The Public's Land?(ISSUES & INSIGHTS)(EDITORIALS)

Energy: Federal land-use policies have locked up decades' worth of resources in the name of the environment. It's time to rethink this luxury.

Times have changed. A shadowy enemy has emerged, and it's going to require a lot of resources to carry the fight. So where do we get them? An excess of critical resources waits beneath the ground right here in the U.S.

Rather than use what we have, we buy oil from countries that finance the terrorism we're trying to wipe out. Is that any way to win a war? We're funding both sides of a life-and-death struggle.

Some willfully ignore this reality. Rather than tap into our own resources, they prefer to lock them away, citing their version of a life-and-death struggle: man vs. the wilds.

Whether it's for preservation, conservation or a shield from man's degradation, the federal government has sealed away more than the land in the eight states bordering the Great Lakes. Holly Lippke Fretwell of the Political Economy Research Center found that "more than 450 million acres of land are set aside under stringent land-use restrictions by federal mandate.

"This is an area more than twice the size of Texas, or 20% of the entire nation," Fretwell said. "The fiscal and ecological implications of these set-asides are enormous."

Beneath that dirt, sand, rock and swamp lies a wealth of energy resources. How much? No one knows. The federal government, which controls the land, is incapable of accurately cataloguing just how much gas, oil and coal it's sitting on. The best guess is a 1995 federal assessment. That study indicated there were 47.2 billion barrels of oil and 381.3 trillion cubic ...