The Rising Influence of Rising Affluence

[OakesCS]

I thought that "subsurface assets" were owned by the state in the western U.S. too.

CT,
in many cases that is correct, e.g. the Bureau of Land Management owns large %'s of several states. However, the population density difference is important and what population exists tends to be supportive of natural resource exploitation because they benefit from that exploitation via provision of goods and services to the exploiters. In addition, the companies extracting the resources frequently provide a nice tax benefit in addition to the royalty payout.

I suspect most of the grumbling 'ranchers' featured in 'Gasland' are folks sitting on land granted to them or a predecessor by the BLM or one of its predecessors yet they don't like it when somebody else takes advantage of the federal govt's largess. However, i'd bet most folks in these areas are quite happy about the resource utilization and that the grumblers who actually live full time in the areas are a minority. My experience in southern California was that most of the folks who cried loudest about environmental destruction and 'unfair' benefit to natural resource exploiters were city dwellers (e.g. LA actors/actresses) who had no idea where their water, fuel, food, and materials came from, how those things came to them, and were more prone to 'environmental destruction' than the folks they were whining about.

The entire reason for the existence of the BLM and its predecessors was to encourage settlement and development of the western US and in order to accomplish that mission it served as an intermediate between companies who wished to develop natural resources and the federal gov't which lacked the expertise and ability to develop the resources itself. That mission has changed a bit but that's the theory.

http://www.blm.gov/wo/st/en/info/About_BLM/History.html