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public lands
'Historic Victory' as Biden BLM Restores Protections for 28 Million Acres in Alaska
"Tribal consultation must be treated as a requirement—not an option—when the federal government is making decisions that could irrevocably affect tribal communities," said Interior Secretary Deb Haaland.
Aug 27, 2024
Indigenous tribes and conservation groups applauded the Biden administration on Tuesday for listening to the demands of Alaska Natives, who have called on the federal government to protect 28 million acres of land in the state from mining—warning that failing to do so would threaten food security and cultural identity for tens of thousands of people.
U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland's announcement that the land would be protected from mining interests—reversing a decision by former President Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee—"is a big deal for the communities and wildlife who call Alaska home," said Dan Ritzman of the Sierra Club.
"These lands and waters are unparalleled not only for their natural beauty, but for the habitat they provide imperiled wildlife, and the recreation opportunities they offer us," said Ritzman, who heads the group's Conservation Campaign. "These 28 million acres are some of the last truly intact wildlands in the United States. Secretary Haaland deserves credit for listening to those who have called for their protection for generations to come."
The Bureau of Land Managament (BLM) said Trump made an "unlawful decision" when his administration ended longstanding protections for the lands "without sufficient analysis of the potential impacts of such a decision on subsistence and other important resources, appropriate tribal consultation, and without compliance with other legal requirements," opening the lands to oil and gas extraction.
"Tribal consultation must be treated as a requirement—not an option—when the federal government is making decisions that could irrevocably affect tribal communities," said Haaland. "Continuing these essential protections, which have been in place for decades, will ensure continued access and use of these public lands now and in the future."
"These 28 million acres are some of the last truly intact wildlands in the United States."
The Wild Salmon Center noted that the lands in question contain some of the largest remaining intact ecosystems in the country, "from high alpine tundra to the pristine estuaries and wetlands in places like Bristol Bay, home to the world's most abundant wild sockeye salmon runs."
Alaska Native tribes have also called for the public lands to be protected because they serve as a habitat for caribou.
"Secretary Haaland's decision today is an important step toward a future full of healthy lands, waters, and people who thrive on wild salmon, waterfowl, other migratory animals, and seasonal plant life," said Anaan'arar Sophie Swope, executive director of Mother Kuskokwim Tribal Coalition. "Our Yukon-Kuskokwim region's wetlands are vital to our people's way of life."
Swope said the coalition is pushing for further action from the BLM to stop the "dangerous and destructive" 315-mile pipeline proposed by Donlin Gold.
"These actions would ensure future generations' ability to safely live on the land while carrying our customary and traditional knowledge," said Swope.
Haaland's announcement comes two months after the Biden administration blocked the construction of an industrial road that would have opened access for mining in Alaska, and weeks after the BLM proposed expanded protections for the Western Arctic—but President Joe Biden's approval of the Willow oil extraction project has been condemned as an "oil stain" on his climate record.
Drew McConville, senior fellow for the Center for American Progress, said the restored protections announced Tuesday are an "historic victory for public lands and the result of unwavering advocacy from Alaska Native communities."
"The Trump administration's attempt to open them up to industrial development was both shortsighted and reckless," said McConville, "especially when Alaska is warming at more than two times the pace of the rest of the planet."
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Why Project 2025 Remains a Threat to Our Livable Future
We all want clean water, safe, affordable food, a healthy environment, and a bright future we can share with future generations. But Project 2025 threatens all of these.
Jul 31, 2024
Amidst a perpetually churning news cycle, you may have seen a chilling phrase break through the din: “Project 2025.”
It looms like a bogeyman in everything from TikTok comments to headlines in major news outlets. And it refers to a 900-page wishlist and roadmap for a potential conservative president’s first months in office. The document was crafted by former Trump administration officials working with the Heritage Foundation (a think tank with a history of climate denial and funded by right-wing billionaires).
So what exactly is in Project 2025 that makes it so startling?
“We are writing a battle plan, and we are marshaling our forces,” said Project 2025’s director. Paul Dans, who on Tuesday announced he would be stepping down in August from the project. But Dans' comment alone clues you in on the gravity of its contents and its intentions. It is nothing less than a plan to completely overhaul the federal government, stripping away its ability to defend families from threats to public health and the environment.
Its deregulatory agenda will put our water at risk of pollution and contamination for the sake of corporate profits, and its agricultural policies will pull a resilient, affordable food system further from reach. Its plan for our energy system would push our planet even more toward climate chaos.
Moreover, Project 2025 is as meticulous as it is dangerous, detailing exactly how a right-wing president could carry out its plans. And while it details a heinous agenda on a wide range of issues, we’re going to focus on food, water, and climate.
