It's SUWA's Fault

[Politics as Usual] You already know that the Utah Legislature's hayseed Cowboy Caucus hates the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) and holds the environmental advocacy group 99.9 percent responsible for locking up millions of acres of federal lands from oil, coal and nuclear power interests.

Betcha didn't know this: SUWA is also the culprit behind the disproportionately high energy costs people of color pay to drive their cars and heat their homes.

No word yet as to whether SUWA has any weapons of mass destruction hidden in its downtown Salt Lake City office, but if Reps. Mike Noel (R-Kanab) and Aaron Tilton (R-Springville) can find a link, they'll be all over it.

I just returned from a press conference at the Capitol in the waning hours of the 2008 Legislature. Noel and Tilton, both of whom have well-publicized personal and business interests in diverting Green River water to develop at least one, and perhaps two nuclear power plants in Southeastern Utah, hosted. Yesterday, Noel sent a letter to SUWA, signed by 45 legislators (42 of them Republicans) demanding the private not-for-profit interest group to produce information related to securities fraud convictions of two board members last year.

Former SUWA board member Bert Fingerhut and former treasurer Mark Ristow are serving 24-month and 20-month federal prison sentences, respectively, for their criminal private securities dealings. SUWA director Scott Groene has stated that an independent audit of the organization shortly after the charges were filed has determined no SUWA involvement in their cases.

The Salt Lake Tribune's Patty Henetz and I tried to get the boys to more fully discuss their ties to the nuclear project they're pushing for the red rock of Emery County, but Tilton quickly brushed us off. "We didn't come here today to talk about that," he blurted. Noel added: "We can talk about that later if you want."

Today, Noel began the show by introducing Niger Innis, spokesman for the Congress of Racial Equality (Core). "When the energy companies get the sniffles, my people get the flu," Innis said.

Innis said the poor and urban black populations pay a disproportionate amount of utility costs in this country. No argument there. Therefore, he argued, every last bit of public land should be available for energy exploration to keep oil and gas prices in check. "I'm an environmentalist," Innis said. "But I'm not an extreme environmentalist."

Earlier this legislative session, House Republicans were all agitato during floor debate about New York Rep. Maurice Hinchey's involvement in protecting public lands in the West. They reasoned he had no right to do so. He doesn't even live here.

Niger Innis flew into Salt Lake from CORE headquarters in--wait for it--New York City.

No irony here, people. Nope, not a whit.

Disclosure: My husband, Ted Wilson, is vice chairman of the SUWA Board. (Holly Mullen)

Utah's Star Chamber

[Utah Unigovernment] Every so often, it's reasonable to remind Utah's power-crazed GOP legislators that theirs is the party of Theodore Roosevelt. You remember him--that madman president who had the audacity to create the national parks system and to push for protection of America's wilderness. A regular flaming enviro, that Republican Roosevelt.

But then, Teddy was more in the moderate vein of John McCain. Today he would be drummed straight out of the party. Besides, everyone knows McCain is secretly a rabid liberal, certainly not worthy of Utah Republicanism.

Yesterday, Sen. Margaret Dayton (R-Orem), interrupted Stephen Bloch, staff attorney for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, as he testified before the Senate Natural Resources Committee. Dayton told Bloch he would have to take an "oath" to speak the truth because, according to Patty Henetz of The Salt Lake Tribune, "someone had raised concerns that his previous testimony before the House [on another bill] was inaccurate or false." Henetz, however, checked a few additional facts in writing her piece--and learned that the Bureau of Land Management had neatly fudged numbers in reporting the amounts of tar sands and oil shale available should Utah's wildnerness lands be opened to drilling and other energy exploration. Read all about it here. The Legislature's anti-environment bloc AKA "The Conservative Caucus," or "Cowboy Caucus") frequently uses the BLM's questionable numbers in justifying their bitching about federal jurisdiction over public lands that belong to all Americans.

BTW, Bloch was quite a decent sport. He complied with Dayton's "request."

Where to start here? When did our citizen Legislature become its own homey little version of the Star Chamber? As Henetz points outs, no other panel witnesses besides Bloch were required to take an oath before testifying. Reps from the oil, mining and farming industries gabbed away, free of interruption.

And who was this "someone who raised concerns" about Bloch? None of your beeswax. At the Legislature it's perfectly fine to build a whisper campaign against an adversary, and let it snowball into the scene that took place yesterday. If Bloch were appearing in a state or federal court, at least he'd have the right to know and/or face his accusers.

And again, it's worth noting, people keep electing these folks. Over and over and over again.

(Holly Mullen)

Unless Utah Goes Nuclear ... the Terrorists Win

[Nuclear News] In an e-mail spammed to 160,000 Utahns Thursday, two Utah lawmakers with ambitions to build nuclear power plants say creating more wilderness areas in the Beehive State is akin to supporting terrorists.

