The House Natural Resources Committee has spent the past year tackling climate change from every angle. We’ve heard from expert scientists, elected leaders, Native American communities, youth advocates and members of the public. They all told us how the climate crisis is harming our planet and our country.
We have a separate Medium post coming out on all the hearings, roundtables and other outreach we did this year, and we don’t want to tell the same story twice. If you’re interested to learn more about just how much work we did on climate change in 2019— a story we’re pretty proud of — please check out that separate item.
We’re here to tell a very specific story. Today, we’re talking about the results of all that work.
This week, Chair Grijalva (D-Ariz.)and Vice-Chair Deb Haaland (D-N.M.), Rep. Alan Lowenthal (D-Calif.), Chair of the Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources, Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.), Rep. Gregorio Sablan (D-CNMI), Rep. A. Donald McEachin (D-Va.), and Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) introduced the American Public Lands and Waters Climate Solution Act. It’s the culmination of a year of fact-finding and listening, and it’s the strongest plan we have to fight the climate crisis with every tool at this Committee’s disposal. This major bill will make our energy supply, and our economy, more sustainable and more climate-friendly — not just today, but far into the future.
No matter what you think of politics, science, Congress or President Trump, this much is true: Oil, natural gas, and coal extraction from our public lands and waters is making our climate crisis worse. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, fossil fuel development on public lands and waters is responsible for nearly a quarter of our nation’s total carbon emissions. If we dramatically reduce that portion, we’re a big part of the way to a climate-friendly future.
The American Public Lands and Waters Climate Solution Act tackles this head-on, putting the United States on a path to reaching “net-zero” climate-harming emissions from public lands and waters by 2040. Net-zero means that for every ton of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere, a ton of carbon dioxide must be removed from the atmosphere, either through terrestrial carbon sequestration or permanent geologic storage, or avoided through the production of renewable energy.
Why do we focus on *emissions* rather than just stopping all production on public lands and waters? Because at the end of the day, emissions are the problem. The fossil fuels produced from public lands and waters are used throughout our economy. Even if all fossil fuel production on public lands were to cease tomorrow, unless economy-wide demand is reduced that production would just shift to private lands.
We understand that H.R. 5435 is only a piece of the solution, not the whole thing. We also understand that we have a responsibility to make our part of the solution as impactful as possible.
We’ll talk about the term “net-zero” in more detail shortly. For now, just know that it’s the goal scientists tell us we need to pursue.
To understand what the bill is and why it works the way it does, we need to start with a quick look at where our energy comes from, how we use it, and what we can do to make our energy supply more sustainable.
The United States depends on a tremendous amount of energy to power the factories, heat the buildings, fuel the vehicles, and sustain all the operations keeping the world’s largest economy running. Today, much of that energy comes from fossil fuels. Unless we change that, our planet will become unlivable for hundreds of millions of people (including many Americans, especially those who live anywhere near the coasts).
Our energy use happens in five major sectors: residential, commercial, industrial, transportation, and electric power. The sources of energy used by each sector vary widely, but overall, around 80 percent of the primary energy consumed across these five sectors comes from oil, natural gas, and coal, all of which have severe climate impacts.
The ways in which we use these fossil fuels varies considerably. Coal powers around 28 percent of U.S. electricity generation, oil accounts for more than 90 percent of the energy consumed in the transportation sector, and natural gas is the source of around 40 percent of the energy used by the industrial sector.
We haven’t always been good at producing our own energy. In August 2006, the U.S. posted net oil imports of more than 13 million barrels of oil per day. That level of dependence on foreign energy sources was, at one time, a problem that both parties wanted to solve. Until the late 2000s, Republican and Democratic presidents alike focused their national energy policies around achieving “energy independence,” largely by increasing efficiency and decreasing our reliance on foreign oil in a number of ways.
In the past few years, that’s changed dramatically. We hear a lot less about energy independence in large part because hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) has sent U.S. oil and gas production spiraling beyond industry’s wildest dreams. In September 2019, for the first time in the last 70 years, the U.S. exported more crude oil and petroleum products than it imported per day. Depending on which day you look, the U.S. is likely the largest oil and gas producer in the world.
