Taxpayers have been losing money on
public-lands grazing, and now the feds have a solution: Charge
ranchers even less. Although the Government
Accountability Office says the federal grazing program loses $123
million annually, the Forest Service and the BLM plan to cut the
fee that ranchers pay to pasture a cow and calf on public land for
one month. In 2005, an animal unit month cost $1.79; this year, it
will cost $1.56 (HCN, 11/28/05: The Latest Bounce).
From Russia, with love, come drill rigs.
Colorado’s natural gas boom means that 80 drill rigs are
punching new wells full-time in the state — but busy energy
companies need at least 100 more rigs, says John Works, managing
director of Emerging Markets Finance International in Denver. The
industry has been importing Chinese and Canadian drill rigs to meet
the demand; this spring, Works’ company plans to bring in 15
rigs from Russia and train local crews to run them (HCN, 10/17/05:
Overseas drill rigs head for the West).
A new
coal-fired power plant gets a big tax break. The
Diné Power Authority plans to give Houston-based Sithe Global
Power a sweet deal, reducing by more than two-thirds the taxes that
Sithe would pay to the Navajo Nation to build and operate the
Desert Rock power plant on the reservation (HCN, 9/5/05: Pollution
for jobs: a fair trade?). All told, the Navajo Nation will get
$530.5 million instead of $1.64 billion during the plant’s
first 25 years.
Washington could become the
sixth Western state to set standards for renewable energy
requirements (HCN, 10/17/05: States lead charge against
global warming). A coalition of labor and environmental groups is
trying to get a measure onto the November ballot that would require
big utilities to get 15 percent of their electricity from renewable
sources by 2020. To the chagrin of the state’s big dam
operators, the measure’s definition of “renewable” does not
include hydroelectric power.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline The Latest Bounce.
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