Love abounds at Interior hearing

By Jim Tankersley

For all the fire they can spit on C-SPAN, ranting about procedure or policy, the truth is that most United States senators are exceedingly polite to one another in public. Friendly, often.

Every once in a while - like, say, when a sitting member of a senate committee appears before that committee for a hearing into his pending nomination to a cabinet post - you get, in the words of one participant, "a full-fledged bouquet-tossing contest."

And oddly enough, a few nuggets of policy plans.

That's the scene this morning in a meeting of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources committee, which is quizzing committee member Sen. Ken Salazar (D-Colo.) on his nomination to be Interior Secretary under President-elect Barack Obama.

Republicans and Democrats have repeatedly told Salazar how much they admire his integrity and how they'll miss him when he leaves the Senate. They've called him brother, professed their love, and invited him to visit their states (and, in the case of Sen. Mel Martinez of Florida, offered to arrange for him to wrestle alligators in the Everglades).

"I think Mel just probably left to go buy you flowers," Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) joked after Martinez called Salazar a "good friend." This after Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), made the crack about bouquet tossing.

Between gushes, though, the senators made clear they see the Interior Department as broken - whether by sex and graft scandal or what Democrats in particular call a departure from science-based decision making on federal lands and wildlife under President Bush.

They pushed Salazar on a variety of hot policy topics, including protections for gray wolves and other endangered species, drilling for oil and gas off the American coastline and whether he would continue to allow guns in National Parks.

Salazar dodged some questions but sketched some details on others. He opened by saying, if confirmed, "I want to clean up the mess that exists in the Department of Interior."

He pledged support for renewable energy development - a cause he championed as senator - and promised a "balanced approach" to energy and land-use policy. He emphasized his rural roots growing up on a ranch in Colorado's San Luis Valley. And he called for a new national youth conservation program, putting young people to work in parks and public spaces.

He said only that he would "study" whether as secretary he would overturn (or defend from court challenges) a controversial decision late in Bush's term to allow guns in National Parks. Ditto for his position on removing the gray wolf from the endangered species list in the Northern Rockies and the Midwest, a decision announced on Wednesday.

Asked if he believed the government should consider global warming impacts in broad endangered species protection - a position environmentalists favor but the Bush administration rejects - he gave only a hint of an opinion.

"There is no doubt that climate change and global warming is having an impact on a whole host of natural features of this world, including endangered species that we have," Salazar said. "It is something that we will take a look at."

Salazar left himself open to compromise over a pair of domestic oil initiatives: drilling on the outer continental shelf, which he said could make sense in some areas but not others, and leasing federal land for oil-shale development - a particularly hot topic in Colorado, where most shale efforts are located.

"We need to look at it as part of a comprehensive energy plan, but we ought not to be reckless as we move forward," Salazar said, adding later: "We don't have some answers to some very important questions, including how much water it's going to take ... how much energy is going to be consumed to melt the oil from the rock?"

Other stances were more concrete. He committed to pushing reform of the nation's signature mining law, including strengthened provisions for water quality. He pledged to pursue research into so-called "clean coal" technology that seeks to capture and store carbon dioxide emissions from coal to curb global warming.

Many environmental groups support the nomination, but some continue to voice their displeasure. In a press release, Nicole Rosmarino of WildEarth Guardians said Salazar "will not take strong stances on behalf of science and environmental protection and is not up to the task of undoing the enormous damage the Bush administration has done to public lands, endangered species, and the credibility of the Department of the Interior over the last 8 years."

There was nothing close to that kind of criticism at the hearing, even from the senators who admitted they initially felt less than rosy about Salazar's nomination.

From press reports about the nomination, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C) said he was concerned that Salazar's energy approach was "to cut off American energy supply." But after talking this week, he told Salazar at the hearing, he came to believe "we're pretty much on the same page."