Interior Secretary Doug Burgum
Here’s Interior Secretary and fossil fuel tool Doug Burgum in a press statement last Wednesday:
“The United States cannot afford to wait. President Trump has made it clear that our energy security is national security, and these emergency procedures reflect our unwavering commitment to protecting both. We are cutting through unnecessary delays to fast-track the development of American energy and critical minerals—resources that are essential to our economy, our military readiness, and our global competitiveness. By reducing a multi-year permitting process down to just 28 days, the Department will lead with urgency, resolve, and a clear focus on strengthening the nation’s energy independence.”
Donald Trump claims to want “energy dominance” globally. And his bogus “energy emergency” is an element of that. Yet the vastly accelerated 28-day time-frame for completing environmental impact reviews specifically excludes solar and wind projects. Leasing for those was put on pause on Trump’s first day of his second term. The warp speed reviews now being mandated by the Interior Department only include fossil fuels, uranium, geothermal, biofuels, and mining for critical minerals. No solar or wind allowed in the express lane. But, hey! give these guys credit for being transparent in their brazen hostility to the future.
28 Days Later is a cult favorite of zombie movie fans. I don’t know if Secretary Burgum has ever seen it. Probably he just picked 28 days out of a hat when mandating how fast reviews for certain energy and mining projects must now be completed. Only 10 days are allowed for public comment. Four weeks to complete often complex assessments that in the past have taken months or years to finish. Almost no time for public feedback. In other words, zombie reviews.
What we are going to get are super-quick, superficial, eyes-glazed-over, template-driven environmental impact statements performed by a vastly downsized, overburdened federal workforce. A sham. No fault of those workers. The outcome of such reviews is being pre-determined by a ludicrously short time-frame designed to grease the skids for the drill, baby, drill interests.
This is being done in spite of the U.S. now producing more oil and gas than any nation in the history of the world ever. In spite of the climate crisis. In spite of the deaths and disease fossil fuel pollution causes. Trump justifies this speed-up because the powers of the energy emergency he has declared supposedly gives him the authority to do … whatever.
Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, told The New York Times that the permitting speed-up was a “sweeping curtailment of all meaningful public processes.” Moreover, “This is manifestly illegal if for no other reason than this is all a fake emergency. We’ll be in court and we will challenge it.”
The center’s policy lands director Randi Spivak said Interior’s plan “proves that Trump’s fabricated energy emergency is a hoax designed to ram through new fracking and coal mining.” This, she said is a “lose-lose deal” for everyone except for Trump-backing fossil fuel executives who put $100 billion into his 2024 campaign.
In a statement, Athan Manuel, director of Sierra Club’s Lands Protection Program, said:
“Donald Trump has spent years trying to make ‘environmental review’ a four-letter word, but the fact is these assessments keep our communities safe. These arbitrary time limits make a complete review of the risks of potentially hazardous projects impossible. A shoddy review means the true hazards of a project may only be known when the air or water thousands of people rely on is dangerously polluted. Just remember, Donald Trump and his allies are willing to take that risk if it means padding the bottom line of billionaires and corporate polluters.”
Mark Oliver at The Guardian writes:
The [expedited reviews] announcement will amplify fears the Trump administration will shrink federal protections for national monuments in the west.
Interior department officials are considering scaling back at least six national monuments spread across Arizona, California, New Mexico and Utah while analyzing the potential for drilling or mining in the areas, the Washington Post reported on Thursday.
Such shrinkage is certain to be litigated because the matter was in the courts but left unresolved the last time Trump shrank some national monuments.
Accelerated eco-assessments are a prescription for green-lighting the kinds of operations that in the pre-regulatory past turned out to cause harm to people, wildlife, and watercourses. Many such operations, long since abandoned by their deadbeat owners, still taint our public lands and waters. Clean-up costs are estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars. The taxpayers have for decades picked up much of the tab for removing the debris, plugging the holes, and purging the poisons left behind. But what remains uncleansed plagues tens of thousands of spots throughout the western states. Environmental assessments have until now been part of an effort to keep from adding fresh spots.
If quicker, high quality reviews are what is desired, then a means to that expedited end is budgeting for a larger staff. As the cliché has it, there are only so many hours in a day (no matter how much management demands people to work smarter not harder). But instead of making new hires, the DOGE machete is hacking away at the payroll. The objective obviously isn’t high-quality reviews more quickly delivered. Green-washing is. And that is aided by crippling the capabilities of staffs to carry out their congressionally mandated missions. A 28-day deadline for adequately evaluating many projects is an insult, a snarl, a dare.
The smidgen of good news in all this — though it may be temporary — is that current market chaos has led to fewer new North American oil and gas wells being initiated. Plus this truncated time-frame Burgum has announced is going to add more lawsuits to the avalanche being filed against the administration over its various newly declared policies.
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