WASHINGTON, April 9 (UPI) -- On Tuesday Interior Secretary Gale Norton sat down with several United Press International editors for a Newsmakers Breakfast. The following is a transcript of the questions, and her responses on drilling the Alaska National Wildlife Reserve, on the environment and on other issues covered by the Interior Department:
Q. It seems to me, despite all his firm resolve, President Bush mentioned it again last night in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, that the president might give up (drilling in the) Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to get a total energy bill. What are the chances of that?
A. The president has been, as you noted, very firm on this issue. Given the current situation, it certainly is important to look at all the opportunities for diversifying our energy supply. ANWR is our largest untapped source of oil in this country as far as we know, and therefore it makes sense to have that as part of an energy package. The president has been consistent in saying that.
Q. We covered in Crawford, Texas -- and we're going to go again to Moscow -- do you have an instinct in the back of your head that we could make a deal with the Russians to augment -- now it won't be within our continental United States -- but it would be a reserve that we would no be dependent on the Middle East (for oil)? Is that close to fruition? If we wanted their oil to offset our end production and difficulties here, can they really ring in and deliver it to us?
A. That's something that, frankly, when it comes to international issues, especially in today's climate, I don't think I ought to be focusing on.
Q. So you're worrying about ANWR?
A. I'm worrying about ANWR. I'll also say that I am not following those negotiations.
Q. Do you think it is best to have a vote, is it necessary to have a vote in the Senate? In other words, frankly, in the Senate it sounds like they're saying 'Maybe its better not to have a vote if we're going to lose on ANWR' and then perhaps address it later in conference or something.
A. Obviously, since it was in the House bill it is teed up to get into the conference committee. It's primarily an issue for the Senators themselves to determine whether there should be a vote in the Senate or not.
Obviously Sen. Daschle set things up by avoiding the committee process to require a 60-vote majority to have ANWR passed by the Senate. Had he not detoured around the committee, we would have had a fair vote with the majority making the decision.
Q. Do you think the administration has done enough on the conservation side to justify the effort to get more on the production side?
A. I certainly think so. In the president's energy plan, over half of the recommendations deal with renewable energy alternatives, energy sources, conservation and environmental protection. From the Department of the Interior perspective, we held the first conference ever on renewable sources from public lands; brought in the people who are actively involved in that to talk about what we can do to enhance wind, solar, geothermal, biomass energy production from public lands.
In the most recent budget proposal, we increased the amount of funding for those sources; we doubled the amount that would go into wind and geothermal processing of applications for public lands. We've been working with the Indian tribes -- many of them are interested in wind energy, especially from their lands. We've been working on things like that in the Department of the Interior jurisdiction.
Obviously the technology issues, like the EnergyStar program on appliances that use less energy, the hybrid and fuel cell vehicles and so forth -- those are in EPA and the Department of Energy and they are certainly working on those things.
Q. From a perception point of view, groups are saying they don't feel they've been heard -- conservationists -- as much as producers.
A. I find that fascinating because we, for example with this conference, invited everyone in. We had participation from environmental activists in support of renewable energies as well as from the renewable energy companies themselves. When I was in office early on, I spent a considerable amount of time meeting with environmental groups. I certainly have had discussions to invite them into our consideration.
We have spent a lot of time talking about the diversified sources of energy and on the energy demand side -- both supply and demand. That's why the task we set for ourselves was to come up with a comprehensive (energy plan) considering both supply and demand.
Q. Many of the critics of the energy plan -- the one that was assembled by Vice President Cheney's task force -- felt that they were treated sort of like an afterthought. You say that's not the case.
A. No, I certainly do not think that's the case. We were looking at the conservation issues; we looked at ways to try to use high technology... Most of our work was really done, from the Department of the Interior perspective, drawing on the knowledge of the career people within the department. We tried to look at a very broad array of issues.
Q. I'm going to refer to a story that appeared in a Sunday newspaper with which I am sure you are familiar. It says: "Warning on drilling reversed -- US quickly revises Arctic caribou study."
"One week after a USGS study warned that caribou may be particularly sensitive to oil exploration in ANWR, the agency has completed a quick follow-up report suggesting that the most likely drilling scenarios under consideration should have no impact on caribou.
