Lex Anteinternet: And the Economic news gets starker.

I haven't run one of these grim items on the local economy for a month now, with this being the last one:

Lex Anteinternet: And the Economic news gets starker.:

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteintern...: And now the price of oil is down to. . . $29.00 bbl.

Wyoming sweet crude is down to about $19.00 bbl.  Wyoming sour crude is
now down to about $9.00 bbl.  It was at $76.00 bbl in June 2014.

Fairly clearly, those are not economically sustainable prices.

There were several intervening bad stories in the meantime, but given at there's been so many, you reach a "what's the point" type of location.

This past week, however, prices went up, in spite of the news that Iran was about to place 4 bbl/day on line.  Some of the OPEC countries and Russia were beginning to get in line, and there was a day when there was a sharp escalation of the price.  Of course, sharp in this context doesn't put the price up around $50/bbl where it seems to need to be, but it was hovering around $40/bbl.

Yesterday, however, it was sinking again.

Today we read in the paper that Ultra has hired Kirkland & Ellis, the bankruptcy firm that shows up in all of these bankruptcies and which we recently read that Chesapeake was consulting with (although they say they aren't taking bankruptcy).  And Cloud Peak (coal, but still in good shape) and Marathon (which downsized earlier) posted losses for the last quarter.

When the price started to climb a bit I thought that perhaps it had sunk to the pint where the low prices were no longer sustainable.  I could have been premature on that.

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: The economic bad news just keeps...

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: The economic bad news just keeps...: From Sunday: Lex Anteinternet: The economic bad news just keeps on keeping on. : The decline in the mineral industries was undoubtedly the...

And following up on that, the Administration announced yesterday that it is putting a moratorium on new coal leases on Federal lands.

This may be less significant than it seems, as existing leases  are pretty big right now and coal production is really falling off, but it's certainly an indication of the direction things are headed in.

The economic bad news just keeps on keeping on.

The decline in the mineral industries was undoubtedly the biggest news story around here for last year, as I noted here earlier:

Today In Wyoming's History: 2015 In Review:  It hasn't been my habit here to do end of the year reviews, and indeed there are no doubt more items on Medieval history on this site than there are on the year 2015.  So, this is an exception and departure from the norm.  Perhaps it will become the custom, or perhaps not.  We will see.

This year I'm doing one, however, as this year has really been an exceptional year for Wyoming, and not at all in a good way, but in a way that has been somewhat predictable.  We entered an oil crash.

Early Wyoming oil field.

Now, oil crashes aren't new to Wyoming, but this one may prove to be unique and a watershed.  Only time will tell, but the evidence sort of eerily suggests that it might be. . .

Well, now it's 2016 and the news so far this year is headed in the same direction.

Earlier this week the Tribune revealed that Wyoming natural gas production declined 14%, a fall which was the sixth annual fall in a row for Wyoming gas.  It isn't that production is down nationally.  It's up.  It's down here, and the price is down.  Indeed, it's likely down here as production is up nationally.   Wyoming has a lot of natural gas, but so do a lot of other places in the United States.  Added to this, for various reason, coal bed methane production is really down.

Added to this, Wyoming producers are now starting to shut in wells, according to the Tribune.  That isn't a good sign, but with Saudi oil falling to $35/bbl last week, perhaps that's no surprise.

And then last week coal took another blow.

When coal started to decline in Wyoming there were a lot of local backers of the industry who maintained that "clean coal technology" would pull  the industry out of the hole, or maybe if the Federal government slacked up on one thing or another.  I haven't been hearing that recently and I think a sense of realism about these things has set in.  It must have set in within coal consuming industries themselves as we learned today that Pacific Power is backing a bill in Oregon that would require power generation to switch over from coal to gas in the Northeast.  Pacific Power is one of the largest consumers of coal in Wyoming, and if they're backing move away from coal it's telling.

Coal is already at its lowest production figures since 1986, although I don't think those 1986 amount s seemed bad at the time.  Coal exports, moreover have dropped way off, something like 40%. To add to it, coal production overseas has dropped way down, as foreign markets in some localities have switched to other fuels.  That might not seem related, but if foreign production is dropping at the same time ours is, it naturally will reflect itself in a diminished export market.

