A Guy Named Craig May Soon Have Control over a Large Swath of Utah
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
The Federal Government, as you can imagine, controls vast amounts of mineral acreage and the nomination process is how these plots of mineral rights are brought up to auction. The auctions used to be done in person, but now they are done online at www.energynet.com.
Federal Oil and Gas leases are all standardized. Like the article states, the term is for 10 years. You pay an initial bonus consideration payment up front (whose price is determined by auction), and then afterwards you pay an annual rental payment. Any production on a Federal lease is subject to a 12.5% royalty rate, which generally is very cheap compared to a lease from a private mineral owner.
The article doesn't make the distinction very clear, but this is for the leasing of the mineral rights only; surface rights are separate and distinct and might not even be owned by the Federal Government. If a well was to be drilled, there would be a separate surface use agreement between the oil and gas company and the surface owner.
If anyone has any questions about the general process of Federal leasing I can try to answer them as best as I can!
EDIT: As the article and some Google searching shows, apparently the BLM can deny a lease on the basis of lack of intent to drill (or at least they are trying). I did not know this was something they could attempt and I stand (potentially) corrected. A major effort to raise money to tie up Federal minerals would likely create enough noise to where the BLM might try to deny leases.
It doesn't seem like it would be difficult (for the right person) to 1) create a non-profit 2) collect donations designated for the preservation of land 3) bid on key parcels, or even just strategic parcels. Imagine a 10,000 acre parcel where every other acre is owned by a non-profit (if it works that way).
> Why do we have to do everything?
Custom-printed decks of cards are insanely cheap. You should take your idea and run with it!
The vast majority of my mining/drilling knowledge comes from There Will Be Blood, which if (big if) is accurate would mean this plan wouldn't work.
If some person with actual knowledge said this was a valid strategy I'd certainly be willing to donate though.
This starts to get complicated and varies state to state. You don't have to (and often won't) control 100% of the minerals under a well you want to drill. Sometimes you will have partner companies (hostile or friendly), mineral rights owners who refuse to lease, or mineral rights whose ownership is undetermined. So just because a non-profit had a chunk of minerals tied up, a company could petition to the State's board of oil and gas to have the non-participant "forced-pooled" and the well could be drilled. This process involves hearings, oil and gas attorneys, and your typical bureaucratic processes. That said, if the non-profit owned a large enough interest it could very well force the economics of the potential well into unprofitable zones, despite the fact the oil and gas company could force a well.
That seems to be up for debate as the article discusses people who did exactly this and had their lease denied.
Another way of simply buying more environmental protection from the federal government is to purchase SO2 allowances at auction. The US government runs a “cap and trade” system for sulphur dioxide emissions where prospective SO2 emitters have to buy allowances at auction for the tonnage of SO2 they will emit. Environmentalists frequently buy a chunk of allowances and refuse to resell them, reducing emissions even more while raising costs for polluters.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London
"The case arose in the context of condemnation by the city of New London, Connecticut, of privately owned real property, so that it could be used as part of a "comprehensive redevelopment plan." However, the private developer was unable to obtain financing and abandoned the redevelopment project, leaving the land as an _undeveloped empty lot._"
The price was very low but I decided against that headache.
I only have experience in the Western states, but this it is very frequent to find the the mineral rights have been long severed from the surface rights. Typically it is when the original patentee of the tract sells the surface they end up reserving the mineral rights.
Regardless of how you feel about that, you could make a point that the BLM and ONRR (Office of Natural Resources and Revenue, the department of the Feds who collects revenue from hydrocarbon production) have a fiduciary duty to seek the highest revenue from the mineral rights they own. Canceling leases which will never be drilled would follow this goal.
Now, any environmental damage being more than the revenue derived in the end is another point altogether...
The author of this ad “is a founder of the grassroots climate campaign”, doesn’t even mention the size of this “large swath”, so I’m left to wonder if it is even similar in size to the 1,100 acre example he gives, which itself would be 0.002% of Utah; that’s not a large swath. I have multiple friends with larger farms than this in a single town.
If I stake a claim to pan for gold in Montana, I wonder if he will write an article about me.
However, why should the Federal government get this land at all? We used to have allodial title many years ago...but then it became common-law precedent that we effectively "rent" our land from the government and pay perpetual property taxes for that right.
The lack of allodial title is what ultimately creates an inescapable "head tax" on every citizen.
sigh Such a shame that the author decided to use deceptive tactics which really water down what the message should be: that the government should preserve the land and not sell mineral rights unless there's a very compelling reason. I mean, here I am defending the government when I agree with the overall sentiment that nature should be preserved!
Reading the article, it seems more like an oil & gas company is purchasing (EDIT: leasing) some land in Utah, and the article doesn't even make it clear how much (unless I missed it).
How is this really different from what we already know? There's a lot of cheap land out there, the country is big, and the federal government makes various kinds of deals with people who want to develop it. The article says that it's $2 an acre, which sounds like little, but it doesn't provide a point of comparison.
