Following pushback from a growing coalition of politicians and public interest groups, U.S. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, proposed an amended version of his plan to sell off public lands.
Read the full story
The Biden administration moved on Thanksgiving eve to bar future coal leasing in the Powder River Basin, one of America’s most coal-rich regions, according to multiple reports.
The Powder River Basin, a region that spans parts of Montana and Wyoming, accounted for about 43% of U.S. coal in 2019, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The administration made its move to formally end coal leasing in the area and roll back previous approvals for development plans on Wednesday as Americans prepared to enjoy the Thanksgiving holiday, according to E&E News.
Read the full story
A map of the U.S. showing land under federal control paints large swaths of the West. In August, Utah filed a lawsuit against the federal government, arguing that it’s unconstitutional for the feds to retain unappropriated land in a state indefinitely.
Since the lawsuit was filed, a dozen other states, including Idaho, Alaska and Wyoming, have filed briefs asking the court to hear the case. Additionally, a coalition of counties in Arizona and New Mexico, the Pacific Legal Foundation, the Utah Legislature and the Wyoming Legislature have also filed briefs in support of the lawsuit.
Read the full story
The state of Utah wants the U.S. Supreme Court to hear its lawsuit against the federal government.
At issue is the federal government’s control of unappropriated lands, lands that Utah says the federal government is holding indefinitely.
Read the full story
Wyoming’s Congressional delegation is warning Interior Secretary Deb Haaland that a proposed amendment to the Resource Master Plan (RMP) for the Bureau of Land Management’s Buffalo field office would have dire consequences on the nation’s grid and economy.
In their letter Tuesday, Rep. Harriet Hagamen and Sens. John Barrasso andCynthia Lummis, Republicans, explained that roughly 40% of all coal mined in the U.S. comes from Wyoming and most of that in the Powder River Basin.
Read the full story
Alaska Natives are fighting back against the Biden administration’s decision to shut down oil and gas development in northern Alaska, which they say is vital to the prosperity and well being of their communities.
The Voice of the Arctic Iñupiat (VOICE), a nonprofit advocacy group for Native-American communities living on the state’s North Slope, filed a lawsuit Monday against the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland over the final BLM’s final rule blocking 13 million acres in their region to oil and gas development.
Read the full story
The Interior Department last Friday blocked 28 million acres of federal land in the state of Alaska from any mining or oil and gas development.
Rick Whitbeck, Alaska state director for Power The Future, said the decision on D-1 lands removes an area the size of the state of Pennsylvania from resource development, which will have severe energy impact to the nation and the state of Alaska.
Read the full story
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has been chipping away at the oil, gas and coal industries ever since President Joe Biden took office. Wyoming is an energy state that produces half the nation’s coal, as well as part of its oil and gas output. Since the federal government owns nearly half the state’s land, virtually all oil, gas and coal operations in the Cowboy State are heavily impacted by every rule the BLM throws at fossil fuels.
Although the Biden administration is waging war on fossil fuels, Wyoming is fighting back. The state, along with Utah, filed a lawsuit against the agency last Tuesday over its restoration lease program, and Rep. Harriett Hageman, R-Wyo., is rolling out legislation to fight back against the BLM’s proposed ban on federal coal leases.
Read the full story
The Biden administration is looking to shrink and move a proposed onshore wind project in Idaho after receiving considerable pushback from local residents, according to The Associated Press.
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) recently published its final environmental review for Idaho’s Lava Ridge wind project, specifying its preference to see the project scaled down by nearly 50 percent and moved several more miles away from a World War II memorial dedicated to interned Japanese-Americans in the area, according to the AP. The project has drawn intense opposition from locals, in large part because of concern that its presence would undermine the experience for those visiting the memorial site, known as the Minidoka National Historic Site.
Read the full story
The Biden administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ) claimed in a legal filing the Arizona State Legislature is powerless to prevent the designation of nearly 1 million acres around the Grand Canyon as a national monument.
Federal prosecutor Michael Sawyer claimed to U.S. District Court Judge Stephen McNamee that a lawsuit launched by Arizona lawmakers, led by Senate President Warren Petersen (R-Gilbert), does not have standing because only the U.S. Congress could override President Joe Biden’s decision to create the monument, according to a report by Capitol Media Services.
Read the full story
The Biden administration Friday rolled out three decisions aimed at greatly restricting oil and gas drilling, as well as mining activities needed for renewable energy, on public land.
The decisions include shutting down the Ambler Access Road project, which would have opened up part of Alaska to mining needed for renewable energy, and blocking oil and gas drilling on up to 13 million acres of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.
