While this is an interesting idea, it's pretty comical to think that conservationists could ever come up with enough money to seriously outbid oil and gas companies in lucrative areas. The only reason this person was able to get this lease is that this area is uneconomic to produce from.
Also, the BLM and other leasing organizations use these leases as a way to incentivize develompent in rural areas. Everyone involved has a strong incentive to ensure that leases are actually used for something.
As an aside, here's a paper [1] that summarizes the tax revenue that individual states receive from oil and gas production. Any longterm solution to oil and gas production needs to seriously address how these tax bases (especially in rural areas) stay stable or grow with decreasing oil and gas production. Otherwise you should expect increased resistance to decarbonization as people literally see their schools close, roads deteriorate, etc.
> it's pretty comical to think that conservationists could ever come up with enough money to seriously outbid oil and gas companies in lucrative areas
It would be less comical if there were a global carbon tax that reflected the actual costs of the externalities of fossil fuels. And yes, I know that's not likely either, but a boy can dream.
There is an old satirical essay by the French economist Frédéric Bastiat on how the candlemakers demanded protection from the Sun:
Economic Sophisms and the candlemakers' petition
Contained within Economic Sophisms is the satirical parable known as the candlemakers' petition in which candlemakers and tallow producers lobby the Chamber of Deputies of the French July Monarchy (1830–1848) to block out the Sun to prevent its unfair competition with their products.[9] Also included in the Sophisms is a facetious petition to the king asking for a law forbidding the usage of everyone's right hand, based on a presumption by some of his contemporaries that more difficulty means more work and more work means more wealth.
It's not necessarily that it's an uneconomic lease (I don't have any facts). But that initial payment is not the value paid to the government. The lease bid is premised on the risk of exploration, and the huge royalty payments to the government that accrue from any production. Tying up the ground with the initial bid without exploration and production locks away all of that value. To be equivalent, the environmental bid would have to offer the NPE of all of the royalty revenues that would have otherwise been produced, discounted for the likelihood of discovery. And there's no way they could afford that. Natural resource production comes at some cost, but it also produces huge benefits to society. Nobody wants to see a hole in the ground, but everybody wants schools and roads . . . and, yes, gasoline. Lease bid fees are not relevant to the conversation.
Most areas, especially in the contiguous United States, have already been explored to some extent. These ultra cheap leases reflect the fact that the likelihood of economically producing hydrocarbons in this area is extremely unlikely.
Or, the ultra-cheap leases represent giveaways of public goods to corporate interests. Political consideration of these deals is more about personal+crony enrichment than it is about generating public tax revenue.
Royalty payments aren't really huge. Tax revenues are, but note that the environmental leaves the petroleum in the ground, where it can be recovered later.
Those huge benefits come with huge externalized expenses, too.
What do you mean by production? I assume you mean extraction, not production. These companies cannot synthesize fossil fuels at scale.
In which case, the no-extract bid has the added benefit of not taking the resource out of the public's hands. The royalty is a pittance compared to the true value of the publicly owned resource.
>it's pretty comical to think that conservationists could ever come up with enough money to seriously outbid oil and gas companies in lucrative areas. The only reason this person was able to get this lease is that this area is uneconomic to produce from.
Not a hard disagree, but it certainly gets easier the less economic it is to produce/extract from the area. A good example would be coal, where plants in the US are already being closed. Expensive? Yes. But probably cheaper due to market dynamics and, for someone interested in conservation/preservation, has more bang for their buck, given the miserable nature of coal.
Overall taxes paid to governments are not going down. Hence it's __just__ a matter of government re-allocating taxes from something that is growing to something that is shrinking.
I really don't see why, for example, school funding should only come from oil proprerty taxes and not from other tax streams as well.
In many rural areas, there are no other growing tax bases. Indeed the population in rural areas is declining overall as people move to cities for better opportunities.
According to the paper you link to, the value of the petroleum was $269B (total value) and state/local tax revenues and the states' share of federal leases were about $28B (~10% tax rate; not bad).[1] Unfortunately it doesn't have the acreage that produced it. Being really, incredibly conservative and assuming the only land involved is BLM's 26M acres, that's $1077/acre.