"The new two-page report was written by the same scientists who led the original caribou study. The new report, commissioned by Interior Secretary Gail E. Norton almost immediately after the initial report came out, bolsters the Bush administration's case."
This is the second, or I believe the third time where a report has come out, where a media report has come out, about an Interior report that has been changed to suit the policy of the administration. If these reports are correct, how can this process have any credibility with Congress or the public?
A. Because those reports are not correct. Let me explain on the most recent report, first of all.
What the USGS scientists did was come up with a model for determining the impact on caribou. It is essentially a computer model. You take some assumptions and ask it to analyze a particular scenario. You can do thousands of different scenarios. You put that information in and then it does the analysis and you get the impact at the end of the process. It says, "Assume that there are 10,000 acres impacted by development and they are in these areas." The numbers get run through and it comes out with a result at the end saying, "This is going to be the impact on caribou populations."
That model never changed. That model has been peer reviewed and that was the core of the report. But the model when they analyzed it, the scenario they talked about primarily was the one that was in the 1987 legislative environmental impact statement on ANWR. That assumed there would be permanent roads; it assumed a jet airliner airport; it assumed a number of things that are not at all what we are talking about today.
The information we have today, first of all, is that development by law would be limited to 2,000 acres of surface impact. From the USGS's own studies of where the oil is located, that is in the western portion of the 1002 areas, so the area that is closest to the existing Trans-Alaska pipeline and Prudhome Bay development. When you take the most likely development scenario today and you plug that in, the result you get is that the impact -- they have a range of potential impacts and it includes 'no impact' as part of the range. So it's either a small impact or no impact on the caribou.
Related to that is the issue of where the core calving area is. Early on, we brought together all the career scientists from USGS and the Fish and Wildlife Service and so forth who had knowledge about it and said, "Put together what you all think is the factual information base on which we ought to be looking at the impacts on ANWR."
So the USGS minerals people put together their information about where they thought the oil was. The USGS and Fish and Wildlife Service biologists put together their maps on the core calving areas. That information was put together into a slide show, basically, and we put that onto our Web site.
That was basically the data from the career scientists, from studies that have been done during the previous administration and before. One of the things that was on there was the map of where the core calving (spelling) areas are.
When we were writing a letter to Sen. Murkowski (Sen. Frank Murkowski, R-Alaska) describing the core calving areas he asked us about where those were. We said, and I don't remember exactly what the sentence was, but basically we said that it was in 11 out of the last 20 years, it was inside the 1002 area instead of outside the 1002 area -- or outside instead of inside. Anyway, we got outside and inside mixed up. We had the maps on our Web site, it was talking about the maps that were on the Web site -- in writing a letter to Sen. Murkowski a mistake was made in terms of saying inside and outside and the mistake was one that made it more favorable toward the oil development.
We had the accurate information on the Web site, so it wasn't like we were trying to cover anything up. We did make a mistake in terms of the letter to Sen. Murkowski, but we are still talking about it today.
Q. Among the early criticism of the drilling in ANWR, which I never really heard an answer for this, was that all of the oil produced by that drilling would be headed for Japan -- simply because it is much simpler logistically to ship it to Japan than to the United States. Is that true that if we do produce a great deal of oil, that most of it will be headed to Japan?
A. As a matter of fact, you don't hear much about that because in the House bill a provision was inserted saying that that oil could not be exported. It has to come to the United States. In actuality, it is my understanding that all of the North Slope production today, even though there is not a restriction on it, is all going to the lower 48 (states).
Q. The Department of Interior has received some criticism in the last couple of weeks because you produced a videotape that shows what the 2,000 acres in question look like. Why did you do that and do you think your opponents are being -- by implication -- disingenuous about the nature of what ANWR is like and what the impact is?
A. I've visited ANWR twice, both in the winter and in the summer. The 1002 area is called the coastal plain because that's exactly what it is: it is a plain. The pictures that you see on some of the television ads and are always being run -- I'll be doing an interview about ANWR and when you are being filmed you don't get to see the pictures that they're superimposing as you're talking -- and I would find out later that they were showing these beautiful mountains and trees and so forth as we're talking.
The 1002 area has no trees and it is basically flat. The issue is one that I had fairly much ignored and just assumed, "Well, it would be nice if people had accurate information but that's just not... it's hard to come by in this kind of situation."