At the same time, Wyoming governmental budgets, both statewide and locally, are in trouble.  Casper appears set to have deficit spending to a degree next year, although oddly enough that didn't keep Casper from funding an above appraisal purchase of some downtown property for an anticipated civic plaza.  Perhaps the thinking is that this is a wise move in this climate, as it will encourage downtown reconstruction and innovations, which if so is an example of the sort of surprising New Dealish type of economic action that I wrote about recently here.

And locally, Wolfords Shoe Store, in business for 80 years, closed.  Business had dropped 44% over the last year as work slowed down locally, and the family that owns the store decided the time had come to close it.  The store had focused heavily on work boots in recent years, although it had always sold them.  A pair of Red Wing boots I got there lasted me for decades.  

The new economic normal?

I started this post off about a week ago, and then let it set as I was traveling for work.  In the meantime OPEC had their meeting, and I've just posted on that. This post came back to mind at that time.  According to the Tribune, Wyoming's economy is now flat.  With the OPEC failure to put in place caps, I'm worried that it won't remain flat for long, however, which is what I had originally addressed here (i.e., a flat economy, although I thought that analysis somewhat flawed even prior to the OPEC story).

Founder of the House of Saud. Who would have guessed that the Saudi kingdom would prove so critical to the economy of a Rocky Mountain state?

Unemployment isn't increasing, and employment isn't increasing in the state either.  A state employee terms it the "new normal".

Except, it's flat in part because of construction jobs.

And those jobs have been a largely fueled by school construction.

 

 A series of major school construction projects has been keeping the state's unemployment figures from rising.  They won't go on forever.

Which is provided for by coal severance taxes, a dropping revenue.

And by tourism. Tourism is apparently up.  Which isn't surprising really, as with fuel prices in the basement, we should see more traveling, although apparently there  hasn't been much of an increase in fuel consumption nationally.  However, with gasoline now down below $2.00/gallon, we'll see if that holds.

$2.00 per gallon, by the way, is something I was frankly stunned to see.

Now, in the week or so that I've delayed on this story, I've actually seen gasoline at $1.87.  It'd dropping like a rock.

And I'm going on record right now that its my prediction that we'll see it go as low as $1.00 in the next two years.

Even as it is, right now, in real terms, it has to be as low as its ever been, and I'd think that should make air travel and ground travel much cheaper. We oddly haven't been seeing an increase in fuel consumption as the price first stabilized, and then fell, but I'm guess that we will now somewhat.  Or at least it'll begin to have a nationwide deflationary effect which will make the American dollar much stronger and create a real rise in earning power in everyone's bank accounts.  Unless, of course, you were working in a state, like I am, where we depend on the coal and petroleum industries for our economy.

Anyhow, this news time line is very familiar to those of us who lived through the early 1980s here. As before, there was denial, as in "this is only temporary", which ultimately yields to "oh, it won't be that bad", and followed by where we now are, which is "tourism will save us".

Tourism is important to the local economy, but it has problems as a n economic sector, not the least of which is that the wages it generates tend to be low. An added problem, rarely addressed, is that tourism and the mineral industry can be at odds which each other, at least to some degree. And the fact that the mineral industry is the high paying end of the economy makes quite a difference in the local impact of the various types of employment.

 

World War Two era poster discouraging vacation travel.  We're in the opposite position.

That the boom would end was something that those with a sense of history always knew.  A belief was out there that it was going to last decades, but that has never proven to be the case. What is unusual, however, is that the end of this boom was caused by a pricing determination from overseas, with Saudi Arabia seeking to keep its market share.  A boom had been fueled by OPEC oil policies in the past, but never a bust.  Whether the Saudi gamble will pay off for them isn't yet know, so the ultimately impact on the local economy isn't either.  But it is scary.

Petroleum and coal, it should be noted, have been part of the state's economic engine since the 1890s, but agriculture was the main sector of the economy for over half the 20th Century.  Petroleum only took that place in the 1960s.  This is significant as agriculture has actually lead the economic boom in some US states, and its proven to be an industry that not only has remarkable staying power, but staying power in a modern economy.  But it's really dwindled as a sector of the Wyoming economy in recent decades, all while remaining the romantic sector of the state's image.  In some ways, agriculture is really the reason for our tourism industry, whether that's realized or not, as range cattle production is the reason for the range being what it is.  That's something that the state should remember, and perhaps taking a second look at agriculture and what it can, and does, for the state, should be done.  It certainly can play a bigger role than it currently does, and its proven to have real staying power.

