If you’ve followed the Natural Resources Committee on Medium from the beginning, you know we’ve covered a lot of ground. In the 115th Congress, we published a 10-part series called Wasted Resources focused on the many environmental issues the Republican majority had ignored. (Climate change was a big part of that story, but it didn’t stop there). Our Watchdog series documented the decline and fall of former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who left office facing a grand jury investigation for lying to federal investigators.
Since taking the House majority at the beginning of this Congress, we’ve been writing more about how our initiatives help the American people and our environment — and how our plans differ from the Trump administration’s industry dominance agenda.
- We just published a July 12 piece on protecting the Grand Canyon from new uranium mining — a threat that’s loomed ever since President Trump was elected and has only become more serious in recent months.
- We published an explainer on how Chair Raúl M. Grijalva’s (D-Ariz.) bill to help the seven Colorado River Basin states — a bill that recently became law — makes it possible to negotiate long-term conservation plans for 40 million people who rely on the Colorado for their agriculture, their economy and their daily water supply.
- In early March, we started a new series called Sporting Digest to keep sporting and outdoor enthusiasts up to date on issues that affect them the most: public access, land conservation, the future of the Land and Water Conservation Fund, and more. Look for updates on that front soon.
- In late March, we highlighted the terrible climate impacts of the Trump administration’s federal budget proposal, which would end climate research and mitigation measures we can’t afford to lose.
- Back in January, we even published a Committee 101 to explain our jurisdiction, how we consider and debate legislation, and how we conduct oversight of the agencies and laws for which we’re responsible. Anyone curious to know more about the ins and outs of how Congress really works should give it a read.
Today it’s time for something a little different. This isn’t about one bill, one Committee or even one Congress. It’s about an industry — a central player in climate change, public health, the economy, and even some of the most consequential international relations decisions of the past hundred years.
It’s time to take a deep dive and talk about Big Oil.
We held a hearing on Tuesday, July 16, on the oil and gas industry’s impacts on public health and climate change. (You can watch the full video at the link.) Why did we do that? That’s the real story we’re here to tell today. But we need to back up a bit.
A discussion of how oil impacts our lives could start anywhere, but very briefly, let’s start at the beginning of the North American oil industry as an industry. In 1859, shortly before the Civil War, a man named Edwin Drake struck oil in Titusville, Pa., in the Oil Creek Valley, beginning what’s still referred to as the Pennsylvania Oil Rush. Northwestern Pennsylvania was quickly full of oil wells and refineries, and pipelines soon followed to help send oil and oil products around the country.
As Time Magazine discussed in an informative feature, Drake’s find inaugurated “the petroleum age” of human history, which started off with kerosene lamps and steadily grew into the world we now take for granted. While not all features of modern life rely directly on oil, it’s a common aspect of our economy, whether for fuel or in manufacturing. Features of the petroleum age include widespread car ownership (which may finally be peaking), the ubiquitous use of plastic, and modern oil-based manufacturing processes for pesticides and other commercial products.
Today, as it has been for most of its commercial life, oil is mostly used for fuel. According to the federal Energy Information Administration, in 2018, of the approximately 7.5 billion barrels of total U.S. petroleum consumption, 46 percent was motor gasoline, 20 percent was distillate fuel (used for heating oil and diesel fuel), and 8 percent was jet fuel. That’s about three quarters of all oil use in the United States.
As you might have guessed, society’s current level of reliance on oil has made major oil companies very, very rich. Five of the world’s ten biggest companies, as measured by the Fortune 500, are in oil extraction, including Shell (number five), BP (number eight) and ExxonMobil (number nine).
There’s no denying that whatever you think of them, the players who make up Big Oil are central to today’s economy. There’s also no denying that their product is, in more ways than one, making this planet uninhabitable. It’s even destroying more crops than it used to — something conservatives who claim to represent the heartland should take more seriously.
There’s also no denying that climate-destroying emissions are rising under Trump — and Trump administration policies on our public lands are a big part of that equation. As a July 2019 analysis by The Wilderness Society pointed out, development of leases issued during the Trump administration on federal land alone could produce lifecycle emissions higher than the total greenhouse gas emissions from all 28 European Union member countries for an entire year. In other words, the Trump administration’s “energy dominance” agenda — handing out leases on public lands like candy — has probably added a year’s worth of Europe’s climate impact to our already excessive emissions.
