Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2021
Abstract
For decades, the federal government has inadequately considered the environmental harms of oil and gas extraction in its management of public lands and waters. As a result, fossil-fuel developers have been handed vast swaths of land at bargain prices, causing dangerous levels of greenhouse gas pollution that exacerbates climate change while depriving the public of more beneficial uses of the land.
That is all likely to change soon. A week into his term, President Biden called for a comprehensive review of the oil and gas program.1 That review is now underway and is likely to result in substantial programmatic reforms such as curtailing fossil-fuel leasing, prioritizing conservation and renewable-energy generation, increasing environmental controls, and adjusting lease terms to ensure fair value to taxpayers. The substantial climate and other environmental benefits of these reforms should justify any associated economic impacts.
But those benefits will remain largely obscured if Interior continues to use the methodologies it has relied upon in the past. That is because under previous administrations spanning decades, both the Bureau of Land Management (“BLM”) and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (“BOEM”) have prepared analyses that did not fully capture the environmental impacts of fossil-fuel extraction. More rigorous evaluation of these impacts could help Interior defend its breaks from prior policy and, in doing so, provide critical analytical support for long-overdue reforms. Additionally, stronger analytical support will help safeguard this administration’s reforms against any efforts by a future presidential administration to roll them back.
This report offers suggestions on how Interior can build an analytical toolkit to support ambitious reforms in federal land-management policies based on sound scientific and economic methodologies. Interior should not substantially delay overdue reforms in anticipation of revised analytical tools. Some of the tools suggested in this report can be applied immediately, while Interior could develop others in the meantime and then apply those methodologies to any reforms that it undertakes after those methodologies are available.
Recommended Citation
Rothschild, Rachel and Max Sarinsky. "Toward Rationality in Oil and Gas Leasing: Building the Toolkit for Programmatic Reforms." Institute for Policy Integrity (2021).
Included in
Environmental Law Commons, Land Use Law Commons, Natural Resources Law Commons, Oil, Gas, and Mineral Law Commons
Comments
Copyright © 2021 by the Institute for Policy Integrity. All rights reserved. Reproduced with permission. Work published when author not on Michigan Law faculty and included by author request.