Is the U.S. Interior Department wrongly withholding information that will reveal whether taxpayers are being ripped off in a controversial oil and gas royalty program? Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) seem to think so, according to a lawsuit they filed today. Interior claims that disclosure of bidding and contracting information about its Royalty-In-Kind (RIK) sales would reveal oil company trade secrets.

The Royalty-In-Kind Program is responsible for managing Minerals Revenue Management’s (MRM) commercial oil and gas sales activity. The RIK Program is currently selling over 800,000 MM-Btu of natural gas per day and over 150,000 barrels of crude oil per day.

Simply put, Interior acts as an oil broker, selling this oil and gas in order to obtain its shares. Royalty payments on oil and gas from offshore tracts and public lands are one of the federal government’s greatest sources of non-tax revenues, making over $4 billion in 2007. RIK allows companies to pay federal royalties in the form of oil or natural gas rather than cash.

An investigation last September found that Interior employees (19 RIK marketers and other RIK employees - approximately 1/3 of the entire RIK staff) were engaging in sex and drug parties with oil officials, and 8 of the 19 employees received gifts exceeding the allowable limit.

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The U.S. Department of the Interior reports that they will start spending the stimulus money granted them in February, and among the $140 million-worth of projects is $15.2 million for Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s favorite activity: volcano monitoring!

This has been covered before, but it’s too good to let go easily. The complete disregard for actual science shown was thrown back in Jinda’s face immediately, but the volcano gods joined in only a month later when Alaska’s Mt. Redoubt erupted. Residents of the area had been warned two months earlier than eruption was pending, and perhaps as a result there were no major incidents when the volcano finally blew. Department of the Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said that the Alaska Volcano Observatory’s “top priority is to prevent repetition of the incident that occurred during Redoubt’s eruption 19 years ago, when a Boeing 747 passenger aircraft strayed into an ash cloud and nearly crashed.” Eh, who needs monitoring, right?

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Late in the Bush administration, the president lifted an executive order banning offshore drilling. A few months later, facing skyrocketing gas prices, Congress allowed a congressional moratorium, dating back to 1982, to lapse. Offshore drilling has been blatantly polarizing national politics ever since.

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Salazar said his first order of business would be to clean up an Interior Department troubled with ethical lapses, in particular, the Minerals Management Service which was rocked by a sex, drugs, and corruption scandal last year.

But Salazar also described his vision for an agency that would look as hard (or harder) at developing wind farms and solar thermal plants as it has looked at developing coal, oil and gas in the past.

When pushed about the specifics of his policy positions, Salazar didn’t let on too much. He did not say, for example, whether he would support a reinstatement of the ban on oil and gas drilling off the Pacific and Atlantic coasts, which Congress allowed to expire last year. But it is quite likely that Salazar would, in fact, support limited offshore drilling in certain areas, as the senator signed on to the bipartisan “Gang of Ten” compromise proposal in the Summer of 2008 that would have allowed drilling off the coast of certain Southeastern states.

But Salazar was not completely opaque.

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Ah, the executive bathroom, one of the unheralded perks of holding a cabinet-level seat. But unfortunately for outgoing Interior Department Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, the $236,000 renovation of the Main Interior Building Executive Suite bathroom was finally completed just in time to hand the keys over to Interior Secretary-nominee, Ken Salazar.

It is the first time any such renovations have been done at the building since it was built in 1936, but for $236K, that must be one heck of a water closet.

As part of the renovation, workers modernized and upgraded the plumbing, mechanical and lighting systems in the bathroom of the Executive Suite.  The modernization is part of a larger $243 million makeover of The Main Interior Building’s mechanical, electrical, plumbing and ventilation systems in all of its office spaces.

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The lands that will be opened are in Alaska and 11 western states. It is believed that the geothermal energy in time could provide electricity to 5.5 million homes.

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In a stunning reversal of direction, the Bush administration has officially requested a new addition to the Endangered Species list. What threatened species could elicit this drastic change of course for the Bush Administration? It is, of course, the elusive Climate Change Skeptic (dubium mundus fervesco), whose habitat is being threatened by rational thinking, increased rates of deforestation, low gas-mileage standards, and the abundance of “cheap” coal. The stunning news comes just after a story in the Washington Post reported that the current administration has never requested that an animal be protected by the Endangered Species Act. Of the current administration’s 59 listed species, none of them were requested by the administration themselves.

But the Bush administration is not alone in wanting to protect such skeptics as Fred Singer and Patrick Michaels, in fear that the breed may die out completely in the coming years. Fortunately, the skeptics have received significant funding from coal and oil companies, including ExxonMobil.

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