The American public, to be clear, is not okay with all this. Fifty-seven percent of Americans want fossil fuel companies to pay the bill for climate change and clean up the mess they’ve caused us, as Grist reported. Public opinion is firmly on the side of taking meaningful climate action, and people are rightly demanding that the industry pay its share of the tab.
If you’re Big Oil, you’re wondering how to spin this. The industry, the administration and their apologists have two options, neither of them good: come up with an alternate-reality take on the numbers to make them look better than they are, or claim that emissions aren’t that big a deal. (They’ve tried them all.) For his part, the president keeps saying we need to drill more, not less; burn more, not less; and go back to the old days before the renewable energy fad started chipping away slightly at all those nice fossil fuel corporate profits.
How we transition away from such heavy reliance on fossil fuels is one of the key policy questions of our time. The main thing to remember is that no serious climate scientist questions the need for that transition. We’re destroying our planet. The industry likes to point to current consumption trends and then say, “Well, what are you going to do? You need oil. Simple as that.” If that kind of fatalism always prevailed, we probably never would have developed past the horse-drawn chariot, or found a cure for polio, or invented the printing press. We do what needs doing because the need is real, not because it’s easy or because industries who make money off the status quo say it’s okay.
The next time someone tells you oil is here forever, remind them we’re more than 150 years into the petroleum age, and things change. It’s time for a better, more sustainable way of doing business. We need to cut our emissions in half just to avoid the most catastrophic worldwide consequences, and no amount of company spin can change that.
Oh, yeah — and remind them that we kept hearing coal was forever too. Look how that turned out.
The Trump administration keeps telling us that “regulations” are stifling our economy and unless we deregulate the oil and gas industry, we’re letting our enemies win. The most amazing thing about this argument isn’t that it’s obviously untrue — it’s that the industry admits to its own shareholders that it’s untrue, and then pushes it anyway. As Reuters reported shortly after Trump took office:
[T]he top U.S. oil and gas companies have been telling their shareholders that regulations have little impact on their business, according to a Reuters review of U.S. securities filings from the top producers.
In annual reports to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, 13 of the 15 biggest U.S. oil and gas producers said that compliance with current regulations is not impacting their operations or their financial condition.
The other two made no comment about whether their businesses were materially affected by regulation, but reported spending on compliance with environmental regulations at less than 3 percent of revenue.
Why would an industry that’s done more than perhaps any other to destroy our world’s climate stability claim it needs weaker regulations, even while it tells investors that regulations are no big deal? Do they think we’re suckers? Do they think the Trump administration will just do whatever they want, regardless of the facts?
Well, some questions are unanswerable, but Politico had a good piece not long ago on the administration’s relationship with the industry:
The Guardian had another:
As the paper reported in March:
Joe Balash, the assistant secretary for land and minerals management, was speaking to companies in the oil exploration business at a meeting of the International Association of Geophysical Contractors, or IAGC, last month.
“One of the things that I have found absolutely thrilling in working for this administration,” said Balash, “is the president has a knack for keeping the attention of the media and the public focused somewhere else while we do all the work that needs to be done on behalf of the American people.”
Lest you think that sounds perfectly reasonable, just try getting a meeting with Trump officials to talk about the need for more local conservation. That’s not the work they think needs to be done on behalf of the American people:
Public records obtained by the Guardian show that the Trump administration has been in regular communication with key players in the offshore industry, while conservationists and coastal communities say their voices have been ignored.
All told, a handful of prominent offshore drilling proponents — such as the International Association of Geophysical Contractors and the National Ocean Policy Coalition — held more than thirty calls or meetings with key Trump political appointees, including the former interior secretary Ryan Zinke and assistant secretary Balash, between early 2017 and the summer of 2018.
Top interior aide Katharine MacGregor, who for much of her tenure at the department helped oversee the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, communicated at least six times with proponents of Atlantic drilling in 2017, for example.
In one instance, she traveled to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in the fall of 2017 to speak to the National Ocean Industries Association. Its board members are representatives of some of the biggest offshore drillers in the world, including BP, ExxonMobil, Shell and Chevron.
