The U.S. Bureau of Land Management is being accused of focusing on oil drilling and ignoring the affect such drilling might have on wildlife.
Some of the bureau's biologists say the agency routinely restricts monitoring of damage to wildlife caused by energy drilling on federal land, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.
The Government Accountability Office -- the investigative arm of Congress -- issued a report last year, finding BLM managers order field staff to devote increasing amounts of time to processing drilling permits, allowing less time to investigate the environmental impact of oil and gas drilling.
"It has become almost a cultural practice in the BLM to spend money that is appropriated for one purpose, for whatever purpose somebody deems is a higher priority," a senior BLM official told the Post on condition of anonymity.
The BLM's pace of issuing drilling permits in the western United States has, in some areas, increased six-fold in recent years, the newspaper reported. In the past two years, the BLM issued a record 13,070 drilling permits on federal lands.
Copyright 2006 by United Press International
Related stories:
Reduce carbon footprint or find more energy sources? Americans want to do both, poll finds
(PhysOrg.com) -- With gas prices topping $4 a gallon and the prospect of record-high heating costs this winter, Americans say they're driving less and cutting their electricity use to save money and improve the environment.
500,000 years of climate history stored year by year
The bottom of Turkey’s Lake Van is covered by a layer of mud several hundreds of metres deep. For climatologists this unprepossessing slime is worth its weight in gold: summer by summer pollen has been deposited from times long past. From it they can detect right down to a specific year what climatic conditions prevailed at the time of the Neanderthals, for example.
Uranium mining prospect worries neighbors
A company wanting to mine for uranium in south Texas said a strike would be an alternative fuel dream while opponents said it's an environmental nightmare.
Polar Expedition to Siberian Lake will Yield Details of Past Climate
An international team of scientists led by Julie Brigham-Grette of the University of Massachusetts Amherst has received $3.2 million from the National Science Foundation to fund an expedition to a polar lake in Siberia, which should yield data that will provide the most detailed record of past Arctic climate to date.
RV Polarstern on its way to East Siberian Sea
Bremerhaven, August 19th 2008. German research vessel Polarstern, operated by the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association, transits the Northwest Passage for the first time. Polarstern left the port of Reykjavik on August 12th, sailed around Greenland on a southern course and is located right in the Northwest Passage. Its destination is the East Siberian Sea where geoscientific measurements at the junction between the Mendeleev Ridge and the East Siberian Shelf are at the focus of the participants of this expedition. The measurements striven for in the framework of the International Polar Year shall help to understand how the undersea ridges and basins were built. This expedition takes the researchers in 68 days around the North Pole because the return voyage is to lead via the Northeast Passage.
Probing Question: Is peak oil a myth?
Unprecedented summer gasoline prices are squeezing Americans' wallets and also expanding their vocabularies, as terms like "peak oil" gain common usage.
X-rays use diamonds as a window to the center of the Earth
Diamonds from Brazil have provided the answers to a question that Earth scientists have been trying to understand for many years: how is oceanic crust that has been subducted deep into the Earth recycled back into volcanic rocks?
Patagonian glacier yields clues for improved understanding of global climate change
Although ice cores obtained from Antarctica have now provided more than 800 000 years’ worth of climate records, analysis of them alone is insufficient for understanding the history of climatic interactions between the diverse regions of the world. Boreholes drilled during the 1990s on six glaciers in the tropical zone of the Andean Cordillera gave rise to a substantial collection of data on the changes and developments of the tropical climate of the Southern Hemisphere.