WASHINGTON — In a rare victory for environmentalists in the House of Representatives, Republican leaders Wednesday night abandoned a measure to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling.
They also jettisoned a provision to relax a long-standing ban on new energy exploration off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. However, they apparently left in the budget package a mining law provision that would permit the sale of public lands in the West for private development.
A rewrite of the Mining Law of 1872, it has drawn less attention than the Arctic drilling provision but could have a farther-reaching effect on public lands. Drafted by the House Resources Committee, the measure would allow the sale of potentially millions of federal acres, including national park and forest holdings.
Such a law could mean "the biggest privatization of federal land in the last 100 years," said John Leshy, who was the Interior Department's top lawyer in the 1990s and is now a professor at UC Hastings College of the Law. "Nothing like this has ever surfaced before."
The proposal would lift an 11-year-old congressional moratorium on mining patents, letting mining companies buy federal land with valuable mineral deposits for nominal fees. It would also make it easier to purchase federal land for nonmining uses, dropping the requirement that the acreage contain a valuable mineral discovery. And it would let the public stake new claims next to existing mining claims and buy that adjacent land for economic development unrelated to mining.
The concessions to moderate Republicans on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge grew out of the party leadership's effort to salvage the broad spending-cut bill to which the oil-drilling and mining measures were attached.
Even with the drilling provisions gone, today's House floor vote on the bill, which would cut more than $50 billion over five years from federal benefit programs, will probably be close.
A spokesman for House Resources Committee Chairman Richard W. Pombo (R-Tracy) said Pombo was inclined to oppose the bill "if it does nothing to increase domestic energy supplies and lower prices."
Wednesday's developments do not kill the prospect of drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The Senate included drilling in its spending-cut bill, passed last week, and the provision could survive an eventual House-Senate compromise.