There are plenty more of these articles. (Seriously, just look up “Trump administration oil industry favoritism” on your favorite search engine the next time you have a few minutes.) They make it abundantly clear that yes, the industry does think we’re suckers, and they do expect the Trump administration to do whatever they want. And the administration is only too happy to oblige.
On top of the pile of favorable policy decisions, we should remember that Trump made ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson his first secretary of state despite the company’s history of funding torture squads in places like Indonesia’s Aceh Province. We need to be honest, as we look at Big Oil’s impact both domestically and beyond our borders, about how some big industry players treat people who stand in the way of profits. As Mother Jones recounted in a feature on Aceh and ExxonMobil in 2017:
According to the lawsuits, one plaintiff was allegedly shot in the knee by an ExxonMobil security official while riding his bike home from a local plantation, where he worked as a laborer. When another plaintiff tried to intervene, a security official stomped on his head. A third plaintiff said security officials shocked him in the genitals with electricity and brought him to a pit filled with human heads. Their lawyer, Terry Collingsworth of International Rights Advocates, says he’s met dozens of people in Aceh with similar complaints. In response to my questions about the case, a spokesman for Exxon Mobil told me the company “categorically denies any complicity in any human rights abuses committed by Indonesian soldiers during an Indonesian civil war.”
The Indonesian plaintiffs say top Exxon Mobil executives in Texas knew or should have known about the alleged abuse but kept the soldiers on board for security anyway. During the first few years of abuse outlined in the complaints, Rex Tillerson was executive vice president of Exxon Mobil Development Company, a subsidiary that develops Exxon Mobil’s exploration and production projects around the world. He became senior vice president of Exxon Mobil Corp. in 2001 and its president a few years later. Exxon Mobil says Tillerson had no responsibility for operations in Aceh “during the relevant time period.” Collingsworth says there’s no evidence to suggest he was making decisions related to the retention of Indonesian soldiers as security.
But it’s hard to believe Tillerson wouldn’t have had some idea of what was happening in Aceh. The abuse was covered by news organizations — including the Associated Press and the Wall Street Journal — as early as the 1990s. “There wasn’t a single person in Aceh who didn’t know that massacres were taking place,” a former top government official in Aceh told BusinessWeek in a 1998 investigation. In 2001, Time magazine wrote that in Aceh, “people literally line up to tell stories of abuse and murders committed by troops they call Exxon’s army.”
Even if your friend or family member doesn’t think climate change is real, nobody (that we know of) is politically invested in torture squad denialism. This is, to put it lightly, a high price to pay for cheap oil.
To understand the health and climate impacts of Big Oil, just doing the math on extracting and burning fossil fuels isn’t the whole story. You have to add the consequences of decades of systematic industry denial that climate change is real — denials that major companies repeated even after learning themselves in the 1970s that it is real and does present a serious threat to their own interests. Oil companies like Exxon have known for decades that burning fossil fuels does irreparable harm to the planet by dramatically increasing CO2 levels in our atmosphere. If anyone in the industry has a serious response to the damning timeline laid out in this short video, we haven’t seen it:
Those denials came with a lot of political activity and heavy financial contributions. While climate denial is now completely discredited as science, President Trump is still a flat-out denier and is using the federal government to try to bury climate science at every turn. He’s stocked the National Security Council with people like William Happer, a 79-year-old physicist who served in the George H.W. Bush administration and left the federal government after starting an argument with Al Gore by claiming that refrigerant chemicals were safe for the ozone layer. (He was wrong.) Happer is infamous for, among many other outrageous blunders, once saying, “The demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler.”
The world of climate denial and Big Oil chicanery is full of these colorful characters. They would take up an entire bookshelf by themselves. The story of the oil and gas industry is largely a story of political, legal and public relations hatchet men — paid foot soldiers in the industry’s attempt to convince the public that wind energy is the real threat, pollution isn’t that big a deal, oil is clean, climate change is fake, the industry is the good guy, and everyone needs their product anyway, so what’s the big deal?
But this article isn’t just about climate denial. It’s about what the industry is denying: that oil and gas drilling is bad for public health, that it’s making climate change even worse, and that the industry is blocking the public from doing anything about it.
