DENVER – Western Energy Alliance responded today to the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) new Draft Resource Management Plan and Environmental Impact Statement for Greater Sage-Grouse Rangewide Planning. The Biden Administration continues the back-and-forth attempts to manage the species, from the flawed plans issued by the Obama/Biden Administration in 2015, which the Alliance challenged in court, and the revised Trump Administration plans in 2019.
“Conservation of the sage grouse is a goal shared by the oil and natural gas industry, ranchers, states, and communities across the West. That goal is best achieved at the state level, not with a one-size-fits-all federal approach,” said Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Alliance. “This plan amendment is a beast, updating 77 land use plans across 10 states, which concerns me since it’s one approach versus the state-by-state approach of the Obama and Trump plans. As we read it, we’ll be looking to see how BLM accounts for the huge variation across states, as the sagebrush shrubland of Wyoming is different from the sagebrush steppe of Utah, among many other variations. Each state has different topographies, predation concerns, quality of habitat, etc. and a one-size-fits-all federal approach is not effective. We’ll be looking to see how well BLM has incorporated state plans and all the private, state, and federal conservation that has been ongoing for decades. It’s positive that the preferred alternative seems to be a blend between the other approaches and prior plans, which indicates that BLM is trying to find a workable balance. DENVER – Western Energy Alliance’s president, Kathleen Sgamma, will testify at a hearing entitled “Monetizing Nature and Locking up Public Land: The Implications of Biden’s Strategy for Natural Capital Accounting” before the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. Sgamma’s testimony focuses on the detriments of federal agencies implementing the president’s natural capital accounting strategy to assess ecological services values and the growing number of federal bureaucratic initiatives that crowd out basic government services. The hearing is scheduled for Thursday, March 7th, at 10:15 a.m. ET, and will be available on the committee’s website.
“The initiative on natural capital accounting is but another example of bureaucratic encrustation. Twenty-seven federal agencies are now busily figuring out how to account for the natural resource and ecosystem services values they control or advise on. Like other initiatives that have no basis in U.S. law, the Biden Administration looks outside the country for justification. The environmental-economic statistics are to be based on the United Nations’ System of Environmental-Economic Accounting,” said Sgamma. “As the federal government struggles to provide services at a reasonable cost to taxpayers and our national debt has swelled to nearly $35 trillion because the government cannot keep to its means, it is now to apply a whole new accounting framework for often subjective ecosystem services valuations. DENVER – Western Energy Alliance today criticized the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) long-anticipated final climate disclosure rule, which intends to ultimately defund American oil and natural gas production. The trade association stressed that the regulation meets the demands of anti-oil-and-gas activist groups yet has no basis in law.
“SEC’s rule seeks to reorient the entire financial system and drive climate change policy rather than promote fair financial returns for workers, retirees, and investors,” said Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Alliance. “As part of the Biden administration’s whole-of-government approach on climate change, SEC is willing to inflate energy prices by denying financing for American oil and natural gas production and costing Americans $10.2 billion. Despite SEC’s stated intentions, the rule would flood investors with inconsistent, confusing information about ill-defined climate change risk and greenhouse gas data that conflicts with more technically sound inventories from the Environmental Protection Agency. Even with the withdrawal of Scope 3 emissions, the rule lacks statutory authority and elevates speculative climate change risk above material financial information of value to investors. The commission lacks the authority from Congress for this rule and is pursuing a political agenda at the cost of hardworking Americans. |
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