[1] According to the BLM, states receive half of its revenue; according to that paper, that amounted to $1.5B in 2013 which seems pretty reasonable according to the BLM numbers above.
So if you're a big enough company that you can basically assume that a lease will be available whenever you want (which makes sense for a large number of leases, turnover must exist), you just bid enough to justify it once something looks worth the risk.
And until it's worth the risk, leasing it is just a donation since no one would be trying to extract things from it anyway.
It does start to sound like a corporate giveaway where only big companies ever really win. On a per-parcel basis it seems like it is beneficial (i.e. a local group maybe can keep a particular area protected), but on aggregate it doesn't seem likely to do much. The companies that want to extract resources have many options and lots of time to wait.
> The high bidder, Tempest Exploration Co. LLC, paid $2,500 for the 1,120 acre lease by credit card and began paying annual rental fees. What soon did prove remarkable, though, was the revelation that the company had been created by the environmentalist, Terry Tempest Williams. She intended to keep the oil in the ground. BLM promptly canceled the lease.
I wonder if the right way to hack this is not publicly state that you want to keep the oil in the ground but be very, very bad at extracting it... taking years to "start", digging with a shovel once in a while. Basically doing nothing while claiming to do something.
This approach also works extremely well if you want to stall or cancel a project in a big corporation for political reasons.
Just embed one of your engineer in their team to gain knowledge, but fail to deliver on almost all items except a few. You will end-up pitting "your" exec against "their", and it will take them forever to solve the problem. If conflict resolution looms, just send everyone in summer or winter vacation for several weeks.
This used to be an exploited loophole. Wealthy people would use inexpensive "mineral exploration" leases to get long-term control of areas of Federal land that they wanted to use for other purposes. The only real cost was maintaining the bare minimum fiction that they were doing mineral exploration -- dig the occasional hole in some corner of the property, move a bit of dirt around. Meanwhile, they were doing all kinds of other personal things with the land and building structures enabled by having the lease.
The US DoI started clamping down on the use of fake mineral leases a few decades ago and put policies in place to strongly discourage this kind of abuse.
I've seen something similar where I live. Most towns have sign ordinances only allowing up to 4'x8' signs. The hack is to buy a broken down panel truck and wrap the cargo box with your sign and then park it in front of your business.
Here, it's working correctly. The point of paying for these permits is not to extract maximum money from the citizens who own the land; it is to make sure the land is being used.
-"Hi, I have an old black walnut tree that for whatever reason I want/need removed. Since the value of the wood is higher than the cost of removing a tree, I'm taking bids for who to allow to do the job."
+"That sounds like a good deal, how about $250?"
-"Deal! When will you start cutting?"
+"Oh, I'm not going to remove it! It's too beautiful, I'm just going to leave it be in your property"
The government isn't trying to raise money by selling oil rights, it's trying to get someone to produce domestic oil by allowing access to federal lands.
I think the author is not wrong, that if land if offered up for extractive use, it must be offered on the same terms for non-extractive use or non-use. But in general, this is land that should not be offered up for use at all.
In The Ministry For the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson presented another option: an investment vehicle backed by proof of carbon sequestration. One way of earning this carboncoin was to own or buy oil/gas/coal resources and legally commit to keeping them in the ground. As demand for fossil fuels declined, generating carboncoin quickly became a more profitable investment than trying to extract and sell fossil fuels.
How do you measure whether these investment vehicles are having the desired effect? I think folks were generally not thrilled about driving a train full of biofuel back and forth between the US and Canadian border even though it apparently generated a very profitable amount of renewable identification number credits ( https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/biofuel-credits-behind-myster... ).
The best part is that those who believe that extraction leases are rife with 'corporation giveaways' don't see that carbon offsets will be just as fraudulent.
UCLA Law Professor publishes a paper in Science journal, writes an intro for the general reader.
What is said here is true for US Forest Service land in California, based on a layman's reading of some relevent documents. The forests were declared to be valuable in their utility to the market, then the legal system was built around that founding principle. Extractive industry is a greater good for society than the dirt and bugs that were already there.