 

The cow, fabled in our cultural story, but often undersold in the post World War Two economic story of the state. Time to consider agriculture's position once again?

And the economic news continues to darken

Earlier this week Arch Coal announced it was considering bankruptcy, just at about the same time the Governor announced that he expected to be able to ship coal to Asia.  I'm not sure if the Governor really believes that, but I doubt very much that's going to be the case.  Things are looking increasingly bleak for coal.

And the state's community colleges are now preparing for an economic slump, the Tribune reports, with one even putting in place a hiring freeze.  I'm not sure that they'll see a drop in enrollment, like they fear, as at least in the past an increase in unemployment in the young has tended to see an increase in the young seeking college opportunities, something I've witnessed personally. But they're wise to do some planning.

Lex Anteinternet: Hurt feelings?

Recently I wrote about the Peabody Coal Company being unhappy about the inclusion of lyrics from John Prine's song Paradise in a pleading:

Lex Anteinternet: Hurt feelings?: There's a case pending, apparently, in the Federal District Court of Wyoming in which environmentalist have sued the Peabody Coal Compan...

Well, their motion to strike the lyrics failed, the court deciding they'd just have to live with it, in part because the song's been around since 1971 and everyone ought to be used to it by now.

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: What's with all those dire warn...

 

 World War One era poster, from when coal heated most homes.

Earlier this week I published this:

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: What's with all those dire warn...: I was out of town this past week, so came home to a collection of newspapers. One of them related that Wyoming had lost 3,000+ oilfield jo...

Following that, there was an article in the Tribune about how the residents of the coal producing town of Gillette have continued to try to publicly back coal, against the trend of its decline.  The same day the Chinese came out with an announcement about a plan to combat climate change.

In this morning's paper I read that Alpha, a major coal company, has gone into receivership.  The bigger news, however (although that took top billing in the Star Tribune) is that President Obama released his plan for combating climate change which includes a significant drop in the use of coal in Wyoming, and the U.S., for power generation and a reduction of the use of fossil fuels in general.

The reaction by Wyoming's political leaders was predictable, if perhaps actually somewhat muted in some quarters. Governor Mead issued the following statement:

The Clean Power Plan is scientifically flawed and if implemented will not achieve minimum reductions. It is in fact damaging – not just to Wyoming, but the nation.  I will continue to fight regulations that are fundamentally bad for Wyoming and exceed the regulatory authority of the federal government.

That comment was brief, briefer than we might have expected.  That raises the suspicion that Mead felt obligated to reply, but didn't want to put too much effort into it.  Or perhaps he just issued a brief reply as the Clean Power Plan had just come out and there wasn't time for anything larger.   Maybe both.

I'm sure in the coming months there will be much local opposition to the President's plan, and there's absolutely no certainty that it will go into effect, but at some point, on something like this, I have to wonder if the course of events isn't fairly clear.  Coal has been in decline in regards to the type of use made of it for quite some time.  It hasn't been "King Coal" forever.  Weening the country, and the world, from most coal use would be a lot easier than weening it from petroleum oil.

When I was a geology student, coal was my focus.  Focusing on it today, no matter what we might say here in Wyoming, I think it's future is dim.  Not immediately, but not distantly either.  And as for petroleum and the local economy, with sanctions getting set to be removed from Iran, there's reason not to be too short term optimistic there either.

Railhead: The Coal Train

Railhead: The Coal Train

 

Something we'll be seeing less of in the future? 

"Then the coal company came with the world's largest shovel". Musical references and economic trouble.

When I ran this yesterday: 

Lex Anteinternet: Coal in the ICU:    Mine haul truck on display in Wright Wyoming. Wyoming has had a long association with coal. The first coal mines in the state date...

I resisted the temptation to quote from John Prine's "New Grass" song "Paradise".

