Defining 'pristine'

NY Times editorial:

Gale Norton has to be happy. In 2003, Ms. Norton, then President Bush’s secretary of the interior (and now a senior oil executive at Royal Dutch Shell), struck a deal with the governor of Utah that would open about 3 million pristine acres of federal land to oil and gas drilling.

Environmental groups and the courts managed to keep the drillers at bay. No longer. In the last few days, the Bureau of Land Management has completed six long-range management plans for Utah that will expose these acres (and as many as 6 million more) to some form of commercial exploitation.

On Tuesday, the bureau announced that it would soon begin selling oil and gas leases — essentially the right to drill — in some of the most beautiful and fragile areas.

Conservationists are aghast, and rightly so. Apparently without consulting the National Parks Service, one of its sister agencies at the Interior Department, the bureau plans to auction more than two dozen leases adjacent to Arches National Park and very close to Canyonlands National Park, risking the parks’ air and water.

Also on the auction block, among other rare and spectacular vistas, is Desolation Canyon, so named by the explorer John Wesley Powell in 1869 while he traveled down the Green River to the Grand Canyon.

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This is hysteria on stilts. I don't know about Gale Norton, but I am please to see we are actually going to try to produce energy in this country. I think the environmentalist definition of pristine is anyplace that is uninhabitable.

Utah is not nearly as attractive as Texas where we have been punching holes in the ground for decades in search of oil and gas. When ever I see the term pristine now I think it must be someplace no one would want to live. Just because no one wants to live there does not mean we should not produce oil and gas.

This editorial is another example of the extreme hatred the left has for energy production and the irrational lengths they will go to prevent it. I expect we will see more such idiocy from a Democrat administration that will put the environmental wackos in charge of energy policy.

In the meantime Utah and the US will benefit from the production from these sights. It will produce both jobs and energy for this country and mean less money for people who don't like us.