Those times are past. We are on a trajectory to see doubling of extinctions by some measures, along with fundemental changes in plant populations, rainfall and human habitability. Sure, Canadians can rejoice in Calgary for the coming long summers, but the rest of the world, essentially, its not going to be pretty.
This article is US-centric and thats OK, other places need to define their own response. This is a sad day but at least, be proactive with what stands right now.
If the oil & gas rights on >1,100 acres were sold at auction for only $2,500...that suggests that (at least in the minds of the other bidders) there is d*mned little worth the effort of trying to extract there, to generate any "greater good for society".
So why not let the tree-huggers buy up leases on a bunch of neigh-worthless land? Far better than them spending their money on lawyers, to sue real oil & gas companies over the real wells that they're busy drilling & running in worthwhile locations.
I think paying for "conservation" on public lands is not nearly as straightforward as the article implies. "conservationists" are not always doing things in the interest of better land use. In Bozeman there's a wealthy neighborhood ($3m+ per house) that outbid the logging companies for the BLM forestry contract adjacent to their land. They claimed it was for natural habitat conservation, but the land has become completely impassable with bramble. It used to be a fantastic place to hike and ski tour in the winter, but it's become so overgrown it's hard to access by human or wild animal. We were really looking forward to the improved access to the land once the forest was harvested. The director of forestry for the area had a really thoughtful plan for harvesting the land. Completely aside from the economic loss from not harvesting, there wasn't a conservation benefit either.
I mean if you're an environmentalist of course you would think that -- I think that. But it's a little naive to think anyone else really cares when it's that or cheaper gas and employment.
It depends, for example the Ducks Unlimited organization restores and saves a lot of marsh land that may be used for development but generally an oil/gas company wouldn't find the land very useful.
Yeah, the subtext here is that BLM isn't really selling the land for any purpose but allowing extraction if you want. They're selling the land specifically for someone to start drilling.
There's not really a good way around this because even if there it was ruled that BLM couldn't refuse the lease next time they would just change the lease terms to be really really expensive, far more than conservationist movements could afford, and then offer a rebate once extraction began.
I think this article misses an important aspect of conversationalist thinking: a lot of them want the land to be completely untouched. Had a legal battel with conservationists trying to close of a section of property at some point, and part of the objective from them was to prevent the land owners from using the land and somehow harming it as a result. They lost, however it was enlightening to see a different mindset.
I worked in New Mexico in the 90s with a 'gravel' operation that was selling off the gravel left over from mining operations decades and decades before. Tall piles of just rock we loaded into trucks and sold.
At some point they discovered that the old timers left enough gold in the tailings piles that it made sense to use modern techniques to reclaim that already out of the ground gold before selling the gravel. That triggered a multi-year legal fight to 'stop them from raping the land through gold mining'. Not only did they want the 'mining operation' stopped, now they also wanted the current owners to 'properly' remediate ancient mines scattered through the property. Some of these mine were legitimately historical places where South American's were coming north to mine Turquoise and Silver several hundred years ago.
We ended up not only losing access to the tailings piles for gravel use, but were then required to clean up the mess left by mining operations that had not existed for a hundred years or more. It shaped the way I view most people that claim to want to save the environment to this day. There is rarely any middle ground anymore and has become and all or nothing platform.
In New England similar groups buy up land and just let it sit, maybe maintain a hiking trail through it.
New England went glaciers -> tundra -> grasslands -> forests managed by native peoples -> un-managed forests.
The ecological state theses environmentalists are promoting is basically the status quo of the early 1700s and late 1800s through present day. It's hard to define what the "natural" state is since it went from periods of rapid change to various states shaped by human activity with little in between. Generally speaking most people consider the forests as they would have existed as managed by the natives prior to European settlement as the state that is most worthy of reconstruction.
> they would have existed as managed by the natives prior to European settlement as the state that is most worthy of reconstruction
This is magical thinking; the First Nations are, and were, human. The Huron, for instance, would move their settlements once they had "used up" all the readily available resources (mostly game animals) in the area. The First Nations were only better "custodians" of the land because they lacked the means to abuse the land as thoroughly as European "settlers".
