Intending to merely be an annoyance at an auction of oil & gas rights on public lands, a college student ends up buying those rights and accidentally discovers how effective a conservation tool private land ownership can be.

Image Credit: Yaroslav B

In the last days of the Bush administration, the government began auctioning off oil and gas rights on some Federal lands in the Rocky Mountain States.  Some of these lands were in fairly close proximity to National Parks in Utah, and the call went out from environmental groups to stage their tie-dye vegan drum circles environmental protests outside the auction site.  One of the protesters, a student named Tim DeChristopher, made his way into the building.  He approached the front desk intending to provoke the staff into forcefully removing him.  Instead, the front desk personnel mistook him for a bidder, took down his information, and handed him a bidder’s paddle.

Not only did DeChristopher manage to win drilling rights on a piece of land at the auction (over 22,000 acres), but he raised the price on other lots by a significant margin.  Eventually, people began to ask questions and DeChristopher left, only to be billed over $50,000 for the down payment on the thousands of acres of oil and gas rights he bought.  But once word of what DeChristopher had done got out, donations poured in, and he now has over $100,000 to go towards the land rights.

Now to be fair, DeChristopher never intended to pay for the land, even as he bid on it.  Which I’m pretty sure makes him guilty of fraud. (His claim that bidding at an auction doesn’t constitute a promise to pay is laughable) But what if, instead of spending five hours protesting, those students and activists worked and donated what they earned to a fund to purchase drilling and mining rights? By my math, that small a group working for that short a time could put thousands of dollars towards a purchase. And even if the environmentalists failed to acquire those rights, they could still raise the price of those rights substantially. That would have the twofold effect of scaring off non-serious speculators just looking for a cheap source of oil, and raising the price of the oil drawn from those lands. This would help raise the price of fossil fuels generally, thereby pushing entrepreneurs into looking into alternative energy sources.

DeChristopher’s auction antics aren’t unprecedented. Late last year, Google used the same general idea of auction manipulation to force regulatory changes at the FCC. Google and other entities wanted a new block of the EM broadcast spectrum that was being put on the auction block to be open to the public as a source of free wireless Internet access. Telecom carriers, particularly cell phone companies, scoffed at the idea. They wanted to use the spectrum to expand cell phone network bandwidth and didn’t want to share.  They told Google and its allies to put up or shut up. So Google put up, pledging $4.6 billion to buy the rights to use that spectrum range. Google’s public statements and pledge of money got it so much attention and influence that the FCC decided to implement regulatory requirements forcing whoever ended up purchasing the rights to comply with some of the open access requirements Google proposed. Google ended up losing the auction to Verizon, but it can still claim partial victory by getting the FCC to force the open access requirements on Verizon.

While I won’t speculate on the reason environmental groups don’t generally embrace this method of activism, I will say that it’s perplexing that such an effective method of promoting change goes widely unused.  With the ability of social networking and other communications tools to aggregate money from a large number of people into one place at the speed of light, it’s mind-boggling that more people don’t try this more often.  It’s simple, effective, low risk, and with enough of a support base, easy to do repeatedly until you get the results you want.