The Obama administration is halting new coal leases on federal lands until it completes a comprehensive review of fees charged to mining companies and coal mining’s impact on the environment.
Advertisement
“Until the administration steps back and considers all the impacts, we need a moratorium”, said Jeremy Nichols of WildEarth Guardians which joined several other conservation groups in a letter on Wednesday urging Obama to freeze coal leases.
While the White House hasn’t provided any specifics, environmental groups said his remarks are nearly certainly a reference to an ongoing fight over the Interior Department’s coal leasing program, which critics on and off Capitol Hill say is leasing coal at below fair market value and doesn’t take climate change into account (211 ECR 211, 11/2/15).
The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates total U.S. coal production will decline 3 percent this year as the country pushes a low-carbon agenda.
A comprehensive review of how, when and where coal is leased for future mining on public lands is needed to ensure that the federal coal program is managed in an environmentally responsible way and to ensure that coal royalty rates allow taxpayers and communities to get a fair return on their resources, Jewell said.
In addition to analyzing the return American taxpayers are earning on the use of natural resources, the Interior Department says it’ll also review coal’s public health impacts.
The programmatic review will examine concerns about the federal coal program that have been raised by the Government Accountability Office, the Interior Department’s Inspector General, Members of Congress and the public. Reforming government controls on federal lands is one of the few actions still available to Obama in his final year in office.
“There is a reason President Obama waited until the last months of his presidency to sell out the American people who depend on coal for livelihoods and affordable energy: it might score political points with ideologues in Washington, but it’s a bad, economically-devastating policy for main street Americans”. A report last March by the left-leaning Center for American Progress estimated about 10 percent of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions are from coal mining on federal land.
President Obama suggested that the administration might go in this direction during the State of the Union address this week.
The Obama administration will be canceling opportunities for companies to mine for coal on federal land and raising the costs of extracting natural resources – from coal, to gas, to oil – on properties controlled by the government.
“It’s a fossil fuel giveaway that’s costing taxpayers $1.1 billion a year and it’s driving the central environmental challenge of our time“, Buccino said. Ed Markey, a Democrat from MA, has introduced legislation that would halt coal leasing on public lands altogether.
The federal Bureau of Land Management handles coal leasing on the approximately 570 million acres of land.
The Sierra Club’s lands protection program director, Athan Manuel, said additional regulations on the federal program ultimately benefit the climate.
They noted similar pauses on new leases were called for during studies of the coal program under the Nixon and Reagan administrations.
Advertisement
Measures include a public database to show the carbon emitted from fossil fuels developed on public lands, posting online pending requests to lease coal or reduce government royalties, as well as capturing methane emissions from mines.
