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Drilling the Climate: Colorado Oil and Gas Auction to Fuel Global Warming, BLM Ignoring its Responsibility to Protect Colorado’s Climate
Drilling the Climate: Colorado Oil and Gas Auction to Fuel Global Warming, BLM Ignoring its Responsibility to Protect Colorado’s Climate
A coalition of local, regional, and national citizens groups today challenged the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s decision to open up more than 174,000 acres of Colorado to oil and gas drilling without taking action to protect Colorado’s climate.
In his 2007 Climate Action Plan, Colorado Governor Ritter reported that climate change will lead to prolonged heat waves, more air pollution, snow-starved winters, deeper droughts, more wildfires, widespread beetle infestations wiping out forests, and the spread of West Nile virus. Similarly, an August 2007 report by the Government Accountability Office found that federal land and water resources managed by the Bureau of Land Management are highly vulnerable to a wide range of climate change impacts, many of which are already occurring. Simply put, climate change is a major threat to Colorado and the Rocky Mountains.
Click here to read the full press release and view WELC's protest of the BLM decision and related documents.
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"Without WELC's focused analysis and wise guidance, we would not have achieved this great Valle Vidal victory."
Jim O'Donnell, Coalition for the Valle Vidal
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On behalf of the Gros Ventre and Assiniboine Tribes of the
Fort Belknap Indian Community in northeastern Montana, WELC attorneys sued the
Bureau of Land Management and several other federal agencies for permitting the
development and expansion of two cyanide gold mines in the Little Rocky
Mountains, which are located directly adjacent to and upstream from the Fort
Belknap Reservation. The mines are the largest of their kind in the
world, and have caused environmental devastation to Tribal cultural and water
resources. Mining operations have diverted flows from the Little Rocky
Mountains away from the Reservation, generated waste, and polluted watersheds
in the mountains, including those running onto the Reservation. The mines
have also leached, and continue to leach, acid rock drainage – an acidic brew
of heavy metals – into surface and groundwaters hydrologically connected to the
Reservation. The Tribes’ cultural and spiritual use of the mountains have
also been severely eroded – for example, Spirit
Mountain, once the core of Tribal
religious practices in the mountains, is now an open mining pit. We went all the way to the Supreme Court with this difficult case and are now strategizing for the future with the Tribes.
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