This week, a federal judge in Montana cancelled oil and gas leases on 1.5 MILLION acres of land in the State of Wyoming (a different district). And more acres in Montana and the Dakotas.

Cowboy State Daily reports the action and the impact. The State of Wyoming alone will lose $330 million in royalties and fees – not counting the taxes paid by the people who work getting and transporting the natural gas, and the taxes as the money circulates through the local economies. Now, as lovers of liberty, we are of mixed feelings about the bureaucrats and politicos down in Cheyenne (or Helena, or Bismarck and Pierre) getting less money. But it is the people that won’t get paid because that oil and gas will stay in the ground, instead of fueling the economy, that really take it in the shorts. And because we know those politicians and bureau-rats won’t cut their spending when they don’t get those royalty dollars. They’ll just raise taxes and continue to line their pockets and those of their political cronies and big business.

So why did this judge do this? Including going outside his district?

Bluntly, because the guy is in bed with the environists.

Let’s name names of those groups: Montana Wildlife Federation, The Wilderness Society, National Audubon Society, National Wildlife Federation and Montana Audubon. Why?

Because of the sage-grouse, and how the BLM is (or isn’t) following 2015 sage-grouse conservation plans in Wyoming. Yep, 11 years ago. And the leases that were cancelled? They were let in 2018 and 2019, and since then millions of (private) dollars have been spent in getting the permits, designing operations, and constructing infrastructure to actually drill, produce, and transport the oil and natural gas under Wyoming. All of which is now possibly wasted. (And guess who pays, ultimately? People, families, and businesses that use natural gas and motor fuel (and all the rest). Directly or in the cost of manufacturing and transporting goods. (Look in the mirror.)

And this stupidity is more than just the judge being in cahoots with anti-gas and anti-oil activists (and the rest of their ilk). Yes, there is more: the sage-grouse is NOT an endangered species. It is likely not even really a “threatened species.” And Wyoming Game and Fish (for all their many faults) has a perfectly good working plan – now going on 12 years – that protects their habitat. And oil and gas production and transportation is NOT a problem. Even the Obummer regime (filled with environists and haters of free markets and progress) said Wyoming had a great program.

The development of horizontal drilling, fracking, and other technologies has actually significantly reduced the impact on the land since 2015. (Yes, many environists are so stupid that they think that a lease of 10 square miles for oil and gas (6400 acres) is going to destroy or at least severely damage every bit of that 6400 acres.

But the reality? A modern horizontal-drilling well pad disturbs 3-4 acres, to get the oil and gas from a section (square mile). The old-style vertical drilling? 19 acres per section. Even that is small: 19 of 640 acres: less than 3% of the land. But 3.5 acres is just 0.5%! And that land disturbance is quickly restored to suitable wildlife habitat (and possibly even better), except for maybe a whole 1/2-acre (about 110 by 210 feet in size). Running pipelines and powerlines and such is even less impactful.

But the grouse is just an excuse: these are politically-motivated activists that want to eliminate the production and consumption of oil and gas. Not just Algorites who are convinced that all of Western Civilization and the world’s eco-systems were destroyed by global warming in 2012. Not just the “landback” fanatics who want anyone with less than a quarter of “Native American” (AmerInd) blood to be deported to Europe, Africa, or Asia. Not just the Transzis idiots who vow up and down that this time they’ll do “Progressivism” and socialism right. These are the people who manifest themselves as hoplophobes (gun-fearers), and hate liberty.

They want to have every waking (and sleeping) moment of every person’s lives controlled in minute detail by judges and bureaucrats and “the elite” – because they fear that if they enjoyed even a modicum of liberty, they would use it to kill, rape, abuse, and rob other people. And they assume everyone is like them. Because they haven’t been taught better. Or they are, straightforward, in it for lust of power over others and the wealth that they can take from anyone less powerful than themselves.

Which is why we must take away the power over others – immoral power – that we have let them have.

——–

For new readers and family, we explain why we call them “environists” – a word coined by Angie Many of the Black Hills years ago. The modern “greenie” or tree-hugger runs on emotion and rejects logic and truth: they deny the “mental” so we are glad to take that word out of “environMENTAList” and describe them as the brain-dead perveyors and consumers of lies and fear.