It's more complicated than that. Yes, not all the land was being actively maintained at any one time but the 200ft pines, abundance of fruit/nut bearing plants and game species that come with them is a direct result of native land management practices throughout the broader region despite any particular square not necessarily being actively managed at any particular point in time.
Relocating (and they didn't relocate far, remember this is inhabited land after all, you can't just set up shop on the neighbor gang's turf) is the native equivalent of leaving a field fallow. But because the natives were working with animal and plant species the feedback loop is potentially decades long (depending on local resources) vs farmers who will leave a field fallow every few years.
I agree that they would have left the place barren had they had the means but you have to consider that what they were doing was stable on a 500+yr timeline which is a pretty good run.
My point here is that the impenetrable thicket a lot of environmentalists want to maintain is not particularly representative of "peak forest". I'm sure they all want to see blueberries and 200ft pines but just doing nothing won't achieve that because that's not a state that new england forests can (and certainly not today since we've got all sorts of invasive species and pests) get themselves into without human intervention either directly on a particular parcel of land or on enough near proximity land to influence the ecology of the parcel in question.
It's far from clear that native Americans lacked the means of initial European settlers.
I agree that we should not indulge in "magical thinking", but non-American cultures display a wide variety of sensibilities with respect to defining "used up". There are traditions even within Europe that are relatively respectful of carrying capacity, but they have mostly been trampled on by industrialization and capitalism. It's entirely possible that native American resource management was closer to these older European traditions than those of the last 200 years.
Precolonial New England was mostly forest and was home to less than 100,000 people.
I don't know how concerned those people were with sustainability or with being custodians of the land. But, even if they cared nought about such things, that need not mean that the state of the forest during their reign is not a worthy target for modern-day conservationists.
Yeah, I specifically ended the timeline around 1650 or so. Basically once European diseases showed up there has been no stable state, just a bunch of 50yr states. Though what we do know is that the impenetrable forested thickets of the late 1600s and early 1700s are basically the same as what we have now (with less non-native species) to grow up after you cut down all the multi-hundred year old trees for lumber. The fact that we routinely clear cut any given parcel and the average parcel of land has not burnt in hundreds of years gives us very different forests that what would have grown up on un-managed land in say the year 1500 or would have grown up in the immediate absence of natives circa 1630.
More or less but the level of resolution there doesn't really capture the rapid changes that happened after the natives were kicked out. Settlers would cut some lands while simultaneously ignoring others. Some areas that were historically grasslands thanks to continued native settlement reverted to forests. Some forests were clear cut for farm and pasture. But then they turned around and selectively logged some of the newly grown up forests, and repeated grazing/farming altered the substrates so when pastures were left and grown over in the 1850s different stuff grew back. And remember, basically any time you get a mature forest prior to 1980 or so someone comes along and logs it within a couple decades. And all of this is happening in a patchwork manner and the environment is inter-connected so (for example) decimating a bird species in most of its range will effect the plants it caries ability to show up on land left to grow over in its range. Then you have stuff like the chestnut blight, etc, etc. It's really hard to paint accurately with a broad brush after Europeans showed up.
Well, don't forget that the timeline for most forested areas would look more like "forests managed by native peoples -> land clear-cut by European settlers -> un-managed forests," though I'm sure "un-managed" is debatable here; humans never left.
Much of New England was clear-cut, either to harvest old-growth timber or for farmland. The forests we see today date to after the westward expansion, when farmers left the rocky New England soils for easier tilling in the Midwest and Great Plains states. So really, when people want to conserve the land in that state, they're saying "let's let the new-growth forests come back and maybe become old-growth forests again."
There's a ton about public land usage that has to be reformed. There's a law, dating back to the days of the Gold Rush, that's still on the books. If public lands are determined to have hard minerals (e.g. gold) someone can stake a claim and purchase the lands, and that overrides any previous usage of the lands, like leases for grazing or logging. The law also fixes the price per acre when purchasing public land through this method. And said rate hasn't been updated since the law was passed, so it's embarrassingly low, like $150 per acre IIRC.