And then I started seeing these ads on TV that were from the opponents of ANWR that were absolutely showing these gorgeous pictures of the Brooks Range including trees. And that's just not the area we're talking about.
That area, and I think that what they did was go to the southern part of ANWR, into areas that are wilderness, areas that we're not discussing for the exploration, and take pictures of that because it's a whole lot more attractive then the area we're actually talking about.
It seems to me that if we are going to start making that an issue and showing these TV ads of this beautiful area, people ought to know that is not the area we're talking about.
We got this film clip of what the 1002 area really looks like -- which is flat -- and sent that around to some of the major TV stations. We wanted to make sure that the TV stations would have some accurate footage if they wanted to use it to show what we are actually talking about.
Q. Why do you think that the visual that they are using doesn't match? Do you think it is disingenuous or is it sort of a difference of opinion that the administration says 1002 is the flat area and that's it and they're arguing well in fact you can't do anything in ANWR that isn't going to effect the whole thing? Is it deliberately misleading or is it a question of interpretation?
A. I've never heard anybody make the argument that the drilling is going to have any direct impact on the areas where the mountains are...
Q. But they have disputed though -- haven't they -- your footprint. Your entire footprint is disputed...
A. No they...
Q. For example, your access roads have to go through some of those forests...
A. No, no...
Q. ... you can't get in there with out that.
A. Absolutely not.
Q. Well, then maybe the maps they are giving out are totally, but this is the Senate Energy Committee ...finds the footprint - they dispute your footprint in several ways, the depth of the drilling, some other things that are not germane.
A. The footprint, basically, and we've been consistent on this but some people have not understood what we are talking about, the footprint issue is basically the amount of area that would actually be the footprint of development.
If you look at the Alpine facility, which is a facility that is on state-owned lands that came on line in the year 2000, that the new technology that we envision would be the type of thing be used in ANWR.
That accesses an area extending underground for several miles in each direction -- now they're talking about three miles is pretty routine, four miles, they're getting up to and surpassing four miles from the production platform as the length of the horizontal drilling. I think right now 28,000 feet is about their furthest in that area.
The total surface acreage for that facility is, I think 97 acres, less than 100 acres. You would have facilities like that that would be self-contained units that basically (would) be connected by ice roads; not permanent roads, not gravel roads, just ice roads that are not there in the summer time. In the summer time the only access is by air. For that facility, you would count 100 acres as its footprint. You could have 20 of those facilities, hypothetically, although you're also going to have to have some of the pipeline facilities and things like that so you don't actually end up with that many.
So all of that that is a footprint would be considered.
In terms of the area where those impacts would be, because the equipment is basically barged in and you use an ice road to get it to the facility, there's not a permanent road there, other stuff is just helicoptered in. The area where it looks like the oil is most likely to be is closest to the existing terminus of the Trans-Alaska pipeline, it's about 30 miles from the closest existing facility, so you have a pipeline that narrows the impact.
Q. through that 30 miles?
A. Right.
Q. And none of that goes through forestland, from your understanding of this?
A. Right. It's just treeless on the North Slope.
Q. But if you have 20 100-acre plots scattered over various places, don't you have to connect them by pipeline somewhere?
A. You would have to have a pipeline that connects them to the end of the Trans-Alaskan pipeline. You would, I presume, have feeder pipelines into a major pipeline.
Q. Doesn't that sort of expand the footprint a bit?
A. Yes, you would have to count the bases for the pipeline as part of that footprint.
Q. Do you think when you're done with your job at Interior, will the federal lands under your control be in as good or better environmental condition or is that not necessarily your job description?
A. It is my job description, taking care of our lands. I think they will be in better shape. We're doing some things that we have not done in the past to build partnerships in support of our public lands. We have a program that is part of the president's 2003 budget that is called the Cooperative Conservation Initiative. It is $100 million, half available to states and half to our public lands managers: The Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service and National Park Service.
It is on a competitive basis and what the people applying for one of these grants need to do is build partnerships for conservation projects on our lands. For example, if there is a watershed area that today has erosion, it has cattle grazing in it that are trampling the growth along the river front, we would pay a part of it that would have to be matched at least half again with private and state contributions but hopefully multiply that many times over, to enhance the habitat, to put in fences to keep the cattle away, to provide the cattle with an alternative water supply, to restore the riparion habitats, to put in some wetlands and things like to enhance the quality of that public lands area.