Read the full story
Officials in Pinal County are reportedly working to address toxic garbage caused by illegal camping by the homeless after the Bureau of Land Management displaced them by closing 1,000 acres of public land in Apache Junction and the Tonto National Forest to create a new recreation area.
Pinal County Supervisor Jeff Serdy confirmed local authorities are left to confront the numbers of “boondockers,” “nomads” and “truly homeless” who were displaced after BLM closed the acreage to build a recreation area in remarks to ABC 15.
Read the full story
A rancher, who is suing President Joe Biden over the creation of a national monument in Arizona blocking the use of nearly 1 million acres for mining and other uses, told the Daily Caller News Foundation he wants to see it “go away.”
President Joe Biden created the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni – Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument in August 2023, hailing it as a step forward in the effort to “protect tribal lands.” The Pacific Legal Foundation filed a lawsuit to overturn the designation on behalf of rancher Chris Heaton, who the DCNF interviewed on Wednesday, on Feb. 12, according to a release.
Read the full story
Legislatures in 23 states and the District of Columbia have passed some form of a carbon-free electricity goal, but many of these measures do not address the ancillary costs of making it happen.
Read the full story
The Biden administration announced Monday that it has moved to shut down future oil, gas and mining activity on thousands of acres of New Mexico land for the next 50 years.
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM), a sub-agency of the Department of the Interior (DOI), issued the Monday proposal to block new oil, gas and mineral extraction activity on 4,000 acres of land in Sandoval County, New Mexico, according to a DOI press release. The proposal is motivated by the agency’s desire to safeguard tribal cultures and recreational activity in the area, and the policy would last for 50 years if finalized.
Read the full story
The Biden administration unveiled a new oil and gas leasing rule proposal Thursday that would jack up prices at nearly every stage of the public land leasing process.
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM), a subagency of the Department of the Interior (DOI), issued the rule proposal Thursday in an effort to adopt a “more transparent, inclusive and just approach” to federal oil and gas leasing on public lands and “[provide] a fair return to taxpayers,” Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Land and Minerals Management Laura Daniel-Davis said, according to a Thursday DOI press release. The rule nominally aims to boost land conservation efforts, but it would do so by massively increasing minimum bid thresholds and required per-acre fees for energy interests and developers to pay.
Read the full story
Environmental groups sued the Interior Department Tuesday to challenge the first oil and gas lease sale on public lands during the Biden administration.
A coalition of environmental groups led by Dakota Resource Council filed a lawsuit in in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, alleging that the sales violate the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, which requires that the Interior Department prevent “unnecessary or undue degradation” of public lands.
Read the full story
President Joe Biden’s administration wants to lead an electric vehicle (EV) revolution, but apparently doesn’t want domestic production of rare earth minerals vital to EVs.
The Biden administration announced a two-year study on a proposed Twin Metals copper-nickel mine in northeast Minnesota that could delay it for 20 years and stop one of the few planned copper-nickel mines in the nation while the U.S attempts to pivot to EVs from gasoline-powered internal combustion vehicles.
Read the full story
A government watchdog group demanded that the Department of the Interior Inspector General launch an investigation into whether President Joe Biden’s Senate-confirmed Bureau of Land Management director nominee violated the False Statement Act with statements she made to Congress about her involvement in a 1989 eco-terrorism case during her confirmation process.
Tracy Stone-Manning was confirmed to lead the agency along a party-line vote on Sept. 30 amid strong opposition from Republicans who accused her of lying to the Senate Energy Committee about her involvement in an eco-terrorism case. Stone-Manning testified in federal court in 1993 that she sent an anonymous, threatening letter to the Forest Service in 1989 on behalf of her former roommate and friend which warned that a local forest in Idaho had been sabotaged with tree spikes to make the trees unsafe to log.
Read the full story
The Senate vote 50-45 on a party-line vote Thursday to confirm President Joe Biden’s Bureau of Land Management nominee amid strong opposition from Republicans and former Obama administration officials over the nominee’s involvement in a 1989 eco-terrorism incident.
The nominee, Tracy Stone-Manning, failed to win a single Republican vote amid accusations she lied to the Senate Energy Committee over her involvement in the 1989 Clearwater National Forest tree-spiking case. All 48 Senate Democrats and the two independent senators who caucus with the party voted in favor of Stone-Manning’s nomination to lead the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which oversees 245 million acres of public lands.
Read the full story
Wisconsin Rep. Tiffany (R-WI-07) tweeted that he opposes the pick for the director of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Wednesday, saying that Tracy Stone-Manning’s “history of eco-terrorism makes her unfit to lead our nation’s largest federal land agency.”
