Digging a hole
'Energy dominance' policies hurt public lands, leave us holding the bag

I live in Jackson County, in northern Colorado, where hundreds of inactive and abandoned oil wells litter the landscape. Not only are they an ugly sight, they are also just a few of the estimated 2.6 million unplugged wells across the country that leak methane, benzene and other toxic substances. 

The reality is that long after I’m gone, most or all of those wells will remain unplugged. The companies and people who once owned them will have been allowed to walk away from their responsibility to clean up their mess.

Uncapped wells are what happens when the federal government enables the fossil-fuel industry to dominate energy policies, as is happening again now. The policies allow companies, including many foreign ones, to profit from public lands and minerals that all Americans own. They will also leave taxpayers holding the bag for cleaning up leaking wells.

These abandoned wells already have consequences for wildlife, air, water and rural people. Kirk Panasuk, a rancher in Bainville, Mont., near the North Dakota border, said he has personally experienced serious health scares after breathing toxic fumes from oil and gas wells near his property. “And I’ve seen too many of my friends and neighbors in this part of the country have their water contaminated or their land destroyed by rushed and reckless industrial projects,” he said.

Republicans, Democrats and congressional members in previous administrations took pains to reform this historically biased federal energy system because of the damage done to rural communities and American taxpayers. Now, the federal government is rolling back those reforms.

Recently, the Interior Department announced that “emergency permitting procedures” were required when carrying out NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act. Timelines for environmental assessments for fossil-fuel projects were changed from one year to 14 days, without a public comment period. The timeline for more complicated environmental impact statements was cut from two years to 28 days, with only a 10-day public comment period.

In May, the House Natural Resources Committee unveiled its piece of the recently passed budget bill, which enables the federal government to expedite oil, gas, coal and mineral development. It gives Americans basically no say on the projects and keeps taxpayers from receiving a fair return on the development of publicly owned lands and minerals. 

The administration’s justification for expediting permits is that we face “a national energy emergency.” No such emergency exists. The United States is currently the world’s biggest exporter of liquified natural gas and is producing more oil than any other country on Earth.

Both the so-called “Big Beautiful Budget” Act and the Interior Department’s policies ignore the long-standing mandate to manage public lands for multiple uses. Instead, the new policies:

• Drastically reduce the public’s role in the permitting process.

• Allow large corporations to pay to evade environmental and judicial review.

• Exempt millions of acres of private lands with federal minerals and thousands of wells on these lands from federal permitting and mitigation requirements.

• Slash the royalty rate for oil and gas production from 16.67% to 12.5%, depriving state and local governments of funding they depend on for schools, roads and other essential services. An analysis by Resources for the Future found that the proposed lower royalty rates would result in a loss of nearly $5 billion in revenue over the next decade. 

The Interior Department’s emergency permitting procedures and the BBB are assaults the federal government has waged on public lands since January. The public has been shoved to the side as oil and gas drillers enjoy their energy dominance throughout our public lands.

Now, it’s up to us to tell our elected representatives that these policies ignore the wishes of Westerners. We have told pollsters innumerable times that we support conservation, not exploitation of public lands for private interests. What’s happening now is radically wrong.

Barbara Vasquez is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. A retired PhD biomedical researcher and semiconductor engineer, she is board chair of the Western Organization of Resource Councils and a board member of the Western Colorado Alliance.