The idea behind it is that the government should be setting quotas, limits, divisions, etc based on maximizing conservation (not preservation). They should be preserving some areas, like wilderness areas. They should also be allowing limited/regulated use of some resources in some areas to support industry, jobs, conservation, etc (and should be done in a sustainable way).
So if they are doing it right, there shouldn't be a need to have people buy the lease and not use it. At the same time, it doesn't make too much sense care if people don't use the lease so long as they pay the money (except in the scope of organizing to manipulate prices and markets, and this doesn't cover missed royalties/taxes).
I guess it really comes down to debating if we should be balancing multiple uses and group interests, or if we should be choosing as a society (really an oligarchy in my opinion/experience) to pick a winning position/group/use and ban all others.
I fully agree here. If you want to buy a plot of land, and leave it totally untouched, you should be able to, no matter what that land is, where it is, and what it could be used for.
I hold the same stance on being able to own an empty field in the middle of a high cost of living city, when that field could easily be built up into an apartment. Its your property, you should be the one deciding.
Ultimately private property ownership rights should be strengthened, and that is something that both conservationists, and those who seek to make use of the land for their own profit should agree on.
Unfortunately, like with many things, people are often jealous and unhappy about letting others do as they like with their own things. This should always be called out for the immoral greed that it is.
There are certainly arguments to be made that property owners have some responsibility to those around them, and society in general.
I don't think anyone would make a serious argument that a property owner should simply be able to store large amounts of fuel and explosives in the middle of town without taking any precautions to avoid accidental explosions that would harm peoples lives.
But the problem that i often see is that the restrictions and responsibilities grow and grow and grow, until they are entirely disconnected with the goals of public protection of life and property.
No, there is no legitimate reason for zoning. No, there is no legitimate reason to prevent or enforce resource collection. No, there is no legitimate reason to mandate specific color to be used when painting a building, or that said building follows any specific design requirements or safety requirements.
There are certainly certain requirements that should be enforced in order to protect other quiet enjoyment of their own land. For example, it makes perfect sense that noise levels be set, or emissions standards be set and that property owners should be responsible for ensuring that their property is not throwing out noise or emissions onto the commons and other properties above said standards.
That's perfectly legitimate.
But enforcing how those owners adhere to those standards is not.
> No, there is no legitimate reason for zoning. No, there is no legitimate reason to prevent or enforce resource collection. No, there is no legitimate reason to mandate specific color to be used when painting a building, or that said building follows any specific design requirements or safety requirements.
You've established that you draw the line at "store large amounts of fuel and explosives", but this would allow me to buy a house in a quiet neighbourhood, tear it down and build an auto shop, a 24/7 manufacturing facility or a night club.
A purely private system could be imagined where individuals could seek redress for damages.
The private property argument generally doesn't give an owner the right to interfere with another property owner's use of property. Private courts and contract law are often promoted as part of this argument. Even within the public law system there are noise ordinances.
One difference might be where a manufacturing facility is causing quantifiable damages in the form of pollution, yet a public regulator such as the EPA determines that the pollution is within their guidelines. In this case the property owner may have little or no recourse against the pollution. Another case could be the state building an interstate highway through a neighborhood, causing pollution and diminishing the quality of life for residents.
> this would allow me to buy a house in a quiet neighbourhood, tear it down and build an auto shop, a 24/7 manufacturing facility or a night club.
And that's just fine.
If they are causing noise above the standard, or causing emissions, then then should surely be brought to answer for that. But if they take precautions to ensure noise levels aren't above the standard (which should be the same everywhere), there is no problem at all to build a nightclub there.
Simply allowing private citizens to bring forth any charges that the police is allowed to bring forth would suffice.
If a police officer can issue a ticket for making too much noise, or bring someone to court for polluting too much there is no reason why any other citizen should be prohibited from doing the same on the exact same terms.
> Unfortunately, like with many things, people are often jealous and unhappy about letting others do as they like with their own things. This should always be called out for the immoral greed that it is.
Ah yes, the classic "calling people out for immoral greed is the real immoral greed"
This is like if I bought all the vegetables in the world and decided to bury them at a secret location. Well of course, if you didn't like that, it's not because your entire family is starving to death, it would be because you were the one being greedy and immoral, and you should mind your own business.