Read the full story
A federal judge blocked a massive Alaskan oil drilling project Wednesday after ruling that the Interior Department inadequately measured its environmental impact.
Judge Sharon Gleason of the U.S. District Court of the District of Alaska wrote in her opinion that the Bureau of Land Management’s assessment of the ConocoPhillips’ Willow project was “arbitrary and capricious,” noting that it did not even include the likely level of greenhouse gas emissions in its environmental impact report.
Read the full story
President Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the Bureau of Land Management was an editor for an issue of the radical Earth First journal that contained a non-bylined story gloating that federal investigators were bungling their investigation into an eco-terrorism incident the nominee was directly involved in.
The nominee, Tracy Stone-Manning, was one of the six members of the editorial collective for the June 21, 1991, edition of the radical environmental journal. One of the only stories in the 40-page issue that did not contain an author byline was a story celebrating the Forest Service’s move to deactivate their investigation into the 1989 Clearwater National Forest tree spiking incident in the absence of any solid leads.
Read the full story
The 10 Republican members of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee signed a letter Wednesday calling on President Joe Biden to withdraw his nominee to lead the Bureau of Land Management in a letter Wednesday over her involvement in a 1989 eco-terrorism incident.
Read the full story
by Richard McCarty It is well-known that the federal government has a spending problem, but it is less well-known that the government also has a hoarding a problem. As most Western state residents know, the federal government likes to hoard land. Unfortunately, it has not shown itself to be capable of managing the land that it holds. This hoarding impedes economic growth, and federal land mismanagement allows catastrophic fires that unnecessarily endanger lives and property. To address this problem, Congress should stop appropriating funds to buy more land and direct the administration to begin selling off unneeded federal lands to the private sector or turn the land over to lower levels of government that are closer to the people. Just how much land does the federal government own? It turns out that the federal government owns so much land that it does not even know exactly how much it owns. According to a report issued this year by the Congressional Research Service, “The total federal land in the United States is not definitively known.” The government’s “rough estimate” is that it owns 640 million acres, which is equivalent to one million square miles. To put that in perspective, 640 million…
Read the full story
Conservative lawyer William Perry Pendley was appointed acting chief of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management this week in a move by the Trump administration that drew the ire of environmental groups.
Read the full story
by Tim Pearce A federal judge temporarily blocked new oil lease auctions in Wyoming on Tuesday after finding the Department of the Interior “did not sufficiently consider climate change” when proposing the lease sales, The Washington Post reports. Washington D.C. District Court Judge Rudolph Contreras ruled the government violated federal law and did not fully study the environmental impact of oil development on 300,000 acres of federal land. Contreras did not void leases already sold, but he ordered the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to redo the environmental reviews used to approve the leases. The BLM must include in the redone reviews the effects of each new oil well on overall emissions in the U.S., including the pumped oil’s downstream effects, Contreras’s ruling said. “Given the national, cumulative nature of climate change, considering each individual drilling project in a vacuum deprives the agency and the public of the context necessary to evaluate oil and gas drilling on federal land before irretrievably committing to that drilling,” he wrote, according to WaPo. Former President Barack Obama appointed Contreras to the federal bench in March 2012. Contreras’s ruling came after the activist groups WildEarth Guardians and Physicians for Social Responsibility sued the…
Read the full story
by Jason Hopkins An in-depth investigation found that federal, state and local governments were aware of California’s vulnerability to wildfires, but failed to take the necessary steps to prevent its devastation. California residents have recently been forced to deal with some of the worst wildfires in the state’s history. Over the course of a 13-month period that began in October 2017, four major fires scorched California. The fires ultimately burned 700,000 acres of land, destroying nearly 27,000 properties and killing over 100 people. The devastation has left leaders wondering who — or what — is to blame. California and the Trump administration have sparred heavily over what was responsible for the fires. Outgoing Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown and environmental activists have directed blame at climate change, claiming that rising temperatures make the fires more brutal. California officials are currently investigating whether a malfunction in an electric utility’s equipment may have caused one of the fires. Mounting evidence suggest the wildfires were in large part a result of regulatory failure. ProPublica, an investigative outlet based in New York, reviewed records and conducted dozens of interviews concerning one of these deadly fires: the Carr Fire. Its team ultimately concluded that “every level…
Read the full story
