ken salazar

From The Colorado Independent:
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar today issued a notice of withdrawal of nearly 1 million acres of BLM and U.S. Forest Service land around the Grand Canyon from new mining claims for the next two years to allow for more study and analysis.
The move drew the praise of conservation groups such as the [...]

From The Colorado Independent:
Unlike oil and gas extraction, pulling hard-rock minerals like uranium, gold and copper out of the ground is a royalty-free proposition in the United States, despite the often enormous costs of cleaning up public lands after the fact.
The Environmental Protection Agency in a filing on Monday noted that hard-rock mining has impacted [...]

The Obama administration today announced plans to abandon a controversial last-minute Bush-era rule that made it easier for mining companies to fill valleys and streams with the debris from their mountain-topping operations.
From an Interior Department statement:
Under the Bush rule, coal mine operators are able to dispose of excess mountaintop spoil in perennial and intermittent streams [...]

The Hill has a great piece this morning revealing how some powerful Democrats have lobbied the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation urging bailout funds for banks in the lawmakers’ home states.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), for example, wrote a letter in December asking the FDIC to “give appropriate consideration” to Neveda Security Bank’s request for [...]

This morning, the conservative Heritage Foundation rolled out an energy proposal to reduce American dependence on foreign oil, arguing that “the jobs created by a reinvigorated domestic energy industry would be well-paying and long-term and funded … by the private sector.”
Sound like President Obama’s green jobs plan? Try crude-oil black. Heritage was making the case [...]