I'll note that the Tribune, while it didn't actually name the song, couldn't, and the reporter today started off his article about the Peabody Coal Company noting the sad song, and then turned to it again a second time.  Interesting.

For those who haven't heard it, the really sad song involves the demise of an actual Kentucky town named Paradise, and features the chorus:

And daddy won't you take me back to Muhlenberg County
Down by the Green River where Paradise lay
Well, I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in asking
Mister Peabody's coal train has hauled it away

Well, the Peabody Coal Company won't be hauling Gillette away, although coal mining, as the article details, is really in huge long term trouble.   That doesn't help Gillette much either, rather obviously, but that's not Peabody's fault.

Coal in the ICU

 

 Mine haul truck on display in Wright Wyoming.

Wyoming has had a long association with coal. The first coal mines in the state date back to the Union Pacific Railroad which, coming through as it did during the 1860s, needed sources of coal to fuel its trains.  Mining near the railroad started contemporaneously with the laying down of the tracks.

Coal's been in ill health for quite awhile, and it's been suffering of late along with petroleum oil.  More than oil really.  This makes a big difference to the state, as the state is funded on mineral severance taxes which have accordingly been declining.  And it makes a big difference to coal mining towns, like Gillette.  And, of course, the decline in coal fuels some delusional thinking in which "if only" the Federal government wasn't doing this or that, the market would recover.

Well, in today's Tribune, there's a double whammy for coal.

First, Peabody, the legendary coal mining concern, is laying off 250 people in Gillette from a corporate office its closing there. That's a significant thing for Peabody to do, as the area features a number of huge coal mines, albeit ones that have been suffering lately.  For an outfit with a history that is coal to signal that it's giving up on its local office is not only a personal disaster for the people who worked there, it's a huge signal of what going on in coal.

If that signal wasn't clear enough, also in today's paper we learn that Rocky Mountain Power, a large regional electrical generation company, has determined to switch away from coal over the next couple of decades. For a power company centered in a coal producing region that owns many coal fired power plants, and its own mines, that's a huge decision.  It will be going to alternative means of generation, such as wind.  It's announcement wasn't that it's "supplementing", or something, its coal fired plants with alternative means of generation, but that it actually anticipates replacing them.  That's a pretty stunning position assuming it was accurately reported, for a regional power generator.

This would seem to be a pretty clear indicator that coal's in a long term decline.  And with that, so are the state's revenues.  It's not as if coal is going to disappear, but it does seem to be slowly reducing in significance with no likely reversal of that trend in sight.  And that reduction in significance has been fairly dramatic and observable.

The expansion of coal mines into the Powder River Basin is something that really came on during my lifetime, and it built Gillette into what it currently is.  The decline will likely occur over the rest of my life time, but that it would become so evident, while not really a surprise, is fairly dramatic. 

I should note that it's hard to write something like this and not sound as if you are coming off as "anti coal".  In reality, however, I haven't said anything of the sort. When I was a geology student, eons ago, my specialty was in coal, simply because it seemed stable while petroleum was in decline.  But I was wrong about that stability, and the changes we now see are ones that I've been predicting for some time.  Being right about a trend tends to be confused with being partisan in a debate, but it isn't.

 

Geology classroom, University of Wyoming, 1986.

What's with all those dire warnings. . . .

and why are they on a blog that supposedly looks at history around the turn of the prior century?

St. Francis Mission, Midwest Wyoming.

Well, as for the second question, we stray off topic a lot. But as for the first, this is something we've witnessed before, and which makes up pat of the history of this state.  A history we've experienced first hand.

I just posted an item on this, and I should note that I'd started this entry prior to writing the short one I just did.  I didn't post this one when I wrote it last week (often the posts here are delayed days, or years, before they're posted) as I'm busy and I was traveling as well.  Anyhow, those who haven't experienced, and there are a lot of people in that category, have a hard time accepting that things can really dramatically turn around here.  Employment in the extractive industries includes a lot of young people, so that means right now there are a lot of people born after 1990, as amazing as that now seems to me, who are fully adults, and have no personal experience with events of this type really.  Oh, we had a downturn around 2008, but it was nothing like those we experienced earlier.