The connection between Big Oil and climate change has gotten plenty of ink over the years, and we don’t need to rehash it all here. If you’re still unsure just how bad oil and gas emissions are for climate stability, start with this review in Forbes (not exactly a bastion of anti-corporate sentiment, just so you know we’re playing fair). If anyone tells you Big Oil is investing enough in clean energy and is doing the best it can, remind them the vast majority of fossil fuel company expenditures are still in fuel exploration and development, not alternatives.
Climate is its own issue. Let’s take those other themes in turn.
A big part of the story of oil and gas drilling, whether in the United States or elsewhere, is just how destructive it is to human health even aside from the serious climate impacts. Chair Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.) led a congressional delegation to northwestern New Mexico in April to learn more about — and hold a field hearing with public representatives on — the methane hot spots that have developed over the San Juan Basin, where oil and gas drilling has intensified in recent years and whole communities have developed serious health problems due to poor air quality.
Methane is a potent climate change pollutant, but it also contributes to the formation of ozone, which is recognized as a serious health risk factor.
At that hearing, Committee members heard from Barbara Webber, the executive director of Health Action New Mexico, who laid out the risks in plain English (you can read her full testimony here):
- Both short-term (hours, weeks, or days) and long-term (months or years) exposure to ozone come with real and serious risks to our health.
- Ozone pollution poses a serious threat to the health of New Mexicans, especially those living in poor, rural communities.
- Children and the elderly are most at risk from ozone pollution.
- Oil and gas development also releases hazardous air pollutants (HAPs), such as benzene, a known carcinogen. Exposure to HAPs can cause cancer and seriously impair the human neurological system. Unsurprisingly, studies have found that those living in close proximity to oil and gas activity had higher measured exposures to HAPs and face increased risks to their health.
Democrats on the Committee consider it irresponsible to subject the public to these kinds of sustained health risks, especially in the name of Big Oil’s supposed need for more handouts. The industry’s endless demand for natural resources even extends as far as taking water away from people who need it most. Rep. Deb Haaland (D-N.M.), who chairs the National Parks, Forests, and Public Lands Subcommittee, said it best:
I feel compelled to always, always honor and respect the legacy that my ancestors left for me and our people. And in doing so that means protecting the land, protecting the mountains and every animal that lives on the land to ensure that we are always putting the people and the greater good first.
She said she was disheartened to see the amount of development that has happened without benefiting the people in the surrounding communities. For example, Haaland said some people near Chaco do not have access to running water despite the use of water in hydraulic fracturing.
The “amount of development” in that story has to be seen to be believed. And as the Deming Headlight reported from Counselor, N.M., on May 15, in a truly excellent piece of local reporting, it’s making whole communities sick:
A 2017 citizen science report chronicled local complaints of nausea, burning eyes, respiratory problems, recurring headaches — all of which, studies have shown, can be caused by chemicals released during the extraction, processing and transport of oil and gas.
[. . .]
As officials, politicians and the courts debate the future of oil and gas development here, residents continue to tally the cost of living with more and more wells, pipelines and truck traffic.
Across from Lybrook Elementary School, just down the road from the Counselor Chapter House on U.S. 550, a hand-painted sign stands in silent protest to an invisible threat: “METHANE GAS, ODORLESS, TOXIC, IN OUR AIR.” Air samples collected at a well near the school in 2015 by Kendra Pinto, who lives on a nearby mesa and serves on the Counselor Health Impact Committee, showed elevated levels of hydrogen sulfide.
“The school is basically downwind from that site,” she said. “It’s very concerning.”
The next year, Pinto recalls, on July 11, a group of 36 oil storage tanks near Nageezi — just up the road from Counselor — caught fire, triggering a series of explosions and forcing residents to evacuate. The fire burned for four days, turning the sky from blue to black.
More recently, at the July 16 hearing we mentioned at the beginning of this article, Dr. Seth Shonkoff, a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley, laid out the big problems with the Trump administration’s “drill everywhere” strategy (his testimony is available here). As you read this, consider that 17.6 million Americans live within 1 mile of an active oil and/or gas well.