It’s important to note here that while industry cheerleaders point to all of this as evidence that fracking “worked,” when you put this oil and gas boom in a climate context, it’s been a disaster. What should have been a period of investing in clean, sustainable energy sources — there’s more than one way to end our reliance on Middle East oil, after all — we became “independent” from foreign sources without breaking our dependence on fossil fuels. Climate change doesn’t care where the oil and gas you burn comes from. It just cares that you burn it. Fracking has made a lot more oil and gas accessible, which means we’ve burned a lot more of it. That’s not good news.
Fossil fuels are located within the boundaries of federal, state, and private lands in the United States. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), both within the Department of the Interior (DOI), and the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) within the U.S. Department of Agriculture are the three federal agencies primarily responsible for managing fossil fuel development on U.S. public lands and waters.
- The BLM leases onshore land for coal, oil, and gas development.
- BOEM issues leases offshore for oil and gas activities.
- The USFS cooperates with BLM in coordinating access to federal oil and gas resources on approximately one-third of our country’s more than 150 national forests and grasslands.
The vast majority of federal oil, gas and coal resources are located and developed in the western United States, particularly California, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming, and offshore in the Gulf of Mexico. With few exceptions, the staff at these agencies have a significant presence in each location.
The recent overall increase in U.S. oil and gas production has not spared public lands and waters. Federal onshore oil production increased by 78 percent between 2007 and 2015, while federal offshore oil production hit a record high in January 2017 and has continued to grow. Under the Trump administration, leasing and production has risen out of control as DOI has pursued not just energy independence but what the president proudly calls “energy dominance.”
In fiscal year 2018, U.S. public lands produced an all-time high of 214 million barrels of oil, and since FY16 the number of oil and gas leases issued by BLM has increased by 156 percent. Coal production from U.S. public lands has decreased over the last decade as the coal market faces competition from low renewable energy prices and cheap natural gas. But we’re still producing a lot of coal, and public lands production is responsible for nearly 40 percent of our nation’s output.
To better understand the climate impacts of all this extraction from public lands and waters, then-Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell tasked DOI’s U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in January 2016 with developing a publicly available database of estimated GHG emissions associated with the extraction and combustion of coal, oil, and natural gas produced on public lands and waters.
In November 2018, the USGS released a summary report that found public lands and waters are responsible for nearly a quarter of the nation’s GHG emissions.
- The federal coal program is responsible for roughly 13 percent of total U.S. GHG emissions.
- Oil and gas are responsible for around 10 percent.
The USGS estimates on carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide emissions came from the decade between 2005 and 2014. Researchers collected data from public lands in 28 states and two offshore Outer Continental Shelf regions — the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific.
States and regions that produced the most fossil fuels on public lands were associated with the highest CO2 and CH4 emissions. In 2014, that included Wyoming, the offshore Gulf, New Mexico, Louisiana, Colorado, and Utah. USGS also estimated the amount of carbon absorbed by public lands ecosystems — including forests, grasslands, and shrublands — and found they sequestered an average of 195 million metric tons of CO2 equivalents per year, equal to roughly 15 percent of the CO2 emissions from public lands fossil fuel extraction.
So, what does the American Public Lands and Waters Climate Solution Act do to solve this problem? When it comes to climate change policy, most conversations focus on the demand side of the equation — which leads to ideas like carbon taxes, energy efficiency measures, behavioral policies, and creating alternatives to fossil fuels that reduce demand for coal, oil, and gas. But we need to look just as hard at the supply side — ending the tax breaks, subsidies and other bad policies that encourage our unsustainable extraction of oil, gas and coal.
Plenty of supply-side climate policies have been proposed, including stepping down production quotas, removing fossil fuel subsidies, or capping fossil fuel extraction. In recent years, a growing body of literature has examined the emissions reduction benefits of constraining U.S. fossil fuel supplies. Many of these policies could be put into practice today by the Interior Department. Unfortunately, the Trump administration couldn’t care less about climate change, and DOI isn’t being managed to reduce its climate effects on our lives. Many Republicans like to claim we have a sweeping mandate to drill everywhere we find oil and gas and dig everywhere we find coal. That’s simply not the case.
