An Honest Conversation About Coal, Climate, and the Future of America’s Public Lands
“Rather than subsidize the past, we should invest in the future.”
If you care about climate disruption and the future of our public lands, big changes are afoot.
Last week, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell made good on her promise to have an “honest and open conversation” with the American people about the future of the federal coal leasing program.
Three days after President Obama used his last State of the Union address to pledge changes to “the way we manage our oil and coal resources, so that they better reflect the costs they impose on taxpayers and the planet,” Secretary Jewell announced that her agency would take the first-ever comprehensive look at the climate impacts of mining and burning coal from our publicly-owned lands. The review will also examine a laundry list of taxpayer protection issues that should help ensure that the public receives a fair price on the sale of taxpayer-owned coal.
The announcement marks a sea change for our public lands, for our climate, and for an Administration that is clearly interested in using its last months in office to continue backing up strong climate rhetoric with meaningful climate action.
The Devil’s in the Details, and the Details are Good
Interior’s announcement, and the Secretarial Order that implements these changes, have three main components:
1. Comprehensive review, heavy on climate and taxpayer protections
The Secretary announced it will prepare a Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (“PEIS”) to study several critical and long-overlooked issues: how, when, and where we lease coal in a system currently driven by industry; how to ensure taxpayers get a fair return on the sale of publicly-owned coal; whether to raise royalty rates that have not changed in thirty years; and whether we should lease coal to export abroad.
The biggest wins here are on climate. Through the programmatic review, Interior will disclose not just the amount of carbon pollution that results from burning federally-owned coal, but also the economic costs that that combustion imposes on society and how different levels of coal leasing affect the amount of renewable generation that enters our energy grid.
These are critical pieces that advocates and BLM have been grappling with for years, and they are essential to understanding the true climate impacts of the federal coal program.
2. A Pause on New Mines and Expansions of Existing Mines
Echoing precedents set by Presidents Nixon and Reagan, Interior announced that, effective immediately, it will pause applications for new coal mines and proposals to expand existing mines until the PEIS is complete. There are exemptions for certain projects that are either relatively small (less than 160 acres) or already received agency approvals. BLM’s published exemption list contains 16 projects that can move forward.
The pause doesn’t mean advocates will pack up our bags and go home, and some of the mines on that exempt list will prove to be major fights. For example, Forest Service is currently weighing a proposal to give the recently-bankrupt Arch Coal access to 19,000 acres of Colorado’s roadless forests. The cost of that trade-off for the American people: billions of dollars in climate pollution and 140,000 fewer homes powered by renewable energy. That’s why, on the same day the Secretary announced these reforms, 130,000 Americans told the Forest Service to reject the Arch deal and keep that coal in the ground.
3. Improved Transparency and Accountability
Finally, there are a suite of reforms to improve transparency and accountability of the federal coal program, particularly around economics and climate issues. Chief among these initiatives is a new publicly-available database run by the US Geological Survey to track greenhouse gas emissions tied to public lands. Other measures include making sure the public has access to industry requests to reduce agreed-upon royalty rates and lease new areas.
A Critical Moment
As explained by my colleague Cesia Kearns, Interior’s new path forward comes at a critical moment for our climate. Coal mined from public lands accounts for roughly 10 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, and climate scientists tell us that the need to reduce carbon pollution is now more urgent than ever. There hasn’t been this type of review of the federal coal program in more than thirty years, and it is important to get the details right.
To be sure, many of these changes have been a long time coming. The Sierra Club, along with many other conservation organizations, has opposed the largest and most destructive coal mines on public lands for many years. These fights have taken us to the doorstep of Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah, Colorado’s Sunset Roadless Area, the Tongue River Valley in Montana, and Reservation lands in Arizona and New Mexico. Sierra Club was one of a handful of groups, including Earthjustice, WildEarth Guardians, and Powder River Basin Resource Council, that advocated early on for solutions to methane waste from underground mines in Colorado and pressed for large-sale leasing reforms in the Powder River Basin with then-Interior Secretary Bob Abbey. There have been numerous calls for reform from Congress, and two government audits of the federal coal leasing program found fundamental flaws that were exploited by industry and cost taxpayers billions of dollars. That’s why, in April 2013, the Sierra Club and nineteen other conservation organizations welcomed Secretary Jewell into office by calling on her to implement many of the badly-needed reforms announced last week. Indeed, WildEarth Guardians made similar calls as far back as 2009.
An End to Business As Usual
The announcement represents an end to business as usual and marks a turning point in the way our public lands are managed. At a time when the coal industry is already on the ropes, this announcement is only more bad news. As a country, we just hit a 30-year low for coal production, the industry has been besieged by high-profile bankruptcies to two of its biggest players in Alpha and Arch, and Bloomberg news reported this week that coal companies have lost 94 percent of their market value in the last five years.
Since the review could take up to three years to complete, the next administration will have the opportunity to make an informed decision about the role our public lands play in our energy choices. Those policy choices and their climate costs will be clearly defined. Public lands – owned by all of us – could be used to prop up an entrenched and dying industry that only exacerbates the impacts of a warming climate and rising seas, or they could be used to help communities and workers find a just transition in a clean energy economy.
The path forward is clear and the call will only get stronger once Interior completes its comprehensive study. No longer will BLM adhere to policies of the past simply because previous administrations thought they were a good idea. No longer will federal agencies simply assume that the amount of fossil fuels that come from public lands has no effect on the amount of renewable electricity in our grid or greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere. And no longer will our public lands be used to subsidize private interests by leasing taxpayer-owned coal for far below what it’s worth and far below the costs that burning it imposes on the rest of us.
Real Climate Leadership
This is what climate leadership looks like. The Obama Administration and Secretary Jewell deserve enormous credit for connecting the dots between the scientific consensus around climate change and the energy choices required to leave the next generation a habitable planet.
Simply put, our public lands must be used to incentivize the future rather than subsidize the past. Last week’s news is a big step in the right direction.
You can join the more than 30,000 Americans who have thanked President Obama and Secretary Jewell for their vision and climate leadership by clicking here.
Photo courtesy of Ground Truth Trekking.