GILLETTE, Wyo. — As it runs through Orin Edwards's ranch, the Belle Fourche River bubbles like Champagne. The bubbles can burn. They are methane, also called natural gas, the fuel that heats 59 million American homes. Mr. Edwards noticed the bubbles two years ago, after gas wells were drilled on his land. The company that drilled the wells denies responsibility for the flammable river.

An hour's drive west, the artesian well on Roland and Beverly Landrey's ranch has failed. After producing 50 gallons a minute for 34 years, the well, the ranch's only source of water, stopped flowing in September. A well digger who examined it blames energy companies drilling for gas nearby, but the companies dispute that. So the couple — he is 83 and ailing; she describes herself as "no spring chicken" — hauls water in gallon jugs and drives 30 miles to town weekly to wash clothes and bathe.

Dave Bullach, a welder who lives near Gillette, couldn't take it anymore. For two sleep-deprived years, he endured the incessant yowl of a methane compressor, a giant pump that squeezes methane into an underground pipeline. There are thousands of these screaming machines in Wyoming, where neither state nor federal law regulates their noise. Mr. Bullach stormed out of his house at midnight last year with a rifle and shot at the compressor until a sheriff's deputy hauled him off to jail.

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Coal-bed methane accounts for only about 9 percent of the country's proven natural gas reserves, or less than one year's production at current consumption levels, according to the Energy Department. But over the last decade, estimates of likely reserves have soared.

The federal Energy Information Administration has described the Rockies as having the potential to become "a Persian Gulf of natural gas."

There are serious questions, however, about how real that potential is. "In the 1970's, oil shale was hailed as our energy salvation, and it turned into a huge bust," said Pete Morton, an economist with the Wilderness Society. "This could be history repeating itself".

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Ms. Blancett, a lifelong Republican, was Mr. Bush's political organizer in northwestern New Mexico for the 2000 presidential campaign. In November, she and her husband, Linn, and two other ranching families locked out energy companies whose plumbing of the gas beneath the surface of the land, they say, threatens their livelihood.

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In financial terms, ranchers in the basin have become insignificant tenants on federal land. They pay the government a total of about $100,000 a year for grazing rights. Energy companies pay about $350 million in federal royalties on gas they produce.

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"Looking after the Earth is a pay-as-you-go process, but they don't have a plan like that here," said Raymond Plank, chairman of the board of Apache Corporation, one of the largest independent natural gas and oil companies in the United States. It does not operate coal-bed wells in Wyoming.

"What happened here is ready, fire, aim," Mr. Plank said.

He said that if energy companies had to pay for the water they waste, as well as put up bonds to cover all costs of restoring land when wells run dry, they would not make money in the basin.

"I don't happen to think that this gas here is probably economically viable with responsible land and water practices," he said.

The Bush administration's 2004 budget would provide little new funding to treat the overgrown forests that it said were to blame for catastrophic wildfires last year.

The administration wants to spend $416 million in 2004 to cut excess trees in 2.5 million acres of forests that are at severe risk for fire. That is an increase of $3 million over the amount the president proposed for the current year.

Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., the ranking Democrat on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said the administration's recommendation doesn't even keep pace with inflation.

"Obviously the need is enormous," he said. "They talked a lot about it. They just didn't request the funds to do much."

The Bush proposal, released Monday, seeks $231 million for Forest Service treatment programs for the 2004 budget year - up from $228 million in Bush's 2003 request - and $186 million for Interior Department programs, about the same as in 2003.

The timber industry could take a much greater role in managing millions of acres of national forests in California and across the West under a little-noticed provision added at the last minute to Congress' huge domestic spending bill.

The proposal would let the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management award an unlimited number of "stewardship contracts" -- essentially paying logging companies trees for maintaining trails or thinning forests to reduce the risk of wildfire.

Critics say the plan could open up wide swaths of public land to heavier logging.

Cronyism is an important factor in our Iraqi debacle. It's not just that reconstruction is much more expensive than it should be. The really important thing is that cronyism is warping policy: by treating contracts as prizes to be handed to their friends, administration officials are delaying Iraq's recovery, with potentially catastrophic consequences.

It's rarely mentioned nowadays, but at the time of the Marshall Plan, Americans were very concerned about profiteering in the name of patriotism. To get Congressional approval, Truman had to provide assurances that the plan would not become a boondoggle. Funds were administered by an agency independent of the White House, and Marshall promised that priorities would be determined by Europeans, not Americans.

Fortunately, Truman's assurances were credible. Although he is now honored for his postwar leadership, Truman initially rose to prominence as a fierce crusader against war profiteering, which he considered treason.

