Ryan Zinke's Having A Fire Sale On Public Lands - Hardly Anyone Is Buying
Since last March, when Ryan Zinke assumed leadership of the Interior Department, vacating Montana’s lone seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, this sort of ideological conformity has been a top priority. On Wednesday, the department’s Office of Inspector General released a report finding that, between June and October of last year, Zinke reassigned twenty-seven senior officials without reason or adequate warning. Many of them “questioned whether these reassignments were political or punitive,” the report states, “or believed their reassignment may have been related to their prior work assignments, including climate change, energy, or conservation.” (In response, Deputy Secretary David Bernhardt said that the department will continue to use “reassignments robustly as a management tool.”) In some B.L.M. field offices, posters depicting conservation landmarks, such as a federally protected red-rock canyon, have been swapped out for ones showing a towering black coal bed and a yellow haul truck. One Interior Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisal, said that the agency had discontinued its program of making conservation posters publicly available. The new ones are strictly internal—“for employee morale,” the source said, with evident irony.
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Zinke isn’t the first Interior Secretary to see this as the agency’s proper function, but he has been more aggressive than his predecessors at implementing his agenda. So far, he and Trump have eliminated two million acres from the nation’s protected areas, and offered another 11.6 million acres of largely wild public lands to oil-and-gas prospectors. (Zinke also proposed raising entrance fees at some national parks by forty dollars or more, arguing that too many people—“elderly, fourth-graders, veterans, disabled”—get in at a discount or for free. After widespread protest, he announced this week that his department would raise the fee by five dollars.) The most substantial wholesale cuts have been in southern Utah, where Trump shrunk Bears Ears National Monument by eighty-five per cent and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by half. Both monuments were originally protected by Democratic Presidents—Bears Ears, in 2016, by Barack Obama; Grand Staircase, in 1996, by Bill Clinton—and it isn’t yet clear whether Trump has the constitutional authority to reverse their directives. What is clear, though, is why he did it. According to internal agency documents obtained by the Times, the decision was driven by the potential for oil, coal, gas, and uranium exploration within the monuments’ borders. A month before Zinke announced plans to review the status of roughly thirty national monuments, inviting the public to comment, he was in touch with Utah’s congressional delegation about the parts of Bears Ears that could be developed. In the end, the monument’s new boundaries were an almost exact match for what the Utahns wanted.
At the same time, Zinke has revamped the B.L.M.’s oil-and-gas leasing process to make it more industry-friendly. In January, the agency issued new guidelines scrapping many of the reforms that the Obama Administration had enacted. According to Steve Bloch, the legal director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, those reforms emphasized a “think first, lease later” approach, designed to account for the competing claims of local and national stakeholders—politicians, environmentalists, energy companies, hunters, tribal groups, and so on. The new process, Bloch told me, is “intended to offer as many parcels as possible on as fast a schedule as possible.” Under Zinke, the land nominated for leasing no longer requires a pre-sale environmental assessment. The Interior Department official said that the B.L.M. “is pushing us to authorize lease sales in a way that doesn’t trigger the same level of public involvement.” The source added, “We’re gonna get our asses handed to us in court.” In Bloch’s estimation, Zinke’s changes return the B.L.M. to the “ ‘drill here, drill now’ days of the Bush Administration.”
George W. Bush was no friend of the environment, but he could justify his policies, to some extent, on economic grounds. In the early years of his Presidency, the domestic natural-gas supply was sinking and the country was reliant on imported fuel. Bush sought to boost production by auctioning off leases on millions of acres of public land. Since then, the energy sector has changed. Fracking on mostly private lands in the Permian Basin, in Texas, and the Bakken Formation, in North Dakota, has led to an energy surplus. These days, the industry seems to lack serious interest in new oil-and-gas leases on federal lands, which have a “higher break-even price,” according to Kathleen Sgamma, the president of the Western Energy Alliance, a Denver-based trade group. (Sgamma, a longtime critic of Obama’s reforms, now sits on the Interior Department’s Royalty Policy Committee.) Last December, the B.L.M. offered leases on 10.3 million acres in the Alaskan Arctic, a sale that the Trump Administration touted as the largest in U.S. history. Less than one per cent of the land received bids. In March, the agency tried again, this time with fifteen thousand parcels in the Gulf of Mexico. Although Zinke advertised the auction as a “bellwether” for America’s “energy-dominant” future, barely a tenth of the parcels received bids.
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https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/ryan-zinkes-great-american-fire-sale
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