Ted Zukoski / Earthjustice
Mount Gunnison perched atop the Sunset Roadless Area in Colorado. Photo by Ted Zukoski, courtesy of Earthjustice.
Last week the U.S. Forest Service took a dangerous step toward opening up more fossil fuel development on public lands, further highlighting the fact that the federal coal leasing program is undermining President Obama’s climate objectives.
The Forest Service’s proposed Arch Coal Loophole would carve out an exemption in the Colorado Roadless Rule to allow Arch to build roads and methane venting well pads in 19,000 acres of otherwise-protected Roadless Areas in Colorado’s strikingly beautiful North Fork Valley. It would also open up nearly 350 million tons of coal, release millions of tons of methane, and result in more than half a billion tons of carbon pollution.
The proposal is bad for public lands, bad for climate, and bad for the American people. Although it is obvious why Arch wants the loophole -- the company lost a reported $558 million in 2014 -- it’s less clear why the Forest Service wants to undermine President Obama’s climate objectives, sacrifice public lands, and kowtow to the second largest coal company in the country at a time when the rest of the Obama Administration is showing real leadership on climate.
The Clean Power Plan, Climate Action Plan, strong nationwide emission reduction targets, and fuel efficiency standards could all make a real difference. And we need them to -- a recent study in Nature magazine concluded that if we are to keep climate disruption within manageable levels, 80 percent of global coal reserves, half of all oil reserves, and a third of oil reserves must stay in the ground through 2050.[1]
Unfortunately the president’s climate objectives are being undermined by federal coal leasing practices,[2] and the Arch Coal Loophole is a big step in the wrong direction for both the Forest Service and the Obama administration.
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So how did we get here?
The Arch Coal Loophole is basically an exception to an exception, carving out a large swath of otherwise-protected Forest Service land and opening it up to development by one coal company.[3] In 2001, the Clinton administration finalized a national Roadless Rule, effectively prohibiting logging and road building in 58 million acres of National Forests.
In 2012, the Forest Service finalized a state-specific Colorado Roadless Rule that was generally less protective of roadless areas than the national rule. Governing 4.2 million acres of National Forests in the state, the Colorado Roadless Rule included a myriad of allowances for ski resorts, utilities, and other interest groups, including the exact same Arch Coal Loophole for coal mines that the Forest Service has recently proposed putting back in place.
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In June 2014, in a suit brought by the Sierra Club, WildEarth Guardians, High Country Conservation Advocates, and Earthjustice, the federal District Court in Colorado issued a landmark decision invalidating the coal mining loophole and a proposed expansion of Arch’s West Elk Mine into the Sunset Roadless Area.
The Court ruled first that the Forest Service fundamentally misrepresented the climate impacts of the coal mining loophole. For years the government has relied on an economic slight of hand to assert that none of its coal leases, no matter how large, have any impact on climate change because even if federal agencies rejected a specific mining proposal, other coal would be mined and burned instead. But that is not how supply and demand work -- price and supply matter when determining how much coal gets burned and how much carbon dioxide emitted -- and court dismissed the agency’s economic fiction as “illogical at best.”
Second, the Court rejected federal agencies’ attempt to ignore the impacts of climate pollution when approving the expansion of the West Elk mine. In particular, the Court found that the agency should have used the social cost of carbon to analyze the climate impacts of the proposed mine expansion. As the Court explained, “[i]n effect the agency prepared half of a cost-benefit analysis, incorrectly claimed that it was impossible to quantify the costs, and then relied on the anticipated benefits to approve the project.”
With these two fundamental flaws drawn squarely into the open, the Court vacated both the loophole and the West Elk expansion.
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That brings us to the Forest Service’s proposed Arch Coal Loophole -- a trade-off that is dangerously out of step with the president’s priorities, bad on climate, and bad on public lands. Just this week, Vice President Biden took the coal industry to task for ignoring market realities and abandoning coal mining communities. Even more damning, last month Secretary of Interior Sally Jewell openly questioned how leasing publicly-owned coal could be managed in a way that is consistent with the president’s climate goals, saying “it’s time for an honest and open conversation” about the federal coal leasing program.
Secretary Jewell and Vice President Biden are right. America is demanding clean energy solutions, and it is high time for an open and honest conversation about the federal coal leasing program. The misguided Arch Coal Loophole is a great place to start.
Be part of that conversation. TAKE ACTION NOW. The public has until May 22 to tell the Obama administration to reject the Arch Coal Loophole and keep this coal in the ground.
[1] Christophe McGlade and Paul Elkins, The Geographical Distribution of Fossil Fuels Unused When Limiting Global Warming to 2 °C, NATURE (Jan. 8, 2015).
[2] As recently noted in a report by the Center for American Progress and The Wilderness Society, federal lands and waters managed by the Department of Interior are responsible for more than 20 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.
[3] Aside from Arch Coal, the only other coal company that could even potentially benefit from the loophole is the Oxbow Mine, which literally caught fire last summer and has stopped operating, leaving Arch as the sole beneficiary.