As Americans venture out this summer to enjoy national, state, and local parks, it’s a prime moment to spotlight the largest federal investments in public lands conservation in the past 50 years as well as emerging threats.
 
Now in its fourth year, the Great American Outdoors Act epitomizes the balance between preserving our nation’s cherished places and utilizing public lands that are working landscapes. The landmark law directs $2.8 billion annually from energy development on non-park, non-wilderness public lands and waters into national parks, wildlife refuges, and other public lands. In return, essential conservation projects and infrastructure repairs that have languished for years are now being funded. 

​​Public lands have seen a surge in visitors in recent years, driven by the need for outdoor recreation during the COVID pandemic, inspiring social media posts, and aggressive marketing by the outdoor industry. Unfortunately, the increased popularity exacerbates problems arising from chronic underfunding of maintenance and infrastructure.

On the other hand, environmental issues of the past often do get resolved because of the superb pace and sophistication of our technological innovation. We’re constantly improving best practices. I’m proud to represent an industry that has met every legitimate environmental challenge, significantly reducing the footprint on the land, habitat fragmentation, water use, and air emissions while speeding reclamation and producing more from every well and field. ​

There are many “heroes” in the recent withdrawal of a rule that would have created a new type of corporation out of whole cloth. The SEC withdrew the rule on Natural Asset Companies (NAC), which it had tried to sneak through in October. It’s a model of how regulatory push-back can be effective against Biden Administration regulatory overreach even with such a slim Republican majority in the House. When red states work in conjunction with congressional oversight, meaningful change can occur. 

We were glad to see the automakers are finally standing up for the internal combustion engine (ICE).  Filing comments on the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s (NHTSA) Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards as the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, several major automakers blasted the rule and requested major changes. NHTSA proposed boosting fuel standards 2% per year for passenger cars and 4% for pickup trucks and SUVs from 2027 through 2032. The American Automotive Policy Council, which represents the Detroit Three automakers, estimates automakers would face more than $14 billion in non-compliance penalties between 2027 and 2032, thereby increasing average vehicles prices by $3,000.

Our friends at the Institute for Energy Research have a running list of the ways the Biden Administration has suppressed American oil and natural gas. We’d like to focus on just one of the 176 we’re dealing with, a Resource Management Plan (RMP) amendment for public lands on the West Slope of Colorado. The RMP would close 1.566 million acres to oil and natural gas leasing. The justification? These lands have “no-known, low, or medium potential” for oil and natural gas, or so BLM would have you believe.
 
BLM is basing its resource assessment on a 2002 U.S. Geologic Survey (USGS) study, well before technological advances and the shale revolution that has unlocked huge resources from shales like the Mancos found in western Colorado. BLM blithely dismisses the need to update its assessment because, and we’re not kidding, “geology remains constant.”

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland is facing new questions about her decision to withdraw land from oil and natural gas leasing around the Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico. An ethics complaint was filed against the secretary by the watchdog group Protect the Public’s Trust, which requested that the Department of the Interior (DOI) investigate several public statements and actions that made clear Secretary Haaland’s decision was pre-determined.

We’re experiencing an onslaught of new regulations targeting oil and natural gas production from the Biden Administration. No sooner did we get our comments out the door on the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) conservation and landscape health rule then the next BLM rule dropped. The recently proposed bonding and royalties rule aims to implement royalty and other fee increases from the inaptly named Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), but more concerningly, add new bonding requirements that Congress jettisoned from IRA.
 
Despite the fact that there are only 37 orphan wells on BLM lands and only 40 calls on bonds over the last decade, the rule plows ahead with essentially what anti-oil-and-gas groups have been pushing for: the disruption of the bond market for oil and natural gas by increasing bonds to prohibitive levels, particularly for small companies.