When I was in the National Guard in the early 1980 the unit was filled with men who were using their military experience to tide them over, hopefully, until better times arrived.  Lots of those men were Vietnam veterans who had returned home after their service and then had entered the work force in the 1970s, when times were good here. They weren't all in the oilfield to be sure, but some were, and quite a few others worked skilled labor jobs of some other type.  A few of the enlisted men were, however, professionals.  One fellow was an accountant, or had been (he was working as a carpenter).  Another had an advanced degree in Spanish and at one time had been a teacher.  Quite a few of those guys were struggling to get by, and their service in the Guard was providing much needed income to their families.

One of those men had a teaching job in Jeffrey City, Wyoming.  He was an officer, but he was sort of an unusual one as he was much more like the enlisted men than the other officers and addressed us in that fashion all of the time.  He'd been a Marine prior to having gone to college and perhaps that explained it somewhat.

Jeffrey City provides a bit of a window into the concern that some of us have now.  In the 1970s it had been a booming town.  By the 1980s, it was struggling as the industry that supported it, uranium mining, was declining.  It's still a town, but certainly not a city, now, but it's a mere shadow of its former self.  It's barely there.  It is there, but it's hardly active. The uranium mines are closed.

Gillette forms another example.  When I was in high school, it was a booming coal town.  It was also really rough.  Going there during high school swim meets was always an experience.  But, by the mid 80s, it had fallen on tough times and was fairly quiet.  It started turning around dramatically with coal bed methane exploration in the 1990s, but now there's a fair amount of concern there over the future of coal, and the coal bed methane industry has pretty much completely shut down.

Wight gives us another example.  A mere road stop in the 80s, it's now a real town with lots of nice new construction. But the economy is completely based on extractive industries.  Residents of the town, if they're familiar with the histories of Gillette and Jeffrey City, must be concerned.

Further down the road are Midwest and Edgerton.  These towns are within a couple of miles of each other, with Midwest having been a Standard Oil company town that also supported the Naval Petroleum Oil Reserve.  One of the streets in Midwest is called "Navy Row", as it at one time housed U.S. Navy personnel stationed at the petroleum reserve.  The reserve has long quit being a Naval facility and the sailors are all gone.  The facility itself, an experimental oilfield facility, was recently sold.  The oilfield is still active, and through the advance of technology oil wells drilled in the 1920s are still producing, but both Midwest and Edgerton have really had their ups and downs.  In the 1940s they were booming.  They were again in the 1970s.  In the 80s they were really suffering, but in the past decade they boomed again.  Now, things are starting to go the other way.

Or take the town of Lance Creek.  Lance Creek was an earlier participant in oil exploration in the state, with oil claims actually filed as placer mining claims.  The field was extensively explored during the 1920s. During World War Two the town ballooned to 4,000 or more people. The population of the town collapsed after the war, and its never recovered. There's still oil that's produced in Niobrara County, but the least populace county in the state has never seen a recovery of an oilfield economy.

The recent article in the Tribune took an interesting look at past ups and downs.  I noted, in reviewing them, that one of them drew some reader comments.  Reader comments to the Tribune tend to draw a lot of snark, but in this case they didn't seem to.  Here's what one reader had to say:

Many of us went through more busts than booms in Wyoming working the oil patch.The current slowdown pales in comparison to the bust of the 1980's.Do yourselves a big favor ...get out of the oil patch while you still can,or pay the price later,in more ways than one.

So far, I'd note, this writer is correct, and I've heard others note this as well. This slow down is less severe than the one in 1983. . . so far. But that one started out milder than it ended up. With these collapses, the collapse doesn't come overnight.  Another reader commented:

We've lived in Wyoming for six decades. We love this state but hate its busts. We were one of many families who were victims of the bust in the early 80's. Lost our jobs, lost our house...lost everything. Though we've recovered it's been a long, long road. I'll never be able to retire comfortably due to the lost time and income. Take it from a man who's been in the fire: save your money now and don't wait!

Dire warning indeed.

The point is that things can really turn around here.  But when you live through them for the first time, it doesn't seem quite real at first.  Here, in the early 80s, in this town, we saw the oilfield collapse and the Standard Oil Refinery close.  Ultimately, the Texaco refinery also closed.  This is and was a small city, but the impact was truly devastating.  Maybe we need not fear that again, but we should be aware that it happened.

