usa president and so while they were and don't forget they used bribery to hear the bureau of land management had given away the macondo well the one that blew up that was worth a fortune they are supposed to be paying for us taxpayers a windfall some if the oil they were pulling from the gulf sold for more than forty dollars a barrel it went up to as high as one hundred forty dollars

land and their citizens. in june of two thousand and seven newly elected colorado governor bill ritter was faced with a critical confrontation with the bureau of land management an agency of the interior parts they had authorized more than fifteen hundred new gas wells on the rhone plateau one of the last pristine areas and garfield county we just started with a very modest request a hundred twenty days for a new administration and we were turned down and we don't think twenty four days is enough for us to be able to really have a thoughtful and. proven response there's too much that we don't know for us to be able to really respond in a very short amount of time so that's why i'm going to push very hard with secretary kempthorne and i asked him to grant the governor the request the governor has made of him. in the summer of two thousand and eight in spite of protests from governor ritter and colorado legislators the bureau of land management went ahead with the federal auction of leases on the rhone plateau. the entire top of the plateau fifty five thousand acres it was leased nearly fifteen thousand citizens sent protest letters but the bureau found the pro

was in bed with the bureau of land management when i say in bed i don't mean that metaphorically b.p. executives are sleeping with b.l.m. well and i mean the outs get. cheap bribes the one thing i'll say about these series and that the people in the other in the cast because they want to get to one more question here we don't have much time ago to you know it's all body so yes a typical day in the life of a of a b.p. executive briberies beatings and blowouts once there and game here i mean this is a finite resources there and him to block renewables pump the last few trillions of dollars out of the out of the ground of oil out of the ground and then just wait for the crowd i mean what's the point here. i mean it whenever there's something scarce the scarcer an item is on wire it's air not remember there are don't forget the number one rule for oil the lower the supply the higher the price the idea that oil companies are looking for oil as it is in sync looking to lock up the oil supplies these are guys who make money on scarcity and make money on the sastre the b.p. blowout actually e

of natural gas wells. >> suarez: for guys like bloch, it's never really over. he pointed out land near utah's desolation canyon, where the bureau of land management recently approved 1,298 new wells for the natural gas company gasco. >> the desolation canyon stretch of the green river is truly one of the big gems of american public lands. it's a remarkably wild landscape. one of the largest roadless areas in the lower 48 and that will be lost. the level of development will be significant. it'll significantly impact that area. >> suarez: the decision was a huge disappointment for bloch, who says once these places are developed, there's no going back. though new leases require companies to leave the land the way they found it, a desert is very slow to heal and hard to reclaim. >> woodruff: as ray has pointed out, modern drilling technology is largely responsible for the changing energy picture in this country. that technology involves a process known as fracking. in earlier reports, the newshour has covered the intense debate about fracking itself, otherwise known as "hydraulic fracturing." you can find links to our reports, plus much more information aboufracking,