I actually didn't know that public land could pass into private ownership so easily.
As it says in the article: "The law itself is the crime — a gift to the oil and gas businesses."
This all sounds pretty routine; "a feature, not a bug", designed to promote economic development and be accommodating in general.
If you don't like development in general, or Oil & Gas development in particular, you won't be happy with this arrangement. But I would think there would be more outrageous examples than this one.
Whether humanity ought to recreate in these areas or not is another question (we are currently experiencing numerous wildfires in Arizona and the Southwest in general). But it’s not necessarily a clear case of destroying the land permanently. Rain alters land permanently as well, but few are motivated to stop that process on this type of land.
And please look up the Converse Basic Grove of Sequoias. The whole place was destroyed to make fence posts. Oh, my bad I suppose "lease" is the current euphemism for destroying the land like that. But hey! cutting down all those giant sequoias improved the recreation opportunities, right?
That's an extreme example but any natural resource extraction irreparably damages land. Even grazing or roads have significant impacts that take hundreds or thousands of years to recover.
Roads dramatically change the landscape and cause huge impacts. And the roads usually serve some purpose, i.e. more damaging activities. Crisscrossing the landscape with roads has a huge impact on the land and does not enhance the recreational opportunities other than the ability to take instagram pics from your car.
Unless there is some sort of a spill there, the land is most certainly not “fundamentally and permanently” altered.
If the goal is to equalize the amount of land owned by the federal government in each state, why not do the opposite and have the government gain control of more land in the east?
Outside of monuments and parks most of the land the gov owns in western states is undesirable. You can already buy very cheap land in the middle of nowhere UT, NM, NV, and AZ. The market for off grid desert land with no water is small.
Now what we should have done over the last twenty years is just buy Canada. It works have only cost a few trillion dollars (non-urban areas only) and would have radically expanded federal holdings.
Examples include cattle overgrazing on BLM land, fracking on leased land, military activities (the worst offender of them all) and really any mineral/oil/gas/water exploitation in which the user has no incentive to keep the land in good quality (e.g. maintaining a resale value).
It's counterintuitive, but unless you make it all a National Park, pretty much every other government land use will cause more harm than privatization.
Mining gold on federal lands seems to go through a different (and easier) process (involving staking a mining claim as opposed to nominating land and then bidding on it in an auction): https://www.blm.gov/programs/energy-and-minerals/mining-and-...
Airlines may have to reduce passenger capacity to maintain social distancing rules (legal or just customer demand), potentially increasing the total number of flights along various routes. And more people will probably be traveling by car than by air for domestic/regional travel, which (in aggregate) would be less fuel efficient than mass transit.
You might be right. But based on the information in the article, it might also be true that tourists don't ever notice that any of this happened.
But basically, almost nobody is willing to even go to this land even if they did own it. Even environmental charities would probably set their sights elsewhere: jungles and waterways are almost certainly more environmentally significant.
But it's especially not a problem here because desert land in America is extremely plentiful and unwanted. It's effectively an unlimited resource. Do you know of any native Americans who want to use some remote desert but can't because they don't own it? Give them $2 to lease some. The government won't use it any more than they're already not using it so it's no use in their hands. They've already blasted big areas of desert with nuclear bombs and left it permanently radioactive so it's not even clear that the government is a good steward of land anyway.
No, that’s not at all what this process does. It provides limited mineral rights for the land. That is all. No surface rights and definitely not exclusive rights to the land.
https://bwab.com/surface-rights-vs-mineral-rights-whats-the-...
It often turns out to be more complicated, because most of the land in the United States is stolen land. In the Hawaiian Kingdom, King Kamehameha III "invented" private property because the kingdom was starting to open up to the global world and he wanted to make sure the lands which the people occupied could not be stolen by way of foreign military invasion. Which is impressive considering that a foreign military invasion did indeed come, and those lands could not legally be seized by the invading forces. The land would need to be stolen by other means. Up until then, land was not property it was a responsibility, to the family, the community, and by extension, the nation as a whole. Land could not be owned, only stewarded. Land could not be sold for profit. A friend of mine put it nicely, he said that, to him, the buying and selling of land is like prostituting a family member, who is also an elder.
It just doesnt make sense, so try not to think about it. You get too many people thinking about it at the same time, the whole system is liable to fall apart.
I think you are confusing Larson with Terry Tempest Williams, who is mentioned later in the article as trying to lease land in order to prevent it from being leased by oil and gas companies. The article doesn't suggest that Williams and her husband plan to bid on rights in the upcoming auction, so it seems likely that Larson (or another oil and gas company) will win that auction.
(I should say it means he means to bid on at least some of it. I could see wanting to bid on something specific, and nominating much more than that, so that anybody who wants to swipe the piece you're interested in doesn't know which piece to bid on.)
Yes. That's precisely my mistake. Thanks for the correction.