{"id":5822,"date":"2014-07-03T17:22:07","date_gmt":"2014-07-03T17:22:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reefrelieffounders.com\/drilling\/?p=5822"},"modified":"2021-05-19T01:04:12","modified_gmt":"2021-05-19T01:04:12","slug":"businessweek-com-sally-jewell-obamas-pro-fracking-climate-czar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reefrelieffounders.com\/drilling\/2014\/07\/03\/businessweek-com-sally-jewell-obamas-pro-fracking-climate-czar\/","title":{"rendered":"Businessweek.com: Sally Jewell Obama’s Pro-Fracking Climate Czar"},"content":{"rendered":"
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http:\/\/www.businessweek.com\/articles\/2014-07-03\/sally-jewell-obamas-pro-fracking-climate-czar<\/a><\/div>\n
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Jewell wants the government to continue to raise money from energy producers to pay for sea walls, wetlands restoration, and other measures that will make communities more resilient to climate change. She also wants to reform oil and gas permitting so that industry gets permission faster, while underwriting environmental impact evaluations and inspections Interior can’t afford. And it’s not just for fossil fuels, Jewell says. The U.S. needs the same arrangement-faster permit processing in exchange for fees from industry for safety analysis-from wind and other renewable energy producers.<\/div>\n
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For offshore oil and gas production, Jewell says, it works. Onshore, it doesn’t. “So we’re criticized for not processing permits fast enough,” she says. “And we have a report from the [U.S. Government Accountability Office] saying we’re not inspecting high-risk wells. And we can’t do that because we don’t have the resources. So we’re working with members of Congress and in the industry to say let’s be rational about matching supply and demand.”<\/div>\n
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\"SallyPhotograph by Benjamin Rasmussen<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Sally Jewell has just seen a ghost. Several, really. As she enters the aisle between two rows of eight-foot-tall shelving units, the U.S. Secretary of the Interior has come face to face with more than a dozen severed tiger heads. She lets out a quiet \u201cooh,\u201d somewhere between gasp and sigh. The heads are all taxidermied\u2014jaws open, fangs bared, startled eyes, comprising a gallery of silent roars. A U.S. Fish and Wildlife (USFW) officer tells Jewell how few of these cats remain in the wild; such trophies can fetch thousands of dollars on the black market. Jewell listens and, moving down the aisle, reflects on how values take time to change\u2014until they do. When she was little, she recalls, her gram owned a snow leopard coat. Later, when her grandmother learned it was from an endangered species, she donated it to a zoo.<\/p>\n

Jewell is touring the National Wildlife Property Repository, a 10,000-square-foot facility outside Denver where items made from protected animals get cataloged. The warehouse calls to mind the conclusion of Raiders of the Lost Ark<\/em>. Instead of crated artifacts, however, it\u2019s packed with the remains of animals: tortoise shells; a trunk of shawls made from the wool of a Chiru, a Tibetan antelope; bear claws; ivory shards. As the tour continues, Jewell has a suggestion for Steve Oberholtzer, who runs the repository: invite the fashion trade. \u201cWhen they see this stuff close up,\u201d she says, \u201cthe message will get through, and they\u2019ll be more careful about their sources.\u201d<\/p>\n

The policing of poachers, smugglers, and exotic pet owners is but one of the federal functions Jewell supervises, and although it keeps 205 agents busy full time, it\u2019s one of the smaller ones. Interior manages more than 500\u00a0million acres, one-fifth of all the land in the U.S., on an annual budget of $12\u00a0billion. It controls 23\u00a0percent of the nation\u2019s energy supply\u2014mostly oil, gas, and coal on federal lands\u2014and last year disbursed $14.2\u00a0billion in energy revenue to federal agencies and state, local, and tribal communities. Interior is also the largest wholesaler of water in 17 Western states, a life-and-death matter for thousands of farms and rural communities. And, of course, it runs more than a thousand parks, monuments, and wildlife refuges, natural and cultural attractions estimated in 2011 to contribute, through tourism, $48.7\u00a0billion to the economy. In all, the department estimates that its \u201cvalue added\u201d economic activity and production contributed $200\u00a0billion to the U.S. economy during 2013. (Interior appears to prefer this \u201cvalue added\u201d figure to straight income because it still spends more than it takes in.)<\/p>\n

Story: Fracking in New York Faces Death by a Thousand Local Bans<\/a><\/div>\n

The agencies that comprise Interior are almost comically at odds with one another. The Bureau of Reclamation operates dams that disrupt fisheries. The USFW endeavors to keep fisheries robust. The U.S. Geological Survey studies rising seas\u2019 impact on coastal areas. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Development facilitates deep-sea drilling permits. The department restores Superfund sites, most notably at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge, where the U.S. military made sarin gas during World War II. On the Rocky Mountain Front, the department promotes fracking, a drilling technique that environmentalists contend is toxic. \u201cOne of the best ways to tell if we\u2019re doing something right is when both sides are ticked off at us,\u201d Cecil Andrus, President Jimmy Carter\u2019s Interior secretary, famously told an assistant.<\/p>\n

Jewell, 58, seems uniquely qualified to balance these contradictions. The former CEO of Recreational Equipment Inc., a Seattle-based outdoor gear and apparel retailer, she worked previously as a commercial banker, starting at a regional bank assessing the value of oil and gas reserves as debt collateral. \u201cFrom your r\u00e9sum\u00e9, I can see you worked on the Alaska pipeline, and you\u2019re an oil and gas engineer,\u201d Senator Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) began, recapping her CV during her April\u00a02013 confirmation hearing. He sought\u2014and got\u2014her mostly nodded affirmation for each point: \u201cAnd you said you once fracked a well? You were a banker for 20 years? The chief executive officer of a billion-dollar company?\u201d He paused dramatically. \u201cHow did you get appointed by this administration?!\u201d<\/p>\n

When asked if her values as an outdoorswoman and conservationist conflict with her fossil fuel expertise, Jewell says, \u201cThere\u2019s no reconciling to be done.\u201d It\u2019s the day after her repository tour, and she\u2019s sitting in the lobby of a Hampton Inn & Suites in Las Cruces, N.M. \u201cI\u2019m going to be flying home on an airplane. Planes burn fossil fuels. So I don\u2019t think we can afford to be hypocritical,\u201d she says. \u201cI just think we need to open our eyes and understand that these things have tradeoffs. And we need to apply our ingenuity to a future that we didn\u2019t understand in the \u201970s and \u201980s, when we were really focused solely on fossil fuels.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Special thanks to Richard Charter.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

http:\/\/www.businessweek.com\/articles\/2014-07-03\/sally-jewell-obamas-pro-fracking-climate-czar Jewell wants the government to continue to raise money from energy producers to pay for sea walls, wetlands restoration, and other measures that will make communities more resilient to climate change. She also wants to reform oil and gas permitting so that industry gets permission faster, while underwriting environmental impact evaluations and inspections Interior … Continue reading Businessweek.com: Sally Jewell Obama’s Pro-Fracking Climate Czar<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[13,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5822","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-policy","category-fossil-fuels"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reefrelieffounders.com\/drilling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5822","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reefrelieffounders.com\/drilling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reefrelieffounders.com\/drilling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reefrelieffounders.com\/drilling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reefrelieffounders.com\/drilling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5822"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.reefrelieffounders.com\/drilling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5822\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6123,"href":"https:\/\/www.reefrelieffounders.com\/drilling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5822\/revisions\/6123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reefrelieffounders.com\/drilling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reefrelieffounders.com\/drilling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reefrelieffounders.com\/drilling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}