The budgets of Palin's first two years were buoyed by high oil revenues and lots of money for construction projects, but oil has plummeted from a high of $144 a barrel last summer to $67.43 on Tuesday.
Last year's budget was built to break even with oil at $75 a barrel, state officials have said. If the price stays down, the state will have to dip into savings and feel new pressures to cut spending.
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The GAO found that current practices to expedite drilling, such as increasing the rent on federal lands not being drilled, did not do enough to spur production. Only about 26 percent of offshore leases and 6 percent of federal leases on land issued from 1987 to 1996 had been drilled by 2007.
The percentage that produced oil and gas was even smaller - 12 percent offshore and 5 percent on land.
Today, I drove through the mountain towns where I was born and grew up. Through the valley decimated 26 years ago when Exxon abruptly pulled out of its $5 billion Colony oil shale project near Parachute. And partway up the highway toward the Piceance Creek Basin where 40 years ago I worked as a roughneck on exploratory rigs that mapped the region's oil shale.
Back to 1910, the government has reserved some of these lands for energy development.
As a kid in the '50s I remember driving out with my father near the town that later was renamed Parachute. There were lots for sale platted in the desert, and street signs marking the blocks. Oil development was going to make this a thriving city, with a monorail to the top of Battlement Mesa.
He took a pass, as did everybody else.
The unpopulated desert is still there, though you can now spot oil and gas rigs and staging areas on either side of the Colorado River. Late afternoon, cars back up at the Battlement Mesa exit, heading for the cheap housing built back in 1981. It's not a place you'd choose to live unless you drove a white F250 with an extra diesel tank in the back. And then, it's only temporary.
Still, there are people looking at oil through computer screens who want to believe in the monorail. All we have to do is drill, baby. Let the oil companies loose.
They see energy independence where I see my dad shaking his head and driving back to Glenwood Springs