We also have a program that is now coming on line that was approved in the last budget cycle that does something similar in terms of habitat for endangered species on private land. This is a landowner incentive program to again provide things like fencing or watershed restoration or invasive species control so that invasive species are not crowding out the native endangered species, those kinds of things on private lands so we are enhancing habitat.
Our focus has been on trying to build these kinds of cooperative ventures that take advantage of the fact that people really love their public lands, they enjoy the areas that are around them. People are so enthusiastic about public lands that we have about three times as many volunteers as we have actual employees.
Wherever I go, there are people, pretty often retired people who come in day after day to help us in our refuges and our parks and Boy Scouts troops that come in to help us restore trails or to help us take out excessive fuel loads that lead to fires.
There are all kinds of great things we can do and we're working on those kinds of cooperative things.
Secondly, we have a commitment to reduce the backlog of maintenance in our national parks. The president promised to do that as part of his campaign promises. When I go to the parks -- my husband started joking that we were going on the 'sewer tour' of parks -- we went to Yellowstone and we saw three different sewers systems and heard about another one that were leaking and insufficient and polluting the streams. We're in the process of rebuild those things and quit the pollution problems those are causing.
We're taking care of things that have been neglected for years. It's always a whole lot more popular to say we're going to create a new park than it is to say we're going to take care of what we have. We've been doing a lot to take care of what we have, our historic buildings as well.
When you walk through, the first time through you see these fabulous historic places. When you go back and do the sort of landlord tour that I do now, you say, "Oh, we've got cracks up here and plaster's chipping over here." We're going back and fixing those things, although the campaign promise extended to that as well as science in the parks and enhancing our resource restoration in the parks through what's called the Natural Resource Challenge. We're also extending that now to the wildlife refuge system. The president, in his most recent budget, proposed the largest amount ever for the operations for the wildfire refuge system. That was a $56 million increase for the refuge system to again take better care of what we have. That, I think, is one of our themes -- making sure that we are doing the best job in taking care of those things that have been intrusted to us.
Q. Speaking of wildlife, this year is shaping up to be another year of water shortages. How is your department going to weigh the needs of farmers vs. cities, farmers vs. wildlife -- particularly the salmon -- who are in need of water?
A. The salmon are the one endangered species that, for the most part, we don't deal with. The National Marine Fisheries Service has the salmon that go into the ocean and then they have the marine mammals. They mostly have the ocean jurisdiction, we have the inland jurisdiction.
Technical issue aside, we this yearare looking at those areas that are going to be impacted by drought, which this year is about two-thirds of the United States, and looking at it from the perspective of endangered species, from the perspective of providing water through our bureau of reclamation for the ordinary irrigation needs and other needs, hydropower, and then also from fire danger. In all of those ways, we're trying to plan for the drought situations we see arising.
The area that obviously has been the most visible has been the Klamath River area of Oregon and California. When I first came into office, the scientists in the Fish and Wildlife Service said "In order to protect the endangered species you need to cut off the water for the farmers" and the biologists in the National Marine Fisheries Service were saying the same thing. Ours were the upstream suckers, theirs were the downstream salmon.
We did that. If that's what the scientists say we have to do, we follow the science and that's what we did. We also asked for peer review of the science and the National Academy of Sciences analyzed that information and, earlier this year, came out with their report and said that really wasn't the best science on which that was based.
The science is basically that if you stayed within the range of water availability that existed in the 1990s that is what makes sense so now we're building our assumptions on that information as the National Academy of Sciences established what the appropriate range should be.
Q. Staying on the endangered species, Gov. Bill Owens of Colorado, your home state, has started a program to breed endangered species for reintroduction as a way to get around some of the development roadblocks that occur. He's trumpeting that as a major innovation. Is that something that your department is watching to see if it succeeds with the idea that the federal government may want to some day replicate it?
A. It depends on the species. That works for some species and not for other species. It depends on what is causing the species to be endangered.
