.”

Like Norton, he did not name potential sites. Also like Norton, Bush seemed aware of the obstacles but expected to overcome them. “There are a lot of bottlenecks,” he said. “One is, there’s a mentality that says you can’t explore and protect land. We’re going to change that attitude.”

In her new job, Norton is the top executive overseeing the lands and minerals that produce a third of the coal, gas and oil produced in the United States. And as part of an administration determined to provide the nation with abundant inexpensive energy, her tasks include locating new resources on public lands long before coal veins and oil and gas reserves are depleted.

With demands growing for natural gas, Norton indicated that public lands may need to provide more of those resources than in recent years.

Since her Jan. 25 confirmation, Norton has made no secret of her intention to open more public land to oil, gas and coal exploration and development. She is a firm advocate of drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a stretch of tundra in the coastal plain of northeast Alaska. She also has suggested that she plans to open up some areas of the Rocky Mountains to energy extraction. But on Thursday she refused to be specific about which areas might be targeted.

Her pronouncements have given hope to energy prospectors and caused jitters among environmentalists. While the secretary refuses to reveal her hand, advocates and proponents of drilling have drawn up lists of likely targets, including Colorado’s Vermillion Basin, red rock country in southeastern Utah and the Jack Morrow Hills area of Wyoming’s Red Desert.

Norton conceded that once specific sites are selected the administration may face battles in court and Congress before any exploration and extraction could begin.

However, she said her department first must complete a Congress-ordered study of the energy resources located on public lands.

Commenting on national parks, Norton offered an example of how the Bush administration’s plans to erase the $4.9-billion backlog of maintenance projects will bolster the parks’ natural and historic treasures.

She will ask Congress to fund a new visitors center in the Lava Beds National Monument in Tulelake, Calif. The current center is a couple of ancient trailers bolted together and a 1930s office building built on top of the caves. This “sounds like a pure bricks-and-mortar issue, but . . . they’re moving those [facilities] to an area where they will not injure the fauna,” she said.

Norton said she will push Congress to fund a project to relocate facilities to help restore the giant forest areas of Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks. The aging facilities disturb the ecosystem of some of the world’s largest trees.

Another project that will get her blessing is a $9-million restoration of the C.A. Thayer, a 1895 sailing schooner in San Francisco.