Here’s what you need to know about Project 2025’s threat to our livable future.
Project 2025 Would Pave the Way for More Corporate Pollution
One key tenet of Project 2025 is dismantling and disempowering federal agencies. Its goal is to shift agencies’ focus from protecting our health and environment to paving more pathways for unchecked corporate abuse.
Notably, the plan recommends gutting the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). On day one, it would downsize staff at a time when the agency is already severely understaffed and under-resourced. This has led to, for example, absurdly long reviews of chemicals that threaten our water, air, and health.
In other cases, the EPA has rubber-stamped potentially dangerous chemicals to speed up corporations’ path to profits. Project 2025 wants this trend to continue, as it advocates for speeding up reviews “to ensure the competitiveness of U.S. manufacturers” — putting companies before public health.
It also aims to strip our waters of protections from polluters. Project 2025 would exclude much of our country’s wetlands and temporary waters from protection and narrow the kinds of water pollution regulated under the Clean Water Act. As communities across the country suffer pollution from factory farms and industrial plants, we need more water protections, not fewer.
Moreover, Project 2025 would have a new administration pause and revisit Biden’s recent Lead and Copper Rule Improvement and PFAS regulations, which are vital first steps in responding to our country’s lead-in-water and PFAS contamination crises. This would put the health of millions of people at continued risk.
It specifically targets a recent Biden rule that designates two PFAS as “hazardous substances” under CERCLA, jeopardizing efforts to force polluters to clean up their toxic mess. Project 2025 could allow corporations to get away with poisoning our water, and leave taxpayers to foot the bill.
Safe, Affordable, and Sustainable Food Is Under Attack
Project 2025 is expressly focused on deregulation and downsizing the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It views regulations as “a threat to farmers’ independence and food affordability” and advocates for removing “obstacles imposed on American farmers and individuals across the food supply chain.”
This completely ignores the essential role that regulations play in keeping our food safe and combating Big Ag’s takeover of our food system. Government programs are integral to supporting small and medium-sized farmers and building a food system that will be sustainable for generations of farmers to come.
But Project 2025 wants to cut these — from regulations on pesticide use and genetically modified food to conservation programs that help farmers manage their land sustainably.
It also brushes aside the role that our food system has in fostering a healthy environment, saying “environmental issues” are “ancillary” to agriculture. It would hamstring efforts to transform our food system to save our climate and environment while ensuring affordable, sustainable food for all.
Additionally, Project 2025 cruelly threatens to yank food access from poor and low-income families across the country. Notably, it calls for limiting access to SNAP benefits — formerly known as food stamps — which help feed more than 40 million people in the U.S. It also calls for restricting the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, which specifically helps children and families. Cutting these programs will allow more people to go hungry.
Our food system is already in crisis, driven by agricultural corporations cutting corners, playing dirty, raising prices, and crowding out small farmers. The answer is not deregulation that invites Big Ag to get bigger at the expense of the rest of us. Yet that’s exactly what Project 2025 advocates for.
Project 2025 Puts a Livable Climate in Jeopardy
Finally, some of the most disturbing parts of Project 2025 are its fervent promises to let the fossil fuel industry run rampant on our health, climate, and environment.
We know that ending fossil fuel use and production is key to securing a livable climate and defending our health against pollution. Yet Project 2025 calls for a rapid expansion of drilling, fracking, and gas exports.
Its authors propose restoring coal mining on public lands and opening more of them to oil and gas leasing. They also recommend speeding up drilling permits, allowing fossil fuel corporations to more easily ravage our shared public lands for profit.
Notably, Project 2025 recommends clearing the way for the planet-wrecking liquefied natural gas (LNG) industry to balloon. Exporting even more LNG could lock in not only the U.S. into decades of more fossil fuels, but also the entire world.
At the same time, the authors of Project 2025 suggest dismantling several offices at the Department of Energy that are key to federal research, development, and deployment of renewable energy. They also push for stopping efforts to grow the country’s power grid to accommodate new solar and wind energy. Instead, they call for focusing on improving grid “reliability” by expanding fossil fuels and slowing clean energy.
This is a laughable idea. Research shows our grid does not need fossil fuels to be reliable; in fact, in disasters, fossil-fueled energy is more vulnerable to outages.
We know that renewables make our energy more affordable, more resilient, and less dangerous to our health, safety, and climate. Yet Project 2025 has no interest in ensuring these benefits. Instead, it’s fighting for the status quo of dirty energy and corporate power.