Lex Anteinternet: And the pumps kept on.

And following on this:

Lex Anteinternet: And the pumps kept on.: Saudi production has reached 10,000,000 bbl per day, near (or perhaps) an all time record high.  This comes in the face of Saudi resistance ...

I read in the paper this morning that the solar panel industry now employers more people in the US than coal mining.

Indeed, an irony of this is that there's now an effort in some states to tax homeowners who install solar panels, using the logic that they use power on the grid when they cannot generate power on cloudy days. While that's generally true, the law has generally been, or at least was (I haven't kept up on it) that power companies actually had to buy power sent back down the line by domestic solar and wind electrical generation.  This has likely been regarded as a minor inconvenience by power companies for a long time, but now they're becoming irritated in some areas, apparently.

Irrespective of that, solar has quietly come a long way in the past 40 years.  40% of German electrical output is now solar (and if they'd continued to allow nuclear power generation, they'd have darned near 100% non emitting power).  There's no reason to believe that a high American output isn't similarly possible, and perhaps now even probable.

All of this is hugely important to the state of Wyoming, and of course other energy producing states.  With an oil industry that dates back to the 1890s and a coal industry that started when the Union Pacific was first constructed, the state has acclimated itself to the extractive energy industry being the main economic engine of the state.  Coal severance taxes, which were at first stoutly opposed by some, have been funding the state government here for over 40 years now.  The schools are nearly entirely constructed using money generated from taxes on coal.  Coal production has been declining now for several years, and the coal industry's backers have been quite vocal about what they feel should be done to aid the industry, and that it can generate "clean coal".  But the long term trends seem hard to ignore at present.  Coal is being supplemented in the U.S. as a fuel, in Europe its being supplanted.  The trend line in the US seems headed in the same direction unless major technological developments can change the dynamics of the situation.  The coal market right now seems to be mostly China, but Pacific coast states and provinces object to the loading of it, and transportation of coal by sea has its own costs and problems.  So, in spite of hopes in that quarter, and in spite of efforts by Wyoming's politicians in that direction, the Chinese saving the market seems unlikely.

And, as explored here earlier, it seems difficult not to conclude at this point that the Saudi Arabians have made a similar conclusion about future of petroleum oil, and have decided to keep the price on the floor so that they dominate the market during what they have calculated will be the transition phase.  Probably calculating that the beginning of a technological transition from petroleum has commenced and that the process will take about the same amount of time one way or another, by keeping the price low, they'll dominate it during that period of time.  In other words, the money is going to go somewhere, and it might as well go to them.  By keeping the production high, and selling what they'll have, they'll make the most money possible out of their resource and probably try to use that to transition to some other type of economy.  Goodness, knows they need to, as their current culture and economy isn't viable continuing on with its current model.

But for states like Wyoming, which have relied on these industries, the trend line is a bad one for the traditional economy.  Agriculture, Extractive industries, and Tourism have been the three legs of the stool of Wyoming's economy.  There's a pretty good chance that one of those legs is now broken, and there's no really solid idea of what to do to replace it, if it needs to be.

As a final observation, folks who note things like this here are often branded as "antis".  However, as a Wyoming native, and a former crewman on a workover rig, and as a person with a geology degree, I think I can stand on my bonafides.  I'm not declaring this as part of a manifesto, but rather observing as a person given to that by training and inclination.  We probably need to be pondering these topics here.

The return of a perennial bad idea, the transfer of Federal lands to the state.

Every few years Wyoming and the other western states get the idea that the Federal government ought to hand over the Federal domain to the states.  The states don't propose to buy, please note, but just get it.

For those who aren't aware, starting really in the 1860s with the Homestead Act the Federal government started taking a different approach to vast tracks of land it acquired by the surrender, acquisition or simply the theft, of lands held by aboriginal title. Aboriginal title was that title held by the native inhabitants, i.e., the Indians.  The Federal government recognized that title, as the Crown had also, but regarded it as a subservient, less perfect, form of title.  Basically, it was inferior as people who lived a wild, aboriginal life, weren't regarded as civilized, and therefore they couldn't have a civilized title.   The concept sort of was that they didn't really know what they had or how they had it, but they did have something.

