Latest news with #publiclands
E&E News
2 days ago
- Politics
- E&E News
Conservationists sound alarm over spending bill's impact on Utah monument
Nearly 900,000 acres of public lands in Utah could be left in an administrative limbo unless House lawmakers strike language from the annual Interior Department appropriations bill, conservationists say. More than 60 organizations — including the Conservation Lands Foundation, Grand Canyon Trust, Grand Staircase Escalante Partners, New Mexico Wildlife Federation, The Wilderness Society and the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance — signed onto a Monday letter asking House leaders to remove a provision targeting the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument from the fiscal 2026 spending bill. 'Among the most beloved of the National Conservation Lands, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah is the first and largest national monument entrusted to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to conserve, restore, and protect,' the groups wrote in the letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), and Appropriations Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) and ranking member Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.). Advertisement The current spending bill would direct BLM to follow a 2020 Trump administration land-use plan for the monument in southwestern Utah.
E&E News
6 days ago
- Business
- E&E News
White House report extols fossil fuels as economic engine
Increased production of oil and natural gas could boost U.S. gross domestic product nearly 2 percent by 2035, the White House Council of Economic Advisers said in a report released Thursday. To meet the needs of artificial intelligence and other energy-hungry enterprises, the report — 'The Economic Benefits of Unleashing American Energy' — calls for accelerating the construction of gas pipelines, preventing coal plant retirements, quickly permitting all kinds of oil and gas projects and boosting liquefied natural gas exports. The report says the 'energy potential of public lands remains underutilized' while highlighting provisions in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to expand lease sales, lower lease royalties, and nix wind and solar tax credits. Advertisement 'Policies that promote the energy sector's growth,' it says, could raise GDP by 1.9 percent over the next decade.
E&E News
15-07-2025
- Politics
- E&E News
Burgum asked park rangers to flag negative US history. They're delivering.
Park rangers across the country are reporting to National Park Service leadership the ways their roadside signs, museums exhibits and websites could be viewed as negatively portraying U.S. history or failing to focus visitors on the splendor of public lands. The suggestions — including potential edits — were ordered by the Trump administration, which wants to overhaul how American history is told at national parks and federally run museums. The internal documents viewed by POLITICO's E&E News show how people on the front lines of telling those stories are dealing with a mandate from Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to not provide content that 'inappropriately disparages' historical figures and to emphasize the beauty of natural landscapes. Advertisement Park personnel are grappling with how to tell stories about enslavement or the oppression of Native Americans without implicating the white Americans of those eras, as well as expressing uncertainty over whether describing the effects of climate change would diminish the 'grandeur' of public lands in some visitors' eyes, according to about a dozen documents submitted to an NPS online portal.
Condé Nast Traveler
14-07-2025
- Business
- Condé Nast Traveler
What 'Make America Beautiful Again' Means for National Parks
On July 3, the White House issued a pair of executive orders with the expressed purpose of protecting America's public lands. One order establishes a Make America Beautiful Again (MABA) commission, and the other aims to improve the country's national parks. While both orders would represent an abrupt change of tone for an administration that's largely expanded mining and drilling leases across US public lands, the language used to outline future changes is vague, at best. 'We hope this departure from Trump's anti-public lands agenda becomes the norm and isn't just a PR ploy to distract voters from the backlash some Republicans received after spending months trying to sell off these same public lands to the highest bidder,' says Anna Peterson, executive director of The Mountain Pact, a nonprofit project that works with elected officials in Western US mountain towns. Here's what we know so far about how the orders could impact national park funding, staffing, and access. Funding The two orders come on the heels of $267 million in cuts to the National Park Service (NPS) via the current budget reconciliation bill and a reduction of 24% to the NPS' permanent staff. In order to increase revenue and improve park affordability for US residents, the Improving Our National Parks executive order makes mention that entry fees for foreign tourists will be raised. As of this writing, no details have been published on the specifics of the fee hikes. The Make America Beautiful Again executive order also claims that regulatory overreach has 'undermined outdoor traditions and conservation funding' and that mismanagement has led to more than $23 billion in deferred maintenance at the NPS. But what the order doesn't explain is that the Trump administration itself is the reason that the circa-2020 Great American Outdoors Act (GAOA) failed to fully use the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) budget, leading to increased maintenance backlogs at US national parks. Additional legislation proposed by Republicans would further defund the LWCF, which was supposed to be permanently funded by the GAOA by using proceeds from offshore oil and gas royalty payments. Visiting a National Park This Summer? Here's What to Expect In the face of mass firings, seasonal staffing shortages, and spending cuts, your national park vacation might look a little different this year. Staffing Out of the 8,000 NPS seasonal staff that the administration pledged to hire this summer, only about 4,500 have been put in place. Many who work for conservation groups are sounding alarms in reaction, while others are cautiously hopeful that the recent executive orders may reflect shifting priorities. 'Over 330 million visitors flock to parks because of their unrivaled beauty and history,' says Kristen Brengel, senior vice president of government affairs for the National Park Conservation Association (NPCA). 'Dedicated Park Service staff ensure [that] resources are protected. We call on the administration to exempt the Park Service from the hiring freeze and restore positions, or this executive order will go nowhere.' A mere six days after the executive orders were published, the Supreme Court lifted a lower court injunction that blocked the president from directing federal agencies to administer large-scale reductions in their workforces. The TL;DR, according to the NPCA, is that this ruling paves the way for the Trump administration to move forward with even more staffing reductions to the National Park Service. The 'Improving Our National Parks' executive order also calls for an end to a 2017 Presidential Memorandum promoting diversity and inclusion across America's public lands.
E&E News
14-07-2025
- Business
- E&E News
BLM continues geothermal energy support with planned lease sales
The Bureau of Land Management is planning two large geothermal lease sales in the next two months that will advance the Trump administration's public lands agenda backing this particular renewable energy source. The two planned lease sales — the first in August in California and the second in Idaho in September — will cover nearly 50,000 acres of public lands and cumulatively could result in power plant development capable of powering about 70,000 homes. The lease sale bid proceeds, as well as any revenue from electricity that is eventually produced if projects are built, would apply a new revenue-sharing plan that increases payments to counties and states where renewable energy is produced. It was part of the massive tax and energy bill Congress approved, and President Donald Trump signed into law this month, that also set the stage to end wind and solar project tax credits in the next two years. Advertisement The Trump administration has made it clear that geothermal power — which generally involves pumping up naturally heated water from deep underground to produce steam that runs electric generators — is its preferred renewable energy sector on public lands.
