Saturday Evening Notes -- July 3, 2021

Pelicans: This is pretty cool. North America's largest pelican summer refuge is in North Dakota. 

McKenzie County skippers. Link to The Bismarck Tribune. McKenzie County home to a near-endangered butterfly, the skipper. If blocked by the paywall or if you want to avoid the ads, click on this link, and then just add one more note: environmentalists seek to get this nondescript insect on the endangered list. The little-known butterfly makes its home in McKenzie County. Yes, you can see where this is headed. 

Kabuki dance? Oil boom, Native Americans, and Biden administration. Link to AP News. 

On oil well pads carved from the wheat fields around Lake Sakakawea, hundreds of pump jacks slowly bob to extract 100 million barrels of crude annually from a reservation shared by three Native American tribes.

About half their 16,000 members live on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation atop one of the biggest U.S. oil discoveries in decades, North Dakota’s Bakken shale formation.

The drilling rush has brought the tribes unimagined wealth -- more than $1.5 billion and counting -- and they hope it will last another 20 to 25 years. The boom also propelled an almost tenfold spike in oil production from Native American lands since 2009, federal data shows, complicating efforts by President Joe Biden to curb carbon emissions.

Burning of oil from tribal lands overseen by the U.S. government now produces greenhouse gases equivalent to about 12 million vehicles a year, according to an Associated Press analysis. But Biden exempted Native American lands from a suspension of new oil and gas leases on government-managed land in deference to tribes’ sovereign status.

Later tonight: you might find me here.