This is an installment of the Landline, a fortnightly newsletter from High Country News about land, water, wildlife, climate and conservation in the Western United States. Sign up to get it in your inbox.
A few months ago, the Bureau of Land Management quietly proposed a new rule designed to “guide the balanced management of public lands,” putting conservation on a par with other uses, such as grazing, oil and gas drilling and mining. Among other things, it would allow individuals or entities to lease public parcels for conservation purposes, including habitat restoration or invasive species eradication.
To many observers, myself included, the proposal seemed unremarkable, basically a clarification of the multiple-use framework mandated by the 1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act. Nothing about it was particularly earth-shattering or new. Environmental groups mostly supported it, albeit tepidly, though some thought that the conservation lease idea might do more harm than good. Initially, the response from the extractive industries and their enablers in Washington, D.C., was similarly subdued — with one or two exceptions.
But then, a few weeks after the new rule was unveiled, a backlash erupted for reasons I cannot fathom. It started out when Montana Republican Rep. Matt Rosedale, in a moment of rare candor, admitted that he didn’t think conservation was “supposed to be on equal footing” with extractive uses. Soon, it became a raging rhetorical inferno, with the misinformation conflagration climaxing at a U.S. House Natural Resources Committee sh*%show … er, hearing on June 15. The Republican-led committee — whose motto is “putting conservatives back into conservation” — wanted to discuss a bill that would block a rule aimed at putting conservation back into public-land management.
Republican South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem was one of the star witnesses, despite the fact that her state contains just .12% of the lands to which the rule would apply. The rule, she said, would be “devastating” for her state, because it would create “a mechanism like a conservation lease that could be bought by third parties, not even necessarily by people in our own country, and give them access and authority over these lands. It’s dangerous.”
Noem did not explain what she meant by third parties — or first or second parties for that matter — nor why that theoretical third party would be any more dangerous than the first two. She is also apparently unaware of the fact that foreign-owned corporations are regularly given access to and authority over the nation’s public lands — including the ability to rip them apart for profit — in the form of the mining claims and coal, oil and natural gas leases that she and other Republicans enthusiastically support.
While Noem may be dismissed as merely ill-informed, the same cannot be said of her co-witness, Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon, also a Republican. Gordon opened his testimony by declaring that he was a conservationist, which was, at least at some point, perfectly true: He once served as treasurer for the Sierra Club and wrote that oil and gas drilling had turned the once “pleasant little Western town” in which he lived into “the place that stinks on the way to Casper”. (Fun fact: He also served on the board of High Country News in the early 2000s.)
The new rule cannot be used to boot cows, pumpjacks, mines, wind turbines or any other existing uses off public land.
But times — and Gordon — have clearly changed: The governor then went on to deride conservation, claiming that the proposed rule would allow environmentalists to put conservation leases on active grazing allotments and force all the cattle off the land. This is blatantly false, and if Gordon had read the actual text of the rule, he surely would have known it. The draft rule may contain some ambiguity, but it is clear about one thing: It cannot “disturb existing authorizations (or) valid existing rights.” Which is to say: The new rule cannot be used to boot cows, pumpjacks, mines, wind turbines or any other existing uses off public land.
“Everything this administration does is about climate,” Gordon railed, veering away from the topic at hand, complaining that President Biden and company are “holding back the fossil fuel industry” and that “we can’t get a lease out of this administration. We can’t get a permit out of this administration.”
This is also untrue. In fact, on June 28 and 29, oil and gas companies had the opportunity to log into EnergyNet and bid on 116 oil and gas leases covering 127,000 acres of public land in Gordon’s own state, adding to the more than 7.5 million acres of leases already in effect in Wyoming. Meanwhile, the BLM has handed more than 300 drilling permits to operators in Wyoming this year alone, bringing the total of approved and available-to-drill permits in the state to nearly 2,000.
As the hearing dragged on, it became clear that the Republicans either do not understand the proposed rule or — more likely — do not want to understand it, because understanding it would force them to acknowledge that it’s not going to impede fossil fuel development or livestock operations or any other extractive development. And if they were to acknowledge that, they’d have no reason to be outraged and, therefore, no reason to exist.
Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert, who represents the HCN HQ’s home district in western Colorado, grilled BLM Deputy Director Nada Wolff Culver about whether the rule would impact existing grazing, impede forest management or “lock up more land.”
“No, it will not,” Culver said, adding that the agency simply was “implementing the Federal Land Management and Policy Act.” Boebert then demanded that Culver put that in writing. Thing is, it already is written in the 22-page proposed rule published in the Federal Register nearly three months ago. Had any of these folks bothered to read it, perhaps all this brouhaha wouldn’t have been necessary.
It went on, and on, and on like this. Rep. Doug LaMalfa, R-Calif., used his time to spread climate-denial pseudoscience on carbon dioxide. Utah’s Rep. John Curtis brought out the old “absentee landlord” trope about Eastern bureaucrats making decisions that affect the West, willfully ignoring the fact that Interior Secretary Deb Haaland is a member of the Pueblo of Laguna and, as she puts it, a 35th generation New Mexican. Immediately thereafter, Rep. Pete Stauber, R-Minn., slammed the proposed BLM rule for all the restrictions it allegedly would bring. His state, Minnesota, has exactly zero acres of BLM land.