- In addition to well documented climate risks due to the emission of carbon dioxide and methane, oil and gas development poses direct hazards, risks, and impacts to human health largely through exposures to chemicals and other stressors that are accidentally and intentionally released to water, air and soil. (oral testimony)
- Oil and gas development poses well-understood hazards, risks, and impacts to human health through various pathways, including through environmental media (e.g., air, water), from noise and light pollution, and kinetic injuries (e.g., vehicle and well-pad accidents).
- The peer-reviewed literature suggests that more stringent regulation is required to attenuate public health risks from exposures to air pollutants emitted from oil and gas development.
- An evaluation of the peer-reviewed literature on air, water and human health impacts of shale gas development published through 2015 concluded that 87% of air quality studies indicated elevated air pollutant emissions and/or atmospheric concentrations; 69% of water quality studies found associations with water quality impairment; and 84% of public health studies reviewed indicated public health hazards, elevated health risks, or adverse health outcomes.
This oil and gas boom the Trump administration keeps bragging about is happening not because our country needs it but because it’s good for Big Oil’s bottom line. On Trump’s watch and that of the Republican majority in the House and Senate in the 115th Congress, U.S. energy consumption, production and exports (note that — we’re exporting a lot of this oil and gas we’re drilling) all hit record highs in 2018. Oil is sold where oil makes a company the most money. There’s nothing keeping oil and gas extracted in the U.S., even on public lands, inside U.S. domestic markets. Companies aren’t doing this out of the goodness of their hearts or to somehow decrease our dependence on foreign oil. They’re doing it because that’s where profit comes from.
Trump’s Bureau of Land Management, which oversees much of the federal land being leased for oil and gas exploration, officially acknowledges the public health impacts of oil and gas development. According to the BLM’s 2018 environmental assessment for revisions to the methane waste rule, “natural gas contains VOCs (violative organic compounds), which are precursors to ozone and particulate matter, and various toxic air pollutants, such as benzene. These air pollutants affect the health and welfare of humans, as well as the health of plant and wildlife species.”
In other words, Trump officials know these pollutants degrade public health, but they’re handing over more land to Big Oil regardless. That’s why the Natural Resources Committee is pushing hard to protect the local environment and public health where oil and gas development does occur — and to prevent development from happening in places, like Chaco Canyon and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, that should never be opened to extractive industries.
The way the Trump administration is handing our resources over to industry is, as Tim Egan wrote recently in the New York Times, truly killing us. That’s why, on July 17, we passed Rep. Ben Ray Luján’s (D-N.M.) bill to create a 10-mile buffer around Chaco Culture National Historic Park where no new drilling permits would be issued. The people who live in the area are getting sick, and local Native American tribes consider the land sacred.
As Rep. Haaland memorably said to her colleague, Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.), before the vote, “Some things are more important than money. Would you agree with that?”
This isn’t even to get into all the oil, drilling materials and byproducts that got into water sources over the years — Pennsylvania (2014), the Yellowstone River (2015), the Barnett Shale (2015), the Eagle Ford shale (2015), the benzene leak in the Straits of Mackinac (2018), Price River, Utah (2018), Kern County, Calif. (2019). . . and let’s not forget the Deepwater Horizon disaster, which interested President Trump so little that he weakened rules that offshore drilling regulators put in place specifically to make sure it wasn’t repeated.
What can we do about all this? Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) introduced the Methane Waste Prevention Act on May 14 to prevent Big Oil from venting and flaring (i.e. burning off and wasting) excess methane on public lands, and to cut down on methane leaks. We’re holding a hearing on that bill in the fall, in addition to other pro-environment, pro-public health, pro-sustainability legislation. We’re also holding a July 25 hearing on Rep. Mike Levin’s (D-Calif.) and Rep. Paul Gosar’s (R-Ariz.) Public Lands Renewable Energy Development Act, which would — as the name suggests — make it easier to develop clean energy projects on public lands. Passing this kind of legislation is a big part of transitioning away from harmful, polluting practices like unchecked oil and gas drilling.
Above and beyond its public health and climate change impacts, Big Oil has profoundly impacted politics, policy and the scientific community through its relentless attempts to protect itself from scrutiny. As Harvard researcher Geoffrey Supran reported in April, ExxonMobil was invited to testify before a hearing of the European Parliament on climate denial and how it impacts public policy. Rather than testifying, or even attending in person, the company sent a letter to lawmakers insisting that Supran’s 2017 paper reviewing corporate communications on climate denial was false — without actually establishing what he got wrong.
