“...Utah would be one of the wealthiest COUNTRIES in the world based on their clan coal and mineral resources that were stolen by the Feds.”
Who owns the land those coal and mineral resources came from and how did they come to own it? (That’s not a trick question, but a straight forward question the answer to which I don’t yet know.)
“Who owns the land those coal and mineral resources came from and how did they come to own it? (That’s not a trick question, but a straight forward question the answer to which I don’t yet know.)”
Back in the Clinton administration, Bill grabbed the clean coal by making the area that it’s under a federal reserve or park or something. He did this because he was getting campaign donations from an Indonesian guy who just happened to own a lot of land that held this same type of coal. Instead of getting it from Utah, we ended up having to import the Indonesian variety.
That's a good question - The short answer is the states but the feds coerced them to adapt federal regulations into their state laws by attaching strings to federal funding.
Western public lands for the most part where managed by the the states up until the BLM was formed in 1932. The arrangement was intended to provide access to all interests via leases - ranchers, oilmen, miners, ect with both the states & feds sharing the mineral rights. When the eviroNazis got a hold of the BLM during the Carter years they broke that arrangement and tried (and mostly failed) to force a lot of it into no-humans-allowed-wilderness-area.
The fact is the counties have the right to overide the feds. Kane county Utah did just that several years ago when the BLM tried to make most of their county (in the Escalante Staircase Nat Monument) off limits to ATVs. The sheriff & his posse simply uprooted each offending "trail closed" sign and informed the BLM those 100+ year old trails were in fact going to stay open; which they did.