​June is Great American Outdoors Month. It’s a great time to go outside and enjoy the incredible parks, forests, and wilderness areas our nation has to offer. It’s also a good time to acknowledge the threats to the health of our public lands. In the past 18 months, the Biden Administration has overseen an expansion in infrastructure deficiencies and threatened conservation funding that puts our protected lands at risk.
 
In the oil and natural gas industry, we’re proud to fund our nation’s largest federal conservation programs. Under the Great American Outdoors Act (GAOA), our industry almost exclusively funds the $2.8 billion annually provided for infrastructure in national parks, wildlife refuges, and other public lands. GAOA established a new National Park and Public Lands Legacy Restoration Fund while permanently funding the popular Land and Water Conservation Fund. The former receives over 90% of its funding from onshore oil and natural gas production and the latter receives 100% from offshore production.

​The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) claims its controversial climate disclosure rule is justified because demand is purportedly growing for standardized climate information among credible, non-partisan financial institutions and asset managers. Yet reality is quite different.
 
Analysis conducted by Western Energy Alliance reveals what SEC is not sharing: the proposed rule relies on the work of a global network of activist organizations—not a majority of American investors or institutions—that have been collaborating for several years to end the use of oil and natural gas around the world. In the course of developing our comments on the rule, we found that SEC is defending the rule based on the demands of mostly foreign investors with only a very small minority of American investment managers.