Student Post: Enforcing Reasonable Expectations of Energy Companies to Benefit Local Wildlife

The first thing that jumped out to me in the reading was how wind energy development was cut off in certain areas of Wyoming because of the severely reduced sage grouse population. This reduced population resulted mainly from habitat disrupted by drilling operations and by mosquitoes carrying West Nile virus that had bred in holding ponds for CBM waste water. This is an interesting decision to me, because I always seem to be hearing about how fossil fuels are terrible and we need to be finding more renewable energy sources. In Wyoming, they were forced to halt wind energy while allowing CBM production to continue and apparently do little to help increase the sage grouse population.

This got me thinking about some of the news articles I have read over the past several months about oil companies in western North Dakota getting prosecuted for killing migratory birds that had died in their reserve pits that were not covered quite as well as they should have been. The charges have been dismissed because the prosecutors were trying to use migratory bird laws in ways that Congress didn’t intend. Some of the articles on this topic have suggested that it is the current presidential administration that is causing such claims to be pursued in order to promote wind and other renewable energy sources.

Whether or not these charges were brought to hinder oil companies and to promote cleaner renewable energy, they bring up an interesting question that relates back to the reading about the sage grouse in Wyoming and goes all the way back to what we talked about in the first few days of class. It seems that we still haven’t found a balanced position on protecting the environment while pursuing our continuing energy needs.

While I agree with the decision in North Dakota that these bird deaths in the waste pits should not be charged as they were, I think that a lot could be done in Wyoming to help out renewable energy sources and to help the environment. It was CBM producers’ practices that caused the destruction of habitat, the creation of breeding grounds for disease-carrying mosquitoes, and subsequently the severe population decline in sage grouse. I don’t suggest that any criminal actions be brought in Wyoming as they were in North Dakota, but it seems that forcing companies to better preserve habitat or at least manage waste water would do much to benefit local wildlife. This in turn would hopefully give more room for other forms of energy (wind) to develop in some of these same areas.