Chair Grijalva’s bill changes this dynamic for the better. It’s DOI’s responsibility to understand how the energy resources it oversees contribute to climate change and what future extraction will mean for the climate — and to act accordingly.
That’s why the Grijalva bill mandates that DOI and the USFS achieve net-zero GHG emissions from public lands and waters by 2040. The legislation includes increasingly stringent five-year emission reduction targets and requires DOI and the USFS to publish regular strategies that explain in detail how the departments will meet these targets.
In October of 2018, the United National Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — a consortium of the world’s leading scientists — released the Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C, which found the world must reduce global net greenhouse gas emissions by about 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030 and reach net-zero GHG emissions around 2050 to limit warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.
By requiring that U.S. public lands and waters reduce net emissions by 60 percent by 2030 and reach net-zero by 2040, H.R. 5435 sets more aggressive targets than the IPCC calls for, reaching its goals a decade ahead of the deadline. It also directs DOI and the Forest Service to publish regular reports on how it’s going to meet its net-zero mandates.
By focusing on “net emissions,” H.R. 5435 gets to the heart of climate change, which is the cumulative amount of GHGs in the earth’s atmosphere. As we said earlier, net-zero means that for every ton of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere, one ton of carbon dioxide must be removed through either terrestrial carbon sequestration or permanent geologic storage, or avoided through the production of renewable energy. This approach will encourage a reduction in fossil fuel production, better land management, conservation of natural ecosystems, and greater deployment of renewable energy on public lands and waters — all positive steps we should be taking regardless of politics.
In November, Rep. A. Donald McEachin (D-Va.) and 150 original cosponsors introduced legislation in the House (H.R. 5221) that would set a nationwide goal of achieving a 100 percent clean energy economy by 2050, which is defined as net-zero climate pollution across all sectors of the U.S. economy.
We need to meet that goal. The federal government has more flexibility to control new fossil fuel development from public lands than it does from private lands. This means that reaching net-zero on public lands by 2040, while ambitious, is an achievable target.
Climate change is a global problem, which conservatives often use to wash their hands of our responsibility to build a more sustainable economy. The reality is that the United States is the world’s largest economy, the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter per person, and, depending on the day, sometimes the world’s top exporter of oil. We have an obligation, and a real opportunity, to reduce our emissions and lead the world in a transition to a clean energy future.
There is no silver bullet that will accomplish this monumental task, and policymakers will need to implement many solutions and enact numerous bills (including both Chair Grijalva’s and Rep. McEachin’s efforts) to make meaningful GHG reductions by 2050.
The transition away from coal, oil, and natural gas production on public lands and waters doesn’t have to hurt working people. Chairman Grijalva’s bill supports communities and workers that are economically dependent on fossil fuel extraction and related industries. From Louisiana to Colorado to Wyoming and New Mexico, numerous communities and families are dependent on a fossil fuel-based economy, and we can’t abandon the hard-working men and women who will be impacted by a move away from carbon-intensive fuels.
That’s why the American Public Lands and Waters Climate Solution Act raises funds to assist in this transition by modernizing an archaic fossil fuel royalty rate and by establishing new fees for fossil fuel leases on public lands and waters. These new revenues will be returned to states for a variety of purposes, depending on local and regional needs. Rather than slamming the door shut on new fossil fuels and calling it a day, we manage the transition responsibly while giving oil, gas and coal regions resources and support they’ll need to clean up local polluted sites and to build new, more sustainable sources of jobs and income.
We need to address climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions for a lot of reasons. Everyone is impacted in some way, no matter where you live or what you do. But chief among them is the amount of human suffering that will occur, and that we need to prevent, as temperatures increase, storms rage, crops die, and dramatic changes in our climate upend entire societies. Failing to recognize the risks to our fellow humans, or ignoring those risks, isn’t just short-sighted. It’s self-destructive. We can’t outrun climate change. We have to prepare ourselves for its impacts, and we have to slow and stop it wherever we can.
That’s why climate change needs to be the top issue at the Department of the Interior, and that’s why the bill establishes the Office of Climate Change Mitigation and Planning within DOI. It charges the Office and its director with implementing and carrying out the American Public Lands and Waters Climate Solution Act.