The European Parliament was meeting to decide whether to ban Exxon from lobbying activities. You’d think they could do more than try to smear a respected researcher — but that’s not how they operate.
Steve Coll, in a fascinating talk on the process of writing his bestselling book Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power, reveals that Exxon operates more or less as a country, not a private company. It makes its own foreign policy decisions, including which governments to support and which to oppose. It has operations in so many countries around the world — some of them politically unstable — that it needs to think very seriously about “coup-proofing” its overseas projects. It intends to pump 25 percent more oil and gas in 2025 than it did in 2017, and it doesn’t want to talk about what that means for the environment.
That brings us back to Rex Tillerson for a moment. You might be wondering, “Hey, Rex Tillerson was a public official and a huge deal in corporate America — how hard could it be to know what he thought about all this?” We’d love to tell you, but ExxonMobil conveniently “lost” his emails, even as the company was dealing with a court order to produce them as part of a formal investigation by the New York Attorney General’s office. Tillerson liked to email people under the alias “Wayne Tracker” through an account he figured would never be linked to him, and suspicious chunks of that account’s email traffic have been wiped. His secret identity got out, but we still don’t know what some of those Wayne Tracker emails said. According to court filings, the lost material was largely on Exxon’s corporate risk-management issues related to. . . climate change. Now why would those emails disappear?
Think Exxon is alone in not wanting to talk about its operations or what they mean for the rest of us? Unfortunately, although Shell recently increased its disclosures in the face of public and shareholder pressure, the major players are largely on the same page: They fundamentally believe the public doesn’t deserve to know what they’re doing to our climate (or how they’re doing financially), and they’re willing to let their own investors take major losses to protect their secrets.
Even some of Wall Street’s savviest investors have suffered losses because they were caught off guard by the shifts taking place in the energy sector.
Investors in General Electric such as Vanguard, State Street and Fidelity Investments racked up huge losses as the company’s stock tumbled from declining demand for gas and thermal coal turbines and other missteps, according to a recent report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a research group that studies the economic transition to cleaner energy systems. And Blackrock, GE’s biggest investor and the world’s largest asset manager, lost $16 billion in the three years between 2016 to 2018 from its holding.
GE’s history could be repeated at other companies in the oil and gas sector, where executives who have been in the same business for decades may not welcome the idea of publicizing information about shrinking demand for their product, said IEEFA analyst Kathy Hipple, who worked on the report.
“It’s a hard to for a man to see something when his livelihood depends on his not seeing it,” Hipple said.
[. . .]
The American Gas Association, American Fuel & Petroleum Manufacturers and other industry groups fought plans to include more information on environmental, social, or governance concerns in disclosures when the SEC floated the idea in 2016 during the Obama administration.
This kind of secrecy is facing major pushback from investors and public advocates. Investors want companies to disclose their climate risks. But Trump’s Securities and Exchange Commission is protecting Big Oil, and Chairman Jay Clayton told the Wall Street Journal in February that he sees no need for new corporate disclosure standards.
Remember a moment ago when we said Shell was making more disclosures lately? It’s not a better corporate actor than its competitors — it was facing enormous pressure to come clean on the appalling worldwide scope of its environmental damage, including its wholesale destruction of ecosystems and heavily inhabited areas in major African countries like Nigeria. In the U.S., the company has violated the Clean Air Act so aggressively that it’s faced millions of dollars in strictly punitive fines above and beyond paying enormous sums to clean up after itself. Long story short: Shell isn’t cleaner.
So, okay. What do we do about this? We say it’s time to stop handing over public lands and waters as fast as we can to Big Oil. We support bills, like the ones getting a vote in September, to restrict drilling offshore and in sensitive areas in Alaska. We support local consultation and more public accountability. Instead of blowing through public comment periods at record speed, we need to make sure the Bureau of Land Management (onshore) and Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (offshore) listen to all stakeholders before issuing leases and permits. We need to support clean and renewable energy sources and stop taking industry spin at face value.
Most importantly, we must remember that when we start drilling on public property, that’s it — you can’t “un-drill.” That’s more oil and gas, more emissions, and more climate damage that we all have to deal with.
And this is just the short version.