Project 2025 Proposes a Dark Future — But We Can Fight It Together
We all want clean water, safe, affordable food, a healthy environment, and a bright future we can share with future generations. But Project 2025 threatens all of these. At a time of so many intertwining crises, it promises to hamstring the federal government’s ability to protect people, sacrificing us for the sake of corporate profits.
But while Project 2025 represents some of the most poisonous paths our government could go down, we have the antidote. Food & Water Watch has shown again and again that when it comes to making meaningful change and fighting corporate power, the key to winning is two-fold: calling for bold action and organizing people power to fight for it.
By coming together, we can fight for the future we need and deserve. We can protect our food and our water, end fossil fuels, and win a livable future for everyone.
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200+ Groups to Congress: Stop 'Zombie' Funding for Fossil Fuels on Public Lands
"It's past time our leaders take this simple step and stop funding activities that are completely at odds with protecting our climate," one advocate said.
May 15, 2024
More than 200 environmental and climate advocacy groups sent a letter to Congress on Wednesday demanding that lawmakers stop funding the extraction of fossil fuels on public lands and waters.
The letter argues that Congress' annual approval of taxpayer funds to subsidize oil and gas drilling and coal mining "undermine" the international agreement reached at the United Nations COP28 climate conference last year on the need for "transitioning away from fossil fuels."
"Congress has coddled the fossil fuel industry for decades, scarring millions of acres of public lands in the process," Ashley Nunes, public lands policy specialist at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement. "It's past time our leaders take this simple step and stop funding activities that are completely at odds with protecting our climate."
"Every year that Congress keeps supporting status quo drilling on public lands and offshore waters is a missed opportunity that locks us into a hotter and more dangerous future."
The Center for Biological Diversity was one of 234 groups behind the letter, which was addressed to Senate Appropriations Chair Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), Appropriations Vice Chair Sen. Susan Collins (R-Me.), House Appropriations Chair Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) and House Appropriations Ranking Member Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.). Specifically, the letter asks that the lawmakers "zero out funding for all fossil fuel extraction on public lands and offshore waters" in the Department of the Interior's budget for the coming fiscal year.
"Despite the urgency of the climate crisis, year after year, and regardless of the which political party retains control of Congress, Congress continues to direct the Department of the Interior to authorize fossil fuel extraction on our public lands and oceans," the letter states. "This zombie funding continues despite its harmful and lasting impacts to tribal nations, frontline communities, and other groups, as well as its harm to public health, public lands, the climate, and wildlife populations."
The FY 2024 budget, for example, directed more than $160 million toward fossil fuel management on public lands and waters. The amount earmarked for oil and gas management on public lands alone jumped by almost 90% from 2016 to 2023, from $59.7 million to $112.9 million.
Despite calling the climate crisis an "existential threat," U.S. President Joe Biden has approved almost 10,000 permits for oil and gas drilling on public lands in three years, a similar rate to his predecessors and more in his first two years than former President Donald Trump. Under Biden's watch, the U.S. became the leading producer of oil both in the world and in human history. The groups who signed the letter attributed this in part to Congress' "status quo funding" of fossil fuel programs on public lands.
The letter comes as humanity just sweltered through its hottest year on record, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels made a record jump, and a vast majority of top climate scientists recently surveyed said they predicted 2.5°C of warming by 2100, largely because of a lack of "political will" to phase out fossil fuels and embrace the renewable energy transition.
Indeed, the latest Production Gap analysis concludes that governments' plans through 2030 would produce more than twice the amount of fossil fuels that would be compatible with limiting global heating to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels.
"Climate scientists around the world are pleading for change, but Congress continues to let fossil fuel polluters run wild on our public lands," Nunes said. "Every year that Congress keeps supporting status quo drilling on public lands and offshore waters is a missed opportunity that locks us into a hotter and more dangerous future."
In particular, the green groups made the following recommendations for FY2025:
- Ending Bureau of Land Management (BLM) funding for new oil and gas approvals;
- Ending BLM funding for new coal leases and permits;
- Ending Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) funding for all new oil and gas exploration, production, and drilling leases;
- Ending the provision of the Inflation Reduction Act that requires Interior to put up at least 2 million acres of land and 60 million of water annually for oil and gas leasing before it can install any new wind and solar;
- Putting $80 million toward BLM renewable energy programs; and
- Putting $80 million toward BOEM renewable energy programs.
"Congress must end business as usual funding of fossil fuel extraction on public lands and waters," the letter concludes. "If Congress fails to change course, it will simply be impossible to limit warming to below 1.5°C and ensure a livable planet for future generations."
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