Last week, the Department of the Interior released its 2012 Oil Shale Draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement.

By issuing a draft plan that would require companies to prove that development can be commercially viable without serious negative consequences for local economies, lands and water, Interior ensured that millions...

As a third generation rancher and former director of the Bureau of Land Management in Wyoming, I strongly believe in balanced energy development and the lasting importance of protecting the water, land, and wildlife habitat that is critical to our rural economy and our Western heritage.

Unfortunately, some in the...

For more than 100 years, oil and gas boosters have promised that pulling oil out of rock-solid kerogen formations in the West would be easy, and the region would be awash in jobs, fortunes and eternal economic prosperity if we only tapped it.

But then reality, as it always has,...