If you had a situation like we've had with some of the endangered species and fish in the Colorado River where they are endangered because 30 years ago we had a program to eradicate them, well we did a good job. If the particular type of fish is something that you can breed in a hatchery and release them, it restores the population. It can work in that kind of situation.
Similarly with the ferrets that were endangered that fed on prairie dogs, we had a captive breeding program that brought them back and they are now being re-released.
Condors is a great example of the captive breeding program accomplishing salvation of the species that keeping them in the wild would not have. We still have a long ways to go but we have made tremendous progress,
There are other species where the problem is that the habitat itself is being destroyed. You can breed them in captivity and release them and there is still no habitat so they're not going to make it on their own. There, you really have to focus on restoring and protecting the habitat. It just depends on what the situation is for each individual species.
Q. Many Republican voters vote Republican because they think, like presumably the farmers in the Klamath River valley, that they're more important than endangered species. Their livelihood is on the line too. Before the science looked dubious you had a direct choice there. What do you say to them when they say, "Endangered species are valuable but we're an endangered species in this case because we live here, this is our habitat and all of a sudden we are told that something which is essential to our economic livelihood is being cut off?"
A. That's exactly what we heard from many of the farmers in Klamath. We have to follow the law and, if the endangered species act leads to that result that is what we will enforce. We would like to avoid getting to that situation though by planning ahead.
If you had taken the Klamath River area and, 10 or 15 years ago you had known you were going to face this kind of situation and had started planning ahead, you might have been able to avoid where we were last year. I'm chairing a working group of basically the secretary of Agriculture, the secretary of Commerce, and the head of the Council on Environmental Quality all working together to make sure we try to insulate the Klamath Basin from this kind of situation down the road.
We just announced that there are several areas that are currently irrigated that would become natural or non-irrigated areas. That enhances the water quality and the quantity of water that is in the river, both for fish and potentially available for irrigation; enhancing wetlands so that improves the quality of the water that is coming into the area -- part of the problem is water quantity, part of the problem is water quality. The Department of Agriculture is doing some things to restore the upstream watershed.
Klamath also has issues as to the tribal water rights, so now we're talking with the tribes to work with them to see if there are some ways of clarifying what their water rights are and having some more cooperative arrangements.
There are things you can do if you plan ahead to try to avoid getting to that kind of situation. Another example of that is prairie dogs. In Colorado, prairie dogs are all over the place. There were a colony of them that lived across the street from me in my house in Denver so I am familiar with prairie dogs.
Yet there have been proposals to list them as endangered. The reaction of many farmers to the idea of listing prairie dogs as endangered was to say "I'm just going to go out and eradicate them from my land before they get listed."
That creates exactly the opposite incentive as what you want to have. So by looking at things like this landowner incentive program that provides some economic incentive and some easy ways of enhancing habitat so that you're making land owners more friendly to endangered species, that can avoid some of the problems in the long run as well.
Q. Changing the law is primarily a matter for the legislature, though obviously administrations have a say in this. Isn't one of the problems here that some environmental legislation -- particularly the Endangered Species Act -- is written in an absolutist way so that economic and other considerations are not allowed and you don't have the kind of argument and debate leading to compromise that is the stuff of politics -- but instead you've got a kind of steamroller piece of law in which all other considerations are simply pushed aside? Isn't there a case for revisiting some legislation of that kind?
A. One of the examples of this is the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which is your ducks and geese and other species -- it also includes songbirds -- but for the most part we are talking about species that are hunted. We have a law that says you can set hunting seasons, all these things you can do for hunting, but its prohibited from killing any of these birds outside of the hunting season. You essentially have a situation where, if you are doing a productive activity and it happens to end up killing some geese, then that's a violation of federal law -- but you can go out and shoot them. There is no balancing in the way that, if we were writing it now with decades of experience, that we would write it today.
We are trying to deal with some of those things administratively to help smooth over some of the things that are conflicts in the law. The previous administration, for example back on endangered species, worked on habitat conservation plans and what are called "safe harbor" agreements that are basically ways of trying to work with land owners and other people that are effected by endangered species restrictions, to plan out what you can do to help the species at the same time you go forward with at least some of the activity you were talking about otherwise.
Instead of just saying yes or no, either it affects an endangered species or it doesn't, yes you can go forward, or no you can't -- to try to have more planning process and more agreement to try and find ways of accomplishing both objectives.
