In a lease auction the federal Bureau of Land Management sold another 43 parcels of public land in Utah to oil and gas drillers Tuesday. This adds 51,000 acres to the 27,207,018 acres the U.S. government already leases to drillers. Some of those newly leased parcels are near but outside the original boundaries of Bears Ears National Monument. The Trump regime has greatly reduced those boundaries but the matter is expected to be in the courts for what could be years. Some of the leases are so near Hovenweep National Monument that environmental advocates and government land stewards have raised strong objections to the sale.
For the record, the minimum bid per acre to secure a lease is $2. That minimum was set in 1920. Bids for these most recent leases ranged from $2 to $91.
What this leasing shows is what the Interior Department under Ryan Zinke has in mind for Bears Ears, which contains huge amounts of fossil fuels and minerals. The attitude at Interior, of which the BLM is a part, can be gleaned from the response the bureau gave to concerns raised by officials at the National Park Service over the impacts of leasing land on 13 of those parcels covering 17,000 acres near protected lands in Utah and Colorado in the Four Corners region. Juliet Eilperin writes:
According to an Oct. 23 letter, the Park Service outlined concerns about future oil and gas drilling activities on not just Hovenweep, but also three other sites under its jurisdiction in southern Utah: Arches and Canyonlands national parks and Natural Bridges National Monument.
“The visiting public expects high-quality experiences across federal land, and we are concerned that continuing to offer parcels for oil and gas exploration and development in proximity to our parks will be detrimental” to those experiences,” wrote Kate Cannon, superintendent of the Park Service’s Southeast Utah Group.
The seven-page letter critiques several aspects of the environmental analysis the bureau conducted in preparation for the sale, including the extent to which smog-forming ozone represents a threat to Canyonlands and the fact that the bureau did not consider “the significant potential for degradation of dark night skies and soundscapes that would result from oil and gas exploration and development on the lease parcels.”
BLM officials say they worked closely with NPS officials, resolved their concerns, and then went ahead with the leasing of the 13 parcels. Environmental advocates disputed the claim that all the concerns had actually been resolved.
One of those advocates, Stephen Bloch, the legal director with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, which has long supported better protection for the prolific scenic and archaeologically significant lands in that part of the state, said that a decade ago, the organization had blocked a lease auction in the same area. The matter was supposedly resolved when the Obama administration oversaw the creation of a Master Leasing Plan for Utah’s San Juan County. That plan deferred leasing of the 13 parcels until further planning could be completed. Zinke killed that plan last month:
“We’re seeing that BLM is running roughshod over the most spectacular public lands in the country,” Bloch said, and the fact that it “ignored” the comments submitted by a sister agency “clearly tees it up for litigation.”
Zinke’s stance in this matter is no surprise. A year ago this month, in one of the earliest press releases issued after he was confirmed as secretary of Interior, Zinke announced two secretarial orders. One overturned the Obama moratorium of coal leasing on public lands and ended programmatic environmental impact statements on such leasing.
The other directed “a reexamination of the mitigation and climate change policies and guidance across the Department of the Interior in order to better balance conservation strategies and policies with the equally legitimate need of creating jobs for hardworking American families. In particular, the order sets a timetable for review of agency actions that may hamper responsible energy development and reconsideration of regulations related to U.S. oil and natural gas development.”
If you think “better balance” is what Zinke really meant, you’d be on the right track.
Not only does he want to open up previously protected lands to drilling, Zinke also wants to accelerate the process in various ways.
In January, just a day before miners were allowed to stake claims in Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments, Zinke’s deputy directed the BLM to remove “unnecessary impediments and burdens” from the leasing process with the idea of guaranteeing consistent “quarterly oil and gas lease sales.”
Now, in addition to letting the BLM avoid issuing environmental reviews for leases, one of the ways it will speed up the leasing process is by limiting the public comment period to 10 days. Thus is the burden on miners and drillers removed, while the burden on the environment and those who would protect it is increased. Add such anti-environmental recklessness to the Trump legacy.