Earlier this month, we saw the passing of Dick Cheney, career politician. He was a White House Chief of Staff, Secretary of Defense, and arguably the most powerful Vice President in American history.
Now is the proper time to assess his conservation legacy, what it means for Wyoming lands and wildlife, and for the rest of the West.
Cheney had one major conservation achievement: the Wyoming Wilderness Act of 1984.
The Act, which he co-sponsored as Wyoming’s lone congressional representative with Wyoming Senators Alan Simpson and Malcolm Wallop, designated almost one million acres of new wilderness.
It designated the Cloud Peak, Popo Agie, and Gros Ventre wildernesses, as well as several smaller wilderness areas on the Medicine Bow National Forest. It was a landmark achievement in Wyoming conservation.
Otherwise, his record was dominated by environmental destruction.
After a stint in the 1990s as Secretary of Defense under the George H.W. Bush administration, Cheney was hired as the CEO of the Halliburton Corporation, a wellfield services company heavily involved in providing wellfield services for drilling corporations.
Specifically, Halliburton was known for hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” the process of pumping chemicals (often highly toxic ones) and sand into oil and gas wells to stimulate production.
While at Halliburton, Cheney was one of the oil and gas executives who oversaw a National Petroleum Council report alleging that more than a third of federal public lands were off-limits to oil and gas leasing and extraction. This was posed as a problem, not as the conservation advantage that it was, and one he would soon be in a position to change.
Ascending to Vice President under the George W. Bush administration, Dick Cheney headed up the White House Energy Task Force, which produced a National Energy Policy report in 2001.
Its recommendations included opening parts of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, fast-tracking oil and gas drilling permits, and flagging every regulation that could adversely affect the energy industry in a special report.
On the positive side, the report recommended investments in renewable energy and energy efficiency improvements, and called for an increase in low-income energy assistance.
It promoted an all-of-the-above approach with hydropower and nuclear energy alongside “clean coal” (which has never existed) and a preference for market-based incentives instead of legally-required standards.
It acknowledged the existence of climate change and the energy industry’s primary role in causing it, but called for technological advancements as the solution, in lieu of reducing dependence on fossil fuels.
The report also recommended that the Bush II administration “work closely with Congress to implement the legislative components of a national energy policy.”
The Cheney-led National Energy Policy led directly to the passage of the Energy Policy Act of 2005.
Central to that legislation were exemptions that hydraulic fracking got from the Safe Drinking Water Act, a provision that became known as the “Halliburton Loophole,” and that conventional drilling got for stormwater runoff under the Clean Water Act.
The Halliburton Loophole, which still stands today, means that fracking chemicals are exempted from federal regulation under the Environmental Protection Agency.
These exemptions would have major implications for Wyoming and other western states, because major gas deposits in “tight” sandstone and shale formations could only be unlocked by fracturing the bedrock.
Groundwater aquifers all across the country would be poisoned as a result, and in some places, local residents could light their tapwater on fire with the gas leaking through the fractures and into their drinking water.
The contamination problem would come home to roost in Pavillion, Wyoming where residents were compelled to truck in drinking water after wells were poisoned.
Fracking opened up the Red Desert and Upper Green River Valley in Wyoming, the Piceance Basin in Colorado, and led to industrialization of western public lands on a vast scale.
That drilling destroyed the mule deer habitats of the Pinedale Mesa, as more than 4,000 gas wells were drilled there, crucial winter ranges and sage grouse habitats.
In Pinedale, the smog from drilling and gas production was worse than that in Los Angeles, often forcing residents to stay indoors.
The Jonah Field went on to become the most environmentally destructive oil and gas field in the West, with up to 128 gas wells approved per square mile. Sage grouse populations tanked.
Mule deer populations dwindled, the Path of the Pronghorn antelope migration – the longest land mammal migration in the lower 48 states – became hemmed in by the gas field, and over time that pronghorn population has declined from 500 animals to only 50 in 2023.
Cheney also was credited with masterminding the massive project to industrialize the Powder River Basin with coalbed methane development.
This short-lived but damaging gas field played out mainly on private lands underlain by federally-owned minerals (so-called “split-estate” lands), destroying ranches, dumping wastewater as salty as the ocean into local watersheds, and dotting the landscape with reservoirs timed perfectly to fuel an epidemic of West Nile virus.
Sage grouse were decimated by both the virus and the habitat fragmentation. Together with the fracking boom farther west, this Cheney-brokered industrial expansion directly led the greater sage grouse to the brink of Endangered Species Act listing.
At the same time, the Bush II administration approved a land-use plan for the Jack Morrow Hills corner of the Red Desert that applied some modest conservation protections. Its land-use plans for the Rawlins and Pinedale Field Offices, on the other hand, were near-total conservation failures, and a ringing endorsement of maximum industrial and commercial extraction.
I was once personally told by a Rawlins BLM employee that Dick Cheney himself had called the Rawlins Field Office to ensure rapid approval of individual drilling permit applications, to get the oil out of the ground and the carbon into the atmosphere that much faster.
At the beginning of Cheney’s vice presidency, a handful of limited oilfields were scattered across Wyoming’s public lands.
After his vice presidency was finished, millions of acres essentially untouched by the bulldozer and the drilling rig had been converted into industrial wastelands. It was a “shock and awe” approach to industrial development.
Dick Cheney’s time as vice president – and the de-facto leader of the nation’s energy and public lands policy – gave his administration the reputation as the worst regime for the environment in modern times, eclipsing even the James Watt years of the Reagan administration.
That assessment has stood the test of time. While the Trump administration has been more aggressively anti-environmental in its policies, it has been more inept and ineffective, with its harmful policies often reversed.
Dick Cheney did more damage than Donald Trump, a tribute to his effectiveness – at destroying the environment.
Erik Molvar is Executive Director of Western Watersheds Project, and after a 24-year stint as an environmental professional in Wyoming, now resides in southern Oregon.