From very early in the country's history it was the law that only the Federal government, heir to the rights of the Crown, could dispose of aboriginal title.  States and territories couldn't do it.  Up until the Homestead Act, the Federal government generally handed over most of the land it had to the new state upon statehood, but not all of it.  The land it kept were "reservations", and not just of the "Indian Reservation" type.  Washington D. C., which it acquired by donation, is one such Federal Reservation, or was, in spite of its ceaseless nonsensical whining about wanting to become the only city state in the country, thereby elevating a bad idea to statehood level.

Starting with the Homestead Act, however, the Federal government decided that it would keep much of the Federal domain and allow farmers to acquire it directly from the Federal government. This was done in order to encourage the settlement of lands otherwise regarded by most people as wastelands.  The thesis was that by making the land free, or darned near free, people would be encouraged to give farming or livestock raising on it a go.  The Homestead Act was followed by the Mining Law of 1872, which did the same for mining, with mining given a preferential place over everything else.

This was the system for most of the West until the Taylor Grazing Act when Congress recognized that the Dust Bowl conditions in the West then in play, combined with darned near full homesteading, was wrecking everything.  So, it operated to prevent further homesteading entries and to lease the land to agricultural interests.  A law that provided for leasing of oil and gas rights was already in existence. Finally, in the 1980s (I believe) the Mining Law of 1872 was altered to prevent further land patenting.

This system has worked really well. The  Federal government has been a really good steward of the land and the fact that it belongs to all of us has meant that its been open to agriculture, hunting, fishing, and recreation.

So why would the state's have a problem with that?

Well, they do.  Partly that's because the state's see the Federal domain as a source of income, and partially its because local interests always naively imagine the land ending up in their hands.  People who depend on the Federal domain often have a problem sharing it, and they somehow imagine that if it went to the state, it'd go to them, and they'd own it.

And that's why this is a hideously bad idea.

In reality, allowing Wyoming to own the Federal domain would mean, sooner or later, that it would sell it into private hands.  Those backing the bill in the legislature to support this concept deny that, but that is what would happen.  Local pressure from local interest would scream and cry for this until hit happened. And then they'd be stunned when the land all went to big monied interest elsewhere.

For those who support agriculture, mineral extraction and recreation in this state, which is darned near everyone who lives here, there's no better way to mess that up than to support transferring the Federal domain to Wyoming.  Wyoming is always selling little bits and pieces of what it does own, and sooner or later, it'd do that with all the land it owns.  And at that point, locals would basically own nothing, and be able to go nowhere.

This idea is terrible.  The legislature will almost surely pass it.  Let's hope that Congress doesn't support it.  If it were ever to get through, however, this would be the time.  If that's the case, when the day comes when you can't go anywhere on what the Federal government once owned, remember the names of those who proposed this idea and ask them what they were thinking, unless of course you support the concept, and then you can ask yourself.

Postscript

This bill has now been amended such that the proposal is no longer to study the transfer of the lands, but rather transfer the management of them.

That's certainly a much more reasonable, sort of, prospective, but this too is a poor idea.  After all, if the Federal government is paying for the management of the lands, why opt to take on the expense and burden of that task? The answer would no doubt be that there would be more local control, which is true, and which is why the state has chosen to administer such things that it can, such as the Occupational Health and Safety regulations.  Nonetheless, taking on this burden here, which is well done by the Federal government, seem to be a rather poor idea.

Friday, February 27, 1914. The River of Doubt.

Mexican strongman Victoriano Huerta promised an investigation into the death of Clemente Vergara while, at the same time, Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan announced that the Texas Rangers would not be allowed to cross into Mexico to arrest the suspect Mexican soldiers.

Theodore Roosevelt's and Brazilian explorer Cândido Rondon's expedition team reached Caceres, Brazil, to begin exploration of the Rio da Dúvida, an event from which Roosevelt's health would never recover by the time it was done.

The Vanderbilt Cup race was held.

Locally, the news was asbestos, but not the way it hits the news currently.

Some Gave All: Miner's Memorial, Rock Springs Wyoming

A look at mining, when it was horse powered:

Some Gave All: Miner's Memorial, Rock Springs Wyoming: