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On March 27, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland signed an order withdrawing nearly 222,000 acres of federal land in western Colorado’s Thompson Divide area from future mining claims and oil and gas leases. The protected area includes aspen forests, alpine ridges, piñon-juniper-dotted mesas and high-country meadows — diverse habitat that is home to an array of big game species and other wildlife. It stretches from Glenwood Springs to Crested Butte and over to Paonia, home of High Country News’ headquarters.
The move was a big deal for the eclectic ensemble of local ranchers, environmentalists and recreational users who had spent the last two decades fighting proposed mining and fossil fuel development in the area. It solidified a decade-old ban on new oil and gas leases while also driving a nail into the coffin of a thwarted bid to mine molybdenum on the “Red Lady,” a wildflower-strewn mountain outside Crested Butte.
The Thompson Divide protections cover just one-tenth of 1% of the land administered by the Bureau of Land Management. So a cynic might see this temporary withdrawal — it expires in 2044 — as little more than a mildly consequential attempt by President Joe Biden to further differentiate himself from his Republican rival and perhaps regain the support of voters disillusioned by his administration’s failure to end or significantly curtail fossil fuel development on public lands.
Zoom out a bit, though, and a much different picture reveals itself: The Thompson Divide withdrawal, like the Chaco region leasing ban, is merely one piece in a far larger policy puzzle. Taken alone, they’re not terribly significant. But the whole is far greater than the sum of the parts: It’s the most significant shift in public-land management since Congress passed the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976, which mandated multiple use and sought to rid the BLM of its reputation as the “Bureau of Livestock and Mining,” in the process rocking the Western political landscape and sparking the Sagebrush Rebellion.
The administration has issued so many public-lands-related orders, rules and protections over the last several weeks that I’ve had a tough time keeping up. Tracking the environmentalists’ fluctuating responses — along with the growing outrage from Republican officials — has been downright exhausting, and at times exasperating. The recent acts include:
The BLM finalized its methane waste prevention rule on March 27, requiring operators on public lands to find and repair leaks and to reduce flaring and venting of the potent greenhouse gas. Each year, oil and gas facilities on federal land lose about 44.2 billion cubic feet of methane — i.e., natural gas — and other associated gases to venting and flaring alone. This equates to burning 2.7 million tons of coal, and it also robs American taxpayers of as much as $32 million per year in lost royalties. The rule will not only require drillers to capture or reuse methane when feasible, it will also charge royalties on wasted gas, bringing in tens of millions of dollars annually in additional revenue.
The administration blocked new oil and gas leases on 13 million acres — or just over half — of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. The move is a bittersweet victory for environmentalists; it doesn’t affect the gargantuan Willow Project, which the Biden administration approved last year, or any other active leases in the reserve. Alaska Republicans slammed Biden nonetheless, calling his action an “illegal” blow and a “one-two punch” to the state’s economy.
The administration revoked a Trump-era approval for the proposed 211-mile Ambler industrial road through northwestern Alaska wilderness, saying it would violate environmental laws and harm wildlife and Indigenous subsistence hunters. The road would give mining companies access to a massive copper deposit buried beneath ecologically sensitive lands.
The Biden administration also blocked new mining claims and oil and gas leases on 4,200 acres of federal land near Placitas, New Mexico, for the next 50 years. The Pueblos of San Felipe and Santa Ana consider the land in question sacred.
The administration finalized rules raising royalty rates and reclamation bonding amounts for oil and gas drilling on federal land. Environmentalists welcomed the new rules, which mark one of the most significant changes to the Mineral Leasing Act since it became law in 1920. However, some argued that they did not go far enough to reduce hydrocarbon production — or reduce the resulting emissions — from public lands. And a ProPublica/Capital & Main investigation found that the new bonding amounts, which were based on flawed math, would not be nearly enough to cover the actual costs of cleaning up all the wells. Meanwhile, New Mexico’s oil and gas industry, which has enjoyed record-high profits in recent years, whined: “The new anti-oil and gas development policies will substantially handcuff production opportunities for small producers.”
Probably the most intense reactions — of both elation and anger — came in response to last week’s finalization of the public-lands rule, designed to put conservation on a par with oil and gas development, grazing and other extractive uses. The rule directs the agency to prioritize landscape health and creates a mechanism enabling outside entities to lease public land for restoration projects, much as a rancher or oil and gas company might lease BLM land. It also allows firms to lease land for mitigation work to offset impacts from development elsewhere on public lands, and it clarifies the process for designating areas of critical environmental concern, or ACECs, where land managers can add extra regulations to protect cultural or natural resources. And it directs the agency to incorporate Indigenous knowledge into decision-making, particularly when considering ACECs.
Environmentalists lauded the decision. In a written statement, Wilderness Society President Jamie Williams called it a “generation-defining shift in how we manage our shared resources.” It was met by an equally fervent but entirely opposite response from conservative lawmakers. Rep. Lauren Boebert, a Colorado Republican, denounced it as a “land grab” that would “end federal grazing” and block access to public lands — a misguided worry that was echoed by a variety of her GOP colleagues.
Both responses are likely to prove excessive. The rule doesn’t add any new restrictions or put any public land off-limits to development, nor does it give greens the power to expel a legitimate drilling, mining or grazing operation in order to do a restoration project. It simply provides new tools to help the BLM uphold the multiple-use charge that Congress mandated nearly 50 years ago, before the agency went astray during the Reagan and successive Bush administrations. And Boebert’s notion that it will hurt grazing is especially off-base: While Biden has occasionally stood up to the oil industry, he has done nothing to reform public-lands grazing policy, much to conservationists’ dismay.
Again, taken on its own, the new rule is hardly radical or revolutionary. But combined with the administration’s other actions — from significantly reducing the amount of land leased to oil and gas companies, to restricting energy development via resource management plans, to establishing new and restoring shrunken national monuments — it begins to amount to something important. At long last, a coherent — if imperfect — public-lands climate policy has begun to take shape.
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