by Tim Pearce The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is moving two agencies and roughly 700 federal employees out of Washington, D.C., to save money and improve the department’s service to taxpayers. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue announced Thursday that the Economic Research Service (ERS) and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) will be fully moved out of the nation’s capital by 2020, according to the USDA. A location hasn’t been picked yet. “It’s been our goal to make USDA the most effective, efficient, and customer-focused department in the entire federal government,” Perdue said in a statement. “In our Administration, we have looked critically at the way we do business, with the ultimate goal of ensuring the best service possible for our customers, and for the taxpayers of the United States.” “In some cases, this has meant realigning some of our offices and functions, or even relocating them, in order to make more logical sense or provide more streamlined and efficient services,” Perdue said. As part of the reorganization, Perdue is also moving the Economic Research Service (ERS) out from under the USDA’s Research, Education, and Economics branch. The ERS will be placed back in the Office of the Chief…
Read the full story
by Daniel Di Martino Over 1,900 local governments received $553 million from the Department of Interior this year to compensate them for lost tax revenue for federal lands that cannot be developed in their territory. These payments are the consequence of more than 640 million acres of land, which amounts to 28 percent of the U.S. territory owned by the federal government. The Federal Government Is Hoarding Huge Potential Prosperity The costs of federal ownership are not only payments to local governments but also environmental damage due to mismanagement and deferred maintenance, as well as the lost economic activity that cannot occur in 28 percent of the country. Of all federal land, 27.4 million acres are National Parks, while approximately 600 million acres are managed by the Bureau of Land Management, the National Forest Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Park Service. These government agencies allow grazing and other economic activities on federal lands in exchange for fees. However, since fees are not enough for the expenses of these agencies, the federal government spends several billion dollars per year to cover the difference. Additionally, the federal government owns more than three trillion barrels of oil and 450 trillion cubic meters of natural…
Read the full story
by Tim Pierce A federal judge rejected prosecutors’ request Tuesday to reconsider her dismissal of the case against Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, his two sons and friend Ryan Payne. U.S. District Judge Gloria M. Navarro dismissed conspiracy charges against the four men on Jan. 8 after finding that prosecutors had acted “with prejudice” throughout the trial, The Oregonian reported. Federal prosecutors violated federal law and failed to share evidence favorable to the defendants case with the court. “The Court’s finding of outrageous government conduct was not in error,” Navarro wrote in her 11-page ruling (see below), obtained by The Oregonian. “On the contrary, a universal sense of justice was violated by the Government’s failure to provide evidence that is potentially exculpatory.” The prosecutors’ request did not make any new arguments or bring forth any evidence that Navarro had not already considered in her decision to dismiss the case. “The Court gave somber consideration to the ramifications of its Order and found that it was in the interest of justice to dismiss the case with prejudice,” Navarro wrote. “A motion for reconsideration should not be ‘used to ask the Court to rethink what it has already thought.’” Prosecutors requested the court grant another trial…
Read the full story
Reuters is reporting Chief US District Judge Gloria Navarro is declaring a mistrial is the government’s highly controversial criminal prosecution of Cliven Bundy over a range-land dispute that led to a days-long armed standoff in 2014: Bundy, two of his sons and another man had been charged with 15 counts of criminal conspiracy and other violations stemming from the confrontation, which galvanized right-wing militia groups challenging federal authority over vast tracts of public lands in the American West. U.S. District Judge Gloria Navarro told federal prosecutors that they had willfully violated evidence rules and failed to turn over pertinent documents to the defense. Navarro had warned prosecutors last week that she might declare a mistrial after listing documents previously undisclosed by prosecutors that could be used to impeach government witnesses or bolster defendants’ arguments that they felt surrounded by government snipers prior to the standoff. In a stinging rebuke on Wednesday, Navarro said prosecutors knew or should have known of the existence of memos from FBI agents that may have been helpful to the defense. Those memos and other documents, some 3,300 pages in all, were not turned over until well after an Oct. 1 deadline, and then only after repeated efforts by…
Read the full story
By Printus LeBlanc On Monday, President Trump traveled to Utah and signed two proclamations giving control of large portions of Bears Ears and the Grand Staircase-Escalante Monuments back to the people of Utah and Nevada. However, the mainstream media acted like President Trump kicked a puppy on live TV. The President did nothing more than address a significant issue facing states west of Texas and let them oversee some of the land they live on. Utah Senator Mike Lee was in favor of the President Trump’s move stating, “President Trump did the people of Utah a great favor today by rolling back harmful land use restrictions in southern Utah.” Lee knows what most people in western states believe; they are the best stewards of the lands they live on, not a Washington bureaucrat. The Antiquities Act of 1906 was signed into law by President Theodore Roosevelt on June 8, 1906. The law gave the sitting President the authority to create national monuments from federal lands. The act has been controversial, particularly in states west of Texas. When Jimmy Carter designated several monuments in Alaska in 1978, thousands of protesters burned Carter in effigy. No President used the act more…
Read the full story