We need to dramatically reduce GHG emissions and transition to a low-carbon economy. Citizens demand that elected representatives and policymakers take climate action now, not a year or a decade from now. The House Natural Resources Committee intends to do just that. For far too long, America’s public lands and waters — the magnificent resources that belong to us all — have been misused by administrations that saw them as a source of revenue for fossil fuel corporations, not as a shared public trust or a part of our climate solution.
We need to reevaluate the practices and policies that govern our public lands and waters and drive down GHG emissions from these federal resources for good. H.R. 5435, the American Public Lands and Waters Climate Solution Act, is a critical step in our nation’s efforts to address the climate crisis.
You might wonder why the American Public Lands and Waters Climate Solution Act doesn’t do more to quickly reduce emissions. If climate change is the existential threat Chairman Grijalva believes it is — which it is — and if the federal government manages the public lands and waters at issue — which it does — then why not permanently ban all new fossil fuel leasing and end existing production immediately?
We agree that congress should do as much as possible as fast as possible. However, the question of “what’s possible” gets in the way. Overstating what’s possible doesn’t change reality. Federal agencies can’t just cancel existing, legally valid oil, gas, and coal leases. They would need to buy out the leases at fair market value using taxpayer money. Add up the price of buying every lease in the country to be sure you’re really ending extraction on public land, and we’re probably talking trillions of dollars out of pocket. Even phased in over several annual congressional budget cycles, that’s an extraordinary amount of new money, and the legal and political fighting would drag out the process for many years.
A bill centered on that kind of immediate, across-the-board lease buyout would have no chance of being signed into law — and even if it somehow happened, that tremendous expense would leave the majority of fossil fuel production in this country, which happens on private lands, unaffected. We consider this approach technically, legally, and politically unachievable. It is a solution to the problem of climate change only in the sense that ending fossil fuel use tomorrow morning is a “solution.” The goal is supportable; the proposed means, at this point in time, are not realistic.
Why not at least permanently halt all new leasing? Well, if the Interior Secretary were to permanently halt new federal fossil fuel leasing tomorrow, we would still have the issue of existing leases and all the fossil fuel production forecast to occur on these leases. During the Trump administration, the Interior Department has issued thousands of fossil fuel leases; tens of thousands more exist from prior administrations. Onshore and offshore leases have an initial term of anywhere from five years to 20 years, and the leases are automatically extended if coal, oil, or gas are being produced and sold. Some leases that are producing fossil fuels today were sold decades ago. It’s reasonable to believe that leases sold within the last few years may be producing decades into the future.
Should the federal government have issued the obscene number of leases that are currently contributing to U.S. greenhouse gas emissions? No, of course not. But can the government simply stop abiding by the terms of the contracts it has negotiated with private businesses? No, it can’t do that either, and if it tried, the fossil fuel industry would successfully challenge those orders in court while it continues to pull more coal, oil, and gas from the ground.
Our bill focuses on net emissions because that’s the thing that really matters. We need to get our net climate damage down to zero as fast as possible without drastically disrupting the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Setting an unrealistic target will just lead to impossible deadlines, public disillusionment, and contradictory claims about why it didn’t work. An overly “ambitious” bill, written in the name of ambition alone, would sow the seeds of its own demise. We need to take a hard look at our energy consumption, our energy sources, and the future of clean energy technology and set ourselves the best possible goal we can accomplish.
Instead of pushing a bill that cancels or buys back existing fossil fuel leases, Chairman Grijalva has authored a measure that works to drive down leasing and net emissions from public lands and waters as quickly as possible. As soon as we have a president who cares about climate change, we believe there will be a political coalition in Congress to pass this bill into law.
Is the bill perfect? No. Can it be improved? Absolutely, and we’re open to suggestions. This is not a take-it-or-leave-it proposal. But we believe that, broadly speaking, this is the best approach to realistically and rapidly reducing emissions from public lands and waters. We can’t just flip the switch off tomorrow. Wishing won’t make it so. We need an approach that works within the laws of our country, has sustainable public and political support, won’t backfire, and accounts for the fiscal and technological realities of the near future. The American Public Lands and Waters Climate Solution Act meets every test, and we’re asking for your support.
We hope you’ll join us in supporting #OurClimateSolution.
