There’s gold in them thar hills…..

….oil, that is.

Today’s Deseret News reports that 13 Utah permits issued without public comment, as part of an aggressive push by the Bush administration to open more public land to oil and gas production.

BLM deputy director Jim Hughes stated “We don’t think there will be any environmental degradation,” Hughes said. “It’s basically going into areas where you’ve already got stuff happening, where you’ve got existing NEPA work that had been completed. We think in many cases this is just duplicative work.”

Uh, that makes it o.k., then.

But Dave Alberswerth, public lands director for The Wilderness Society, states, “They have to have a fairly recent analysis of the impacts before they can apply these categorical exclusions. If they’re planning to improperly apply these exemptions . . . in places where there are old land-use plans that are out of date, then they are asking for legal trouble.”

A southwest regional representative for the Sierra Club, said it’s “absurd to suggest that we need to weaken environmental oversight to help the industry. Where you have land that ought to be protected, (drilling) it is the difference between the Garden of Eden and the post apocalypse.”

There is no mention of the support or lack thereof by our public officials of this issue in this article. I’m fairly certain, however, that Orrin Hatch is a proponent of drilling for oil in Utah.