Q. You have, as Interior Secretary, jurisdiction over federal relations with American Indian tribes. Your predecessor got into some difficulty over the issue of Indian casinos and other for-profit gaming ventures and the approval process. It is also a political problem for the president -- with Republicans on one side supporting legalized gaming and others opposing all forms of legalized wagering. What does that mean for you in terms of the Indian gaming approval process? Are you thinking about changing the process, issuing a moratorium on new casinos or making other reforms?
A. The Indian Gaming regulatory Act was written essentially when these casinos had not yet materialized at all. Today we have, according to outside estimates I have heard, that it is about a $12 billion industry. There was an essential part of that law that was a state control, in that we had to have the states and tribes come together to negotiate. The U.S. Supreme Court basically knocked that piece out of the law by saying that the tribes couldn't force the states to come into court and enforce the responsibility of the states to negotiate. So we have a somewhat different situation then I think the law initially contemplated.
We're trying to bring together the states and the tribes to reach the agreements that will put some practical restraints on the gaming. I think the best way to do that is having the states at the table, having the local communities involved, so that you are essentially minimizing the conflicts between the tribes and the people who are in the areas most affected by it by getting them all to sit down and talk to each other.
We had a land into trust situation that we approved but it was for a casino, in shorthand approving a casino proposal, from a tribe that got some opposition from Congress but what they had done, on the other side of the ledger, they had gone to the county and negotiated an agreement with the county and made some adjustments to their proposal that would help minimize the impact. They agreed that even though it was legal for 18-year-olds to come into their casino during schools hours, they wouldn't let anyone under 21 into the casino. They really tried to work with the local community so we approved that proposal because that's the model we think is most helpful to follow. We'd like to encourage more of that kind of agreement. Obviously with gaming you have to have law enforcement control as well and we certainly want to work with law enforcement.
Q. Some of the environmental groups have very harshly criticized the administration and its environmental policies, one group even giving the administration a grade of "D" in its annual report. How do you answer the critics when they say the administration so far has not been very good stewards of conservation since President Bush took office, particularly on issues such as seeking rollbacks on regulations in the use of snowmobiles in national parks since a lot of these issues have made their way into federal court?
A. There are some who focus on the areas of disagreement and others who focus on the areas where we have agreement. We've been working with a number of the environmental groups on things like our Cooperative Conservation Initiative and had those groups coming out in support of the president's proposal; but what gets the attention is the outer areas where there is disagreement.
Let me describe what we are trying to do in Yellowstone as an example. What we want to do is find areas of reasonable approaches, areas of trying to balance the recreation interests and environmental protection interests, trying to balance things so we can try to meet as many different needs as possible and to find ways to stretch our resources to do that.
In the Yellowstone area, the Clinton administration had proposed a complete ban on snowmobiles. We looked at that and said, "That may be going too far. Let's see what else can be done to try and accommodate the needs."
The first thing that's significant is that the technology of snowmobiles is changing. From what I have heard, I haven't seen one in person yet, the new generation of snowmobiles, the four-cycle engines as opposed to the old two-cycle engines, are far less polluting and far quieter. That minimizes, right there, the two main complaints that people have about snowmobiles in Yellowstone.
We wanted to find out what the effect of that new technology would be and so we're going through the environmental impact analysis now.
Secondly, because they had taken the approach that they were going to just ban snowmobiles totally, they hadn't looked at what you can do to manage them without banning them entirely. We started doing things like putting speed limits; saying that the snowmobiles can only be on what would be paved roads in the summertime and so they are confined to the paved roads; having better enforcement, we've had a lot more people out there issuing tickets for the snowmobiles that are getting off track; educating the snowmobilers through their clubs about the impact on wildlife.
One of the things that was a big problem in the last administration was they basically had everybody line up to get their permits to go into Yellowstone, and they'd sit there and rev their snowmobiles as they were waiting in line to get their permits. We said, "Why don't we just sell the permits off site so they can just walk in someplace, buy their permits, and then when it's time to go through they just go on through and get out of town. We're doing a lot of those things. We're looking at some additional measures along those lines, perhaps restricting the number of snowmobiles, requiring that they only go through in groups, setting times when they can go through and when they can't, looking at the routes they can go on -- there are a whole variety of different things that we can do to still allow people who want to have snowmobiles as a recreational alternative to have that possibility and yet accommodate the interests of others.
