Guerrilla Tactics at Oil-Lease Auction
Activist drives up prices with bidding.
http://www.truthout.org/011309N
Los Angeles - Instead of joining his protester friends on the
snowy sidewalk outside the Bureau of Land Management office in Salt
Lake City, Tim DeChristopher took a seat inside. In a room milling
with oil and gas men who knew one another by sight, he was the
unknown
in a red parka, registering as a bidder in an auction for the rights
to drill on 149,000 acres of federal land. DeChristopher was handed a
red paddle bearing the number 70.
Half an hour later, he was raising it.
"I leaned forward to one of my colleagues and said, 'This guy
behind us is just running up the prices,'" said David Terry, a Salt
Lake City oil-land man who routinely attends the BLM auctions. "And
my
friend said, 'Yeah, he's going to get stuck with a tract.'"
The University of Utah economics student got stuck with 13.
Promising the federal government $1.8 million he does not have,
DeChristopher emerged holding leases on 22,000 acres in the scenic
southeast corner of Utah.
He might have gone home with more had federal agents not led him
out of the room after he secured the rights to a dozen parcels in a
row, finally just holding his paddle over his head, even between
offers. The U.S. attorney is considering charges that a spokeswoman
declined to specify.
Even before DeChristopher subverted the proceedings, the Dec. 19
auction sized up as one of the most controversial during the Bush
administration, whose policies critics have characterized as a
bonanza
for oil and gas extraction on public land. Opponents of the policies
said the 35,000 drilling permits issued over the past eight years
reflected the boom in petroleum prices and the administration's zeal
to accommodate the oil and gas industry, even on public lands deemed
"special" because of their beauty or fragility.
"This whole business of 'Drill, baby, drill' totally ignored the
fact that we are a well-drilled country," said Dave Alberswerth of
the
Wilderness Society, noting that by the count of the oil-field
services
company Baker Hughes, more drill rigs are operating inside the United
States than in the rest of the world combined. "BLM's oil and gas
program has been just out of control."
The parcels that DeChristopher snapped up stand near two national
parks and a national monument that environmentalists and the National
Park Service warned might be endangered by drilling. The outrage,
which rivaled the outcry over the BLM decision to lease atop
Colorado's majestic Roan Plateau, was aggravated by the timing: The
agency announced the Utah auction on Nov. 4 - Election Day.
Environmental groups answered with administrative filings and news
conferences, including a National Press Club event featuring Robert
Redford.
DeChristopher wanted to do more.
"I've been an environmentalist for pretty much all my life and
done all the things that you're supposed to do that are supposed to
lead toward change," DeChristopher said, accounting for action that,
as he tells it, surprised even him. "I've marched and held signs.
I've
volunteered in national parks. I've written letters and signed
petitions. I've sat down with my congressman, Jim Matheson, for a
long
time.
"Ultimately, I felt like those things were only mildly effective.
And it was having a very tiny effect on a very large problem."
The guerrilla bidding did not go down well with the oil and gas
regulars. The companies recommend parcels for the BLM to sell and can
hold them for decades if they prevail at the quarterly auctions.
"If we'd have put it up for a vote in the room that day," said
BLM
spokeswoman Mary Wilson, "the other bidders might have put together a
lynching party."
Among some environmentalists, however, DeChristopher was hailed
as
a hero. A blogger helped set up a Web site, and a pass-along e-mail
request for $5 contributions turned into an online fund drive that,
by
Friday, raised the $45,000 that DeChristopher needed to pay the BLM
in
the hope of retaining a claim on the leases - and improving his odds
of avoiding jail.
The West Virginia native, 27, said he raised paddle No. 70 fully
aware of the implications. It took him half an hour to screw up the
courage to bid, he said, and another half-hour to start winning
parcels.
"It came down to, if worse came to worse, I'd go to jail,"
DeChristopher said. "And I decided, yeah, I could live with that....
"But seeing all the disastrous effects of climate change in our
future, I didn't want to have to live with that."
His actions impressed Patrick Shea, a Salt Lake City lawyer who
headed the BLM during the Clinton administration and who decided to
represent DeChristopher.
"I interviewed him twice, just to make sure what I saw on the
news
was the real McCoy, and it was," Shea said. "He's really a very
bright, upstanding and principled individual who was rightly upset
about some of these leases being offered."
Along with a criminal defense attorney, Shea is working behind
the
scenes to persuade federal authorities to recognize DeChristopher's
bidding as a well-intentioned political, rather than criminal, act.
"I didn't want to see somebody with that kind of virtue mangled
by
a Kafkaesque kind of system," Shea said. "I think responsible civil
disobedience has been forgotten since the '60s and '70s."
If so, one reason might be reforms rooted in the activism of that
era. Full-time advocates pointed out that the BLM auction was
originally scheduled for two years earlier but that lawsuits from
environmental groups forced the agency to first complete management
plans required by federal statutes aimed at protecting the
environment.
"It was a decision we got in August 2006 that held up the BLM for
this long," said Steve Bloch, conservation director for the Southern
Utah Wilderness Alliance. "The fact that it took a sale at the last
minute of the last hour is in large part due to the efforts we've
been
making."
Protests from the National Park Service also had an effect,
persuading the BLM to pare its original offering of 360,000 acres by
more than half. Bloch noted that all the parcels DeChristopher bought
were among the 80 that conservation groups specifically sought to
preserve. But the student said there was no particular strategy to
his
bids.
"It was more just based on me watching one parcel after another
end up in the hands of developers, watching all those parcels go by
and knowing that I could have stopped it," he said. In fact, the
whole
notion of registering as a bidder was something that DeChristopher
said more or less popped into his head.
"I used to work for a company that one of its mottos was 'plan
with spontaneity,' and that's how I approached this," he said.
By chance, the auction was held the same day as DeChristopher's
final exam in his Current Economic Problems course; the test happened
to include a question referring to the sale. It asked whether the
final bids paid by oil and gas companies would reflect the "true
cost"
of the leases.
"And the answer they were looking for was 'No,'" DeChristopher
said, listing a string of other costs that would flow from petroleum
extraction, including the costs of health care and global-warming
mitigation.
"That question was just something already in the back of my mind
when I was driving up those oil prices, to reflect a little more of
the true costs," he said.
Shea said the BLM appears divided on how to deal with
DeChristopher. "If the hawks prevail, it will flow into a
prosecution," he said. "If the doves prevail, it will be some kind of
community service, I would hope."
DeChristopher, meanwhile, said he plans to hold on to the 22,000
acres as long as possible, if only to register impatience with what
he
sees as compromises that accommodate continued reliance on petroleum.
"I'd say the forces out to destroy the planet on the Bush-Cheney
side have been fighting a lot harder than those out to protect it,"
he
said.
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