Act Green: Sheriff, Er, Secretary Salazar in Rolling Stone
Posted on: Thursday, April 9th, 2009 at 11:34 am
Last week, Rolling Stone published an article, “Obama’s Sheriff,” about our new Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, because government affairs are sometimes the most juicy public interest stories out there.
Interior Secretary Salazar is shaking things up by putting an end to the shenanigans that took place in the Department of the Interior under the Bush Administration. We’re not just talking about the “coke-and-sex-crazed atmosphere” of the Mineral Management Service (remember this absurd real life scandal that broke last September?).
Other shady business in the Department of the Interior has cost taxpayers billions of dollars. The Mineral Management Service essentially stopped collecting royalties from oil and gas companies when Bush took office. When the government leases out government land to energy firms, these companies are supposed to return a portion of the profits from oil and gas to taxpayers. In the last eight years, audits of the oil companies fell by the wayside and collections drastically decreased. Additionally, “the Bush administration fought to let oil companies keep the money, and a judge appointed by Bush recently overturned royalty collections on 75 percent of all oil produced in the Gulf. Should the ruling stand, taxpayers will forfeit as much as $53 billion owed by Big Oil.”
Check out the article to read more about the increased drilling, corrupt deals, and disregard for science over the past eight years that amount to one big, tangled mess for Secretary Salazar to deal with. As Salazar said, “The ‘anything goes’ era is over.”