Q. There have been a lot issues dealing with the Indian Trust Fund. Where does that stand now and what's being done to resolve it?
A. We're 130 years now into trying to manage those trust funds. The court monitor, who is the individual who is within our department on a day-to-day basis and is essentially the eyes and ears for the court, made an observation in one of his most recent reports that we had accomplished more in six months then the previous administration did in six years. We have had incredible efforts toward trying to improve that system. It is a very complex problem. It is one of those things where every time we learn more we learn about another problem, so we are trying to fix the situation.
It is a very long, very difficult challenge to reform this system. We are working diligently to do that.
Q. Some of the things you have said sparked curiosity. You've talked about advance planning, you've spoken about the species; when we have seen drilling down in the Gulf area, some of the environmental assurances were not necessarily -- after experience -- they didn't work out as people thought it would. Has your department looked at what you would do if, say at ANWR, things did not work out as promised, as people had anticipated, stepping back, restoring, requiring companies to go back and put things as they were if in fact the environmental impact is greater than the administration anticipates?
A. We have seen the newest of the technologies actually in place. It is being done in some areas. We have some expectation that we can replicate that in other areas. It would be the most stringent environmental regulation ever applied to oil and gas operations anywhere.
It would require that there be restoration 40 or 50 years down the road when production is completed. It would require that we use the newest of technologies. There is a provision in the House bill that deals with the siting so that you can avoid areas that would have the most impact. There are many things that can be done to ensure the environmental protection of what is being undertaken.
Before we would actually have any production taking place, we would go through a complete environmental impact analysis of that and the companies would have to present proposals to us. Those would have to be analyzed. We would require training of the people who would be operating those facilities. And we, as regulators, would have federal officials who would be overseeing all of that. The current situation has not had the same degree of federal oversight and federal regulation as what we would require.
Q. But if it doesn't work, if things don't work out as anticipated, what is the administration willing to do to assure environmentalists that the problems will be addressed?
A. The legislation puts ANWR on the same footing as any other public lands that are available for oil and gas exploration. We would begin the process of then going through all of the environmental planning that you usually go through.
We would have all the various checkpoints along the way to make sure the protection is there so we wouldn't anticipate getting to the spot of saying "Okay, we've now opened this facility -- whoops, we made a mistake" because we would have done all the analysis upfront.
If we got to the point of saying they've proposed building this facility and it's where it's going to cause damage we would say "No, you can't go forward with that." What we have insisted on in the legislation is that it gives us the ability to do that -- it is the most stringent regulation that has existed anywhere for oil and gas operations.
Q. You are the sole regulator in ANWR...
A. No...
Q. The state of Alaska...
A. The Environmental Protection Agency would be involved in all of the standard environmental analysis there. There might be some Army Corps of Engineer regulation but it would be primarily EPA that would be the other regulator.
Q. Who is on top? Interior, because it is your land?
A. Interior would have the lead because we license the land.
Q. Since coming to Washington, do you feel you have been treated fairly by the national media? You have had an occasional black eye, public relations-wise. Do you think you have been treated fairly?
A. I don't suppose I am any different than anyone else is. I don't feel like I have been ganged up against. It is always a difficult challenge for the Department of the Interior because we have so many different competing interests and responsibilities within the department and we deal with issues that are very emotional issues for people.
We deal with areas that people feel strongly about but may not really be familiar with -- there is a big perception that when you are dealing with western public lands you're talking about Yellowstone; in fact, you're talking about 80 plus percent of Nevada, you're talking about more than half of Alaska, more than half of a number of states. The public lands are huge and diverse. Our management responsibilities vary from place to place and our challenge is trying to find what fits best for each of those areas. When somebody says you want to have oil and gas activities, well, we want to have them some places but we have wilderness areas that are, I think we have an area at least -- certainly larger then the state of California, where we're not talking about doing anything. We have park areas where we are not talking about doing anything. We have areas that are public lands, multiple-use areas where the law intends that they be used for productive purposes including recreation. We're trying to balance all of these things. When somebody says "You're doing something on public lands" people assume you're doing it in protected areas when that is not at all the case.
