Public Lands and Just Energy Transitions
This post is part of a series related to the March 12 Conference on Public Lands and Energy Transitions that was hosted by the George Washington University Law School's Environment and Energy Law Program.
Our vast public lands and waters are both a major contributor to the global climate crisis and a potential solution to the problem. The extraction and use of oil and gas resources from public lands and waters produce 20 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. If the public lands were its own nation, it would be the fifth largest global emitter of GHGs.
The scale of this problem has been exacerbated by the current administration. Since the start of the Trump administration, the U.S. Department of the Interior – the primary federal agency charged by Congress with managing the use of public lands and waters – has used its statutory authority to open up a record number of acres for new fossil fuel development and to roll back Obama-era regulations designed to reduce methane emissions and other pollution associated with existing fossil fuel development. The current administration has thus used the public lands to boost the profits of major oil and gas companies at the …
This blog post was originally published by the Environmental Law Institute at https://www.eli.org/vibrant-environment-blog and is republished with permission. It is cross-posted here as part of an upcoming series related to the March 12 Conference on Public Lands and Energy Transitions hosted by the George Washington University Law School's Environment and Energy Law Program.
With the help of the U.S. Congress, the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) has had a long and proud history of tackling pressing challenges through responsible and inclusive management of America's public lands. One might expect it would continue that tradition as climate change has become a major challenge confronting the nation.
Not so. In fact, Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt has been doing more than any of his predecessors to promote fossil fuel development on America's public lands, all the while dancing around the issue …
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