Former Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne and the Bush administration got a lot of publicity for the last minute effort to open up sensitive lands to oil and gas leasing but that wasn’t all they were doing.

Just before Kempthorne and fellow Idahoan Jim Caswell, the former Bureau of Land Management director left town they issued an order that will allow the agency to accelerate permitting for wind, solar, biomass and geothermal energy projects on what used to be called BLM lands but now are known as public lands.

Kempthorne’s secretarial order is not as powerful as a presidential order but it likely holds someone stops it.

Don’t be surprised if someone wants Ken Salazar to reverse it. Not only does it speed up permits for alternative energy projects, which themselves are already controversial in many areas but it also speeds permitting for the electrical transmission facilities that will be needed to make them viable.

The order also allows the BLM to set up coordination offices in Wyoming, Arizona, California and Nevada, where there is the most interest. Idaho state policies and the policies of its utilities have kept it from having a major run on wind energy development, which may be good or bad depending on your point of view.

I suspect one of the reasons for the rule was to allow some permitting to get finished before a decision on sage grouse is made in May.