You're not arguing against authoritarianism, you're actually saying it's good, you're mostly just defining who the authoritarians should be.
Societies decide what they deem "legitimate reason", so you can like or dislike it - if you cannot get enough people on your side, unlikely to matter.
And no, sitting on a resource and not using it is - at least in edge cases - not ok. Leaving other people to die because you refuse to extract something life saving on your property might push the bounds of propriety, for example.
The property rights issue at question here is if the owner should be able to preferentially sell or or lease it to uses it aligns with, and not to the highest bidder.
E. G. If you have a plot in the city and want to lease it to an interest you agree with.
Private citizens and corporations can absolutely do this, provided they're not discriminating against a protected class. A covenant or warranty on a deed are some ways of doing this, but you can also just not sell.
I think a bigger question in this instance is whether the government should be making these types of pseudo-moral decisions or if they should be bound by more restrictions than the average citizen/corporation.
Typically yes, but isn't the issue here that they purchased natural resource extraction rights as well? Those explicitly disappear after a certain amount of time if they're not used.
This is actually really common with natural resource extraction rights (not just in the US) - use them or lose it.
What is a bit surprising is that the same problems that show up with land use/housing, i.e. someone just sitting on a valuable resource, not using it, and watching prices go up is not considered an issue here. We cannot just allow all resources to be owned by organizations or people with no willingness to use them. So this is not something super simple to solve in the bigger scheme of things.
While I love and support open spaces and natural habitat, at some point, the trend to buy up property and put it into permanent conservation results in only the wealthy being able to afford the remaining housing amid the beautiful, quiet greenery.
In California they don’t bother to buy it up. They just get public policy implemented so that the owners can’t use it for anything. I would be over the moon if conservation interests were limited to land they owned.
If you want to live amid beautiful quiet greenery, what else are you supposed to do?
Yes, it costs more money to live there, because it's more desirable and of limited supply. You can't really buy enough homes and lots to form a 10 acre plot and smash all but one of the homes and replant the greenery, or if you could, it's not cost or time effective vs buying a 10 acre plot that's already greenery or if that's not available, buying a small plot surrounded or at least adjacent to a conservation limited plot.
> We cannot just allow all resources to be owned by organizations or people with no willingness to use them.
Should we allow people to use resources really, really slowly? Like can you buy natural gas wells and instead of capping them (an expensive operation required by regulation when you're done) just extract a tiny amount of gas? The story in https://www.bloomberg.com/features/diversified-energy-natura... was fascinating because it's not clear that that company has done anything illegal, just found a very profitable niche.
It would probably end up looking like western Texas, where resource companies go through and buy the mineral rights from the property owners. It's rare to find a plot of land where you actually own anything you dig out of the ground anymore.
Kind of like Yosemite is a bit of a nature theme park, with hippy tent city. I was trying to take a photo a of a deer and lined up two other photographers in line. One shot, 3 kills.
No I don't, it was a few years back. And my cousin paid for the campsite. How much? I live in Canada, and its like $55 here, add in firewood, and its almost like staying in a hotel.
I'm actually kind of outraged by this, because I think it puts extended campaign out of reach of many poorer inner city families. In a country filled with nature! Even Soviet Russia tried to make this affordable for its poorest citizens. Forget about Russian dacha equivalent cottage in Canada. It will set you back a few hundred thousand dollars, need permits, minimum size, zoning and yearly taxes. It's mad.
US$26-US$36 a night at present (which, to be fair, is actually cheaper than I thought; I was there a couple of months ago but camped outside the park). Still not really hippy territory in my mind.
Also, the BLM and other leasing organizations use these leases as a way to incentivize develompent in rural areas. Everyone involved has a strong incentive to ensure that leases are actually used for something.
As an aside, here's a paper [1] that summarizes the tax revenue that individual states receive from oil and gas production. Any longterm solution to oil and gas production needs to seriously address how these tax bases (especially in rural areas) stay stable or grow with decreasing oil and gas production. Otherwise you should expect increased resistance to decarbonization as people literally see their schools close, roads deteriorate, etc.
[1] https://media.rff.org/documents/RFF-DP-16-50.pdf