Remember when the election of Barack Obama was supposed to change everything on environmental policy? Some days that seems like it was a long time ago, doesn't it? To be sure, no administration could have been worse that George W. Bush's crew, which was filled with oil men who couldn't sign off fast enough on drilling from sea to shining sea -- and on a lot of federal lands in between. And indeed, there were hopeful signs of change in those first months after Obama became our 44th president. Consider the state of Utah, one of the many regions targeted by Big Energy in the current natural gas boom. The federal government is the biggest landowner in Utah, and in his final days in office, Bush 43 had raced to dole out lucrative leases to drillers all over the Beehive State, on 103,000 acres of prime real estate. The Obama administration initially undid those leases and also promised to tighten up relaxed environmental standards on many of the wells being drilled in Utah. But that was more than three years ago. Here is what's happening today in the U.S. Bureau of Land Mangement, the key agency tasked with regulating drilling on ...
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