Rep. Melanie Stansbury, of New Mexico (13.5 million acres of BLM land), was born in Farmington, where her dad worked in the oil fields and her mom at the San Juan power plant. The Democrat assured her colleagues the rule would not impede fossil fuel development or grazing. “I support this rule (because) it will help us manage our lands in a more balanced way,” she said. “I find it very upsetting when I see the resources of this body of Congress … being used to put forward narratives and misinformation that … is intended to scare the American people. Much of what I’ve heard here today is just not true.”
The Interior Department has extended the public comment period on the rule until July 5. So you’ve still got a few days to weigh in.
In related news:
There are conflicting views regarding how the proposed Public Lands Rule would affect renewable energy development.
The Los Angeles Times’ Sammy Roth reported that some wind and solar industry officials worry the rule could give environmentalists and local BLM officials more tools to block future utility-scale solar or wind development. They point specifically to a provision that would extend rangeland health standards to all public lands and to another that would make it easier for agency offices to establish areas of critical environmental concern, or ACECs.
But Wolff Culver told Roth that neither provision is likely to hamper renewable energy projects. ACECs are already widely used by the agency; the new rule would merely consolidate, clarify and codify the procedure for establishing them. As for the rangeland health standards? The agency has never done a decent job of enforcing these standards for livestock operators, so why would it suddenly start using them to block solar projects?
The Center for American Progress said the new rule would actually encourage clean energy development. The proposed conservation leases, Drew McConville wrote, provide a potential framework for developers to do “compensatory mitigation,” or offset the impacts of a solar or wind facility by doing restoration work on another parcel of public land.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration is pulling out all the stops to facilitate clean energy development in other ways:
Haaland traveled to Rawlins, Wyoming, last week to help celebrate the groundbreaking of the TransWest Express transmission project. The high-voltage line will carry wind power from the massive Chokecherry and Sierra Madre wind projects outside Rawlins westward to the California grid. Permitting for the project took 15 years.
The BLM proposed yet another rule, this one aiming to promote utility-scale solar and wind development on public land by reducing rents and fees significantly and streamlining right-of-way permitting.
In May, the Biden administration announced that it would expedite the review of the proposed revival and expansion of the Hermosa manganese and zinc mine in southern Arizona. The Australian owner of the mine said it is needed to meet growing demand for electric vehicle battery materials.
But one place will remain off-limits to “green metal” mining: An ancient dry lakebed in Nevada. The Associated Pressreported that mining companies had targeted the site for its abundant lithium, which is used in batteries for EVs, energy storage and other applications. But it turns out the site is even more valuable to NASA, and for a very different purpose: satellite calibration. And so the BLM withdrew the 36-square-mile site from mineral exploration. The agency has not extended the same courtesy to the tribal nations seeking to block the Thacker Pass lithium mine from destroying a sacred site.
Hold the Line: Stories from HCN and elsewhere that are worth your time
Utah’s leaders may not be too keen on Bears Ears National Monument, but that hasn’t stopped them from moving forward with a related land exchange that promises to be quite lucrative for the state. Currently, the 1.3 million-acre national monument is punctuated by more than 100,000 acres of Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration, or SITLA, parcels. In order to clear up the resulting checkerboard land-management pattern, the BLM plans to gain control of SITLA’s inholdings by exchanging them for federal parcels outside the national monument. The state stands to benefit financially because the parcels it would acquire tend to be in areas that are more favorable for mineral, energy or real estate development. For example, SITLA would gain land in uranium-rich areas like the Lisbon Valley in San Juan County and the Shitamaring Creek drainage in Garfield County, as well as in areas now being targeted for lithium development near Green River.
Rep. John Curtis, R, introduced House legislation that would finalize the swap, and both the Bears Ears Commission and Utah environmental groups have thrown their support behind the bill. Utah State Rep. Phil Lyman, R, an outspoken opponent of federal land management and Bears Ears National Monument, has come out in strong opposition, telling FOX 13 News’ Ben Winslow that the swap is “of, by and for the environmentalists” and that he intends to sue to stop “this unconstitutional transfer of land.” | FOX 13 News
Shortly after a blistering “heat dome” event gripped the Northwest in 2021, killing hundreds of people, along with birds and other wildlife, scientists determined that such an event would have been “virtually impossible without human-caused climate change.” In other words, this was not a natural disaster, but a human-made one. And the main culprit behind climate change is the combustion of fossil fuels, such as oil, coal and natural gas. Multnomah County, Oregon, is now looking to hold the corporations that have profited from carbon emissions accountable. Last week, the county sued 17 oil and gas companies seeking nearly $52 billion in damages and future costs for climate adaptation, adding to a pile of similar lawsuits from local governments around the West. | OPB
Extreme weather and fossil fuels met up in a very different way in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin last week, when a tornado tore through the North Antelope Rochelle Mine, the nation’s largest coal mine, toppling train cars and buses and injuring eight workers. Peabody Energy suspended operations at the mine following the event. | Associated Press
A note to Landline readers: After today’s newsletter, we’ll be moving to a new frequency, publishing once every month, on the last Thursday of the month. See you again in late July.
Your news tips, comments, ideas and feedback are appreciated and often shared. Give Jonathan a ring at the Landline, 970-648-4472, or send us an email at landline@hcn.org.
Jonathan Thompson is a contributing editor at High Country News. He is the author of Sagebrush Empire: How a Remote Utah County Became the Battlefront of American Public Lands.
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