Rep. Aaron Tilton, R-Springville, and Rep. Mike Noel, R-Kanab, say the Red Rock Wilderness Act pending in Congress to provide wilderness protection to more than 9 million acres in Utah "will hamstring our ability to produce American energy right here in Utah.

"That leads America to become more dependent on energy from hostile foreign nations—some of whom fund terrorist organizations that are right now targeting our American men and women in uniform."

Besides, Tilton and Noel write, wilderness hurts people in wheelchairs and raises utility bills for the poor.

To highlight their point, the lawmakers’ e-mail links to a Website, StopUtahLandGrab.org, which shows photos of Osama bin Laden, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—all of whom, the site assures us, are big supporters of the Utah wilderness bill.

Small print at the bottom tells readers stoputahlandgrab is a project of Americans for American Energy, an outfit created in 2006 by a public relations company as a fake “grass roots” group to push for opening the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.

Tilton became involved with Americans for American Energy more recently and is now the group’s vice chairman.

The Utah wilderness bill will “force America to buy more of our energy from foreign dictators who hate America,” the Website says. “These monsters will get more of our energy dollars to fund terrorism”

And foreign terrorists aren’t the only extremists backing Utah wilderness protection. New York Congressman Maurice Hinchey, who is sponsoring the Red Rock bill, is “a political extremist in the U.S. Congress.” The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) and the Utah Sierra Club also are “extremist groups [whose support for wilderness] ”is precisely what these foreign terrorists want.”

The site directs users to send a form letter to politicians opposing the Red Rock Wilderness Act.

Who can save us from the terrorist by supplying a homegrown energy supply? How about Tilton, CEO of a new company that aims to set up two or more nuclear power plants in Utah. A task that might be more difficult if say, the federal government declared additional wilderness near the Green River where reports indicate Tilton wants to erect his nuclear power plants.

The Red Rock Wilderness Act seeks to give wilderness protection to areas like the Book Cliffs north of the Green River and the San Rafael Swell, a formation proposed for national monument designation in the late-1990s that is located in the vicinity of Emery County, a possible location for Tilton’s nuclear power plants.

SUWA has been pushing the Red Rock Wilderness bill since 1988 when it was first introduced by Utah Rep. Wayne Owens. Since Owens left Congress, Utah’s own congressional delegation won’t touch the bill. In recent year’s it’s been sponsored by New York’s Hinchey. The bill has never gotten off the ground, but, with both the houses of Congress controlled by Democrats, some energy producers are fearful.

As opponents to the Red Rock Wilderness bill ratchet up their rhetoric, SUWA is soft pedaling its own.
“The conversation about how to protect wild lands has become polarized and everyone is missing the point,” says Deeda Seed, who heads up SUWAs “dialogue” project that has been hosting mediated conversations about wilderness around the state. “We have an amazing landscape. How can we work together to protect it? We hope to engage the vast majority of Utahns in the middle in answering that question. One way to protect wild lands is wilderness [protection]; there are other ways.”

“To Tilton and Noel: we’re listening,” Seed says. “We’d be happy to sit down and talk to them about how to care for this land that really defines Utah. We’re all about talking and listening. We’re not terrorists.”

The Americans for American Energy “Stop Utah Land Grab” Website has been up at least since December, according to SUWA. When SUWA came across it last year, the site included a poll with this question:

“Do you support SUWA’s campaign to stop Utah from harvesting more of our state’s abundant oil and gas resources even though this makes us more dependent on hostile foreign nations for those resources?”

The poll is no longer on the Website. But results (according to a screen capture taken by SUWA) showed 84 percent to 16 percent supported SUWA’s wilderness proposal … and, presumably, the terrorists. (Ted McDonough)

Turn Around. Go Home.

[Overpopulation] Somehow, stories like this always show up in the mainstream media underscored by a breathless quality. It's like, "hey we're first in something, right here in Utah! We're really somebody!"

To the contrary, every story about Utah gaining new population depresses the hell out of me. It's partly that I know our leaders throw their arms around this growth without ever really planning for it. Beyond that, though, there's an unsettling mirage at work here. We're always fooling ourselves into thinking the space in Utah--in the whole West for that matter--is endless. It's because we haven't yet devised a way to sweat every inch of land into development (Check out this Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance update to see how hard we're trying).

We have too many people here, and we live in a desert. We don't have enough water to accommodate all this growth. Never will. It's fascinating that the other two states with the biggest population gains are Arizona and Nevada. They don't have any water either. Let's see how breathless and excited these growth stories sound a month from now, when pea-soup pollution has enveloped the Wasatch Front. And when the state Legislature is tightening its fists against adequate funding for booming growth in public schools and the higher ed system. (Holly Mullen)