{"id":31873,"date":"2018-03-03T09:43:42","date_gmt":"2018-03-03T14:43:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=31873"},"modified":"2018-03-03T09:43:42","modified_gmt":"2018-03-03T14:43:42","slug":"drilling-and-mining-interests-pushed-to-shrink-utah-national-monuments-documents-reveal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=31873","title":{"rendered":"Drilling and Mining Interests Pushed to Shrink Utah National Monuments, Documents Reveal"},"content":{"rendered":"

Drilling and Mining Interests Pushed to Shrink Utah National Monuments, Documents Reveal<\/a><\/h3>\n
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Even though Interior Secretary\u00a0Ryan Zinke<\/a>\u00a0insisted \u201cthis is not about energy,\u201d environmentalists and public lands advocates have long suspected the\u00a0Trump<\/a>\u00a0administration’s cuts to\u00a0national monuments<\/a>\u00a0were driven by its push for more drilling, mining and other\u00a0development.<\/p>\n

Now, internal Interior Department documents obtained by the\u00a0New York Times<\/a>\u00a0show that gaining access to the\u00a0oil<\/a>,\u00a0natural gas<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0uranium<\/a>\u00a0deposits in\u00a0Bears Ears<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0coal<\/a>\u00a0reserves in\u00a0Grand Staircase-Escalante<\/a>\u00a0were indeed key reasons behind President Trump’s\u00a0drastic cuts<\/a>\u00a0to the two monuments in\u00a0Utah.<\/p>\n

In March 2017, an aide to Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) asked a senior Interior Department official to consider reduced boundaries for Bears Ears to remove land that contained oil and natural gas deposits. Hatch’s office sent a map depicting a boundary change for the southeast portion of the Bears Ears monument to \u201cresolve all known mineral conflicts,\u201d\u00a0the email said, referring to oil and gas sites<\/a>\u00a0on the land that the state’s public schools wanted to lease out to increase state\u00a0funds.<\/p>\n

As the Times reported, the map that Hatch’s office provided\u2014and notably sent about a month before Sec. Zinke publicly initiated his review of national monuments in April\u2014was incorporated almost exactly into the much larger reductions President Trump would later\u00a0announce.<\/p>\n

In December<\/a>, despite\u00a0widespread public support<\/a>\u00a0to preserve protections for\u00a0public lands<\/a>, Trump announced he was gutting the 1.35 million-acre Bears Ears to only 201,397 acres and the 1.87 million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante to just 997,490 acres. The move was the largest elimination of protected areas in U.S.<\/span>\u00a0history.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Drilling and Mining Interests Pushed to Shrink Utah National Monuments, Documents Reveal Even though Interior Secretary\u00a0Ryan Zinke\u00a0insisted \u201cthis is not about energy,\u201d environmentalists and public lands advocates have long suspected the\u00a0Trump\u00a0administration’s cuts to\u00a0national monuments\u00a0were driven by its push for more drilling, mining and other\u00a0development. Now, internal Interior Department documents obtained by the\u00a0New York Times\u00a0show that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[5317,1419,8375,12507,1482,1921,17895,14654],"class_list":["post-31873","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-desmog-blog","tag-drilling","tag-ecowatch","tag-lorraine-chow","tag-mining","tag-new-york-times","tag-ryan-zinke","tag-utah"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31873","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31873"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31873\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31874,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31873\/revisions\/31874"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31873"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}