House GOP Plan to Pay for Billionaire Tax Cuts Will Destroy Public Lands, Speed Climate Change

The House Natural Resources Committee released its portion of the Republican House reconciliation bill late Thursday. It’s part of a Republican proposal to help fund President Trump’s tax cuts for billionaires.

The Republican plan calls for ramping up oil and gas lease sales on public lands and waters, opening at least 4 million acres of public lands for new coal leasing, reinstating multiple highly contested mining leases, authorizing a massive road to aid mining in some of the most pristine wilderness areas in the country, and legislating increased timber production on public forests.

“This extreme proposal shows that House Republicans are hellbent on following Trump’s plan to sell out America’s public lands and offshore waters to the world’s worst polluters,” says Ashley C. Nunes, public lands policy specialist at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Republicans are treating our most precious wild places as nothing more than opportunities for industry to plunder, profit and pollute.”

The bill would overturn several landmark decisions made by the Biden administration to prevent irreparable harm to sensitive resources. The bill mandates the following:

• Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Alaska: Four more oil leases that would disrupt polar bear habitat, caribou calving grounds, and the migration patterns of other wildlife.
• Cook Inlet, Alaska: Six oil lease sales, putting fragile endangered Cook Inlet beluga whales at risk from seismic testing and oil spills.
• Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, Minnesota: Reverses a mining ban on 225,000 acres of federal land and opening it to Twin Metal’s sulfide mining, which threatens to pollute the adjacent Boundary Water wilderness.
• Brooks Range Wilderness, Alaska: Reverses a ban on the 211-mile Ambler mining road that would stretch across the vast unspoiled wilderness of the Brooks Range, to facilitate an industrial mining complex on behalf of a foreign mining company. Caribou migrations may also be affected as the road intersects their migration paths.

The bill includes other provisions that expand extractive industries and undermine environmental protections. For example, it reduces royalties for oil producers, establishes rental fees for renewables on public lands, and directs agencies to increase timber harvests by 25%. It also allow project sponsors to pay a fee to cover environmental review and receive expedited completion.

“From oil drilling in the Arctic and Gulf, to coal mining in the Boundary Waters, to chopping down majestic old-growth trees across the country, a slew of ruinous projects are fast-tracked by this pay-to-play reconciliation package,” Nunes said. “This is nothing short of a plan to let Trump’s friends get rich by destroying our landscapes, coastal waters and wildlife habitat.”