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For example, in July two enterprising Middle Eastern firms started offering cellphone service in Baghdad, setting up jury-rigged systems compatible with those of neighboring countries. Since the collapse of Baghdad's phone system has been a major source of postwar problems, coalition authorities should have been pleased.

But no: the authorities promptly shut down the services. Cell service, they said, could be offered only by the winners in a bidding process — one whose rules, revealed on July 31, seemed carefully designed to shut out any non-American companies. (In the face of strenuous protests the rules were revised, but still seem to favor the usual suspects.) Oddly, the announcement of the winners, originally scheduled for Sept. 5, keeps being delayed. Meanwhile, only Paul Bremer and his people have cellphones — and, thanks to the baffling decision to give that contract to MCI, even those phones don't work very well. (Aside from the fact that its management perpetrated history's biggest accounting fraud, MCI has no experience in building cell networks.)

Then there's electricity. One reason Iraq still faces blackouts is that local experts and institutions were excluded from the repair business. Instead, the exclusive contract was given to Bechtel, whose Republican ties are almost as strong as Halliburton's. And if a recent story in The Washington Post is accurate, Bechtel continues to ignore pleas by Iraqi engineers for essential spare parts.

Companies awarded $8 billion in contracts to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan have been major campaign donors to President Bush, and their executives have had important political and military connections, according to a study released Thursday.

The study of more than 70 U.S. companies and individual contractors turned up more than $500,000 in donations to the president's 2000 campaign, more than they gave collectively to any other politician over the past dozen years.

A company's profits on the transport and sale of gasoline are usually razor-thin, with companies losing contracts if they overbid by half a penny a gallon. Independent experts who reviewed Halliburton's percentage of its gas importation contract said the company's 26-cent charge per gallon of gas from Kuwait appeared to be extremely high.

"I have never seen anything like this in my life," said Phil Verleger, a California oil economist and the president of the consulting firm PK Verleger LLC. "That's a monopoly premium — that's the only term to describe it. Every logistical firm or oil subsidiary in the United States and Europe would salivate to have that sort of contract."

In March, Halliburton was awarded a no-competition contract to repair Iraq's oil industry, and it has already received more than $1.4 billion in work. That award has been the focus of Congressional scrutiny in part because Vice President Dick Cheney is Halliburton's former chief executive officer. As part of its contract, Halliburton began importing fuel in the spring when gasoline was in short supply in large Iraqi cities.

The government's accounting shows that Halliburton paid its Kuwait subcontractor $1.17 a gallon, when it was selling for 71 cents a gallon wholesale in the Middle East.

In addition, Halliburton is paying $1.21 a gallon to transport the fuel an estimated 400 miles from Kuwait to Iraq, the documents show. It is paying 22 cents a gallon to transport gas into Iraq from Turkey.

The 26 cents a gallon it keeps includes a 2-cent fee and 24 cents for "mark-up costs," the documents show. The mark-up portion is intended to cover the overhead for administering the contract.

Ms. Hall of Halliburton said it was "misleading" for the corps to call it a mark-up. "This simply means overhead costs, which includes the general and administrative costs like light bulbs, paper and employees," she said. "These costs are specifically allowable under the contract with the Corps of Engineers, are defined by detailed regulations, and are scrutinized and approved by U.S. government auditors."

In recent weeks, the costs of importing fuel from Kuwait have risen. Figures provided recently to Congressional investigators by the corps show that Halliburton was charging as much as $3.06 per gallon for fuel from Kuwait in late November.

...The point is not especially that Bush has been a uniquely bad president on trade issues (though perhaps he has, I haven't studied the issue) but rather than in many of these cases -- especially my beloved softwood lumber one -- it's more than obvious that policy has simply been put up for sale to the highest bidder. There is no misguided economic theory at work in this White House.

There is no misplaced humanitarian concern for the third world laborer. There is simply the fact that the US softwood lumber producing industry has evidently paid the President of the United States more money than has the US softwood lumber consuming industry. The only thing this administration has in common with the ideals of free market theory is its seeming determination to demonstrate the truth of the crassest public choice characterizations of public sector decision-making. Does PhARMA want a hundreds of billions in subsidies? Is PhARMA willing to pay? Then subsidies they shall get. Do they want special rules written into a so-called "trade" agreement with Australia? Are they willing to pay? Then they shall have them.

Seriously. Canadians want to sell you cheap wood. Whether or not the availability of this cheap wood is, to some extent, the result of Canadian policy is not the issue. They want to sell it to you. You want to buy it. But George W. Bush won't let you. Instead, he proposes that we get our wood by making it easier to cut down our nation's federally protected forestland. Really. That's the policy. Why let someone else cut down his trees for you, when you could cut down your own trees at greater expense?