As a United States senator, I sponsored and helped to pass new Wilderness protections for Colorado’s James Peak Wilderness, Indian Peaks Wilderness, and Rocky Mountain National Park. These bills became law thanks to a united coalition of advocates for conservation and recreation. In my experience, the two cannot be separated. The time we spend outside is what defines every conservationist I know.
Protecting Wilderness requires careful management that allows primitive recreation activities that are compatible with preserving Wilderness characteristics. Over the last decades, the management of fixed anchors in Wilderness areas has been ad hoc. It’s varied from area to area, often causing confusion and conflict. The Protecting America’s Rock Climbing Act (PARC Act) would clarify for the land agencies, the public, and climbers where fixed anchors are appropriate, when they can be replaced, and where they are banned.
By resolving the ongoing debate over fixed anchors, our public land managers can devote their priceless time to the serious, existential, and quickly progressing impacts to America’s Wilderness Preservation System. For example, air pollution and climate change don’t respect boundaries on a map. In fact, 96 percent of national parks “are plagued with significant air pollution problems.”
If we’re going to take a proactive approach to protecting America’s last pockets of Wilderness, we need a new generation of advocates to lead the way. Supporting sustainable climbing access to America’s Wilderness areas will help ensure that climbers—long-standing wilderness champions—are part of that coalition.
Here’s what I think: saying advocates for conservation and recreation “cannot be separated” is one of those generalized expressions that glosses over the fact that certain forms of recreation on the Pyramid of Pristinity are often kicked out or never allowed in Wilderness. Also, that even those activities allowed can have serious environmental impacts. But maybe that’s still conservation? By definition?
The fact is that our “public land managers” “priceless time” will probably not be spent on cleaning up air pollution nor reducing “climate change.” I heard one of my colleagues say “perhaps the best things federal lands could do for climate change is to not allow recreation of any kind because of the transportation and fuel impacts” and I’m not sure it was tongue-in-cheek.
His last argument is fairly pragmatic.. although I’m not sure what a “proactive approach to protecting” means… more Wilderness, or fewer things allowed, or protecting via reducing pollution and decarbonizing? What do they need climbers for, and why stop with them?
I don’t know if this one is particularly good but I needed a photo.
A friend has asked for examples of communities that have done exceptional work in becoming wildfire adapted and resilient. This would include all aspects of resilience, ignition reduction, structure and infrastructures design and hardening, fuel treatments/ mitigation, evacuation, and probably many things not on this list. Please comment below and provide links if possible.
I know, I know. A person could get confused because “climate resilience” sounds like its about adaptation, and the MOG discussion seems to be mostly about carbon, or at least the arguments for not cutting trees.. which we have been listening to for 40 years or thereabouts.. are now centered about carbon. And of course, every little thing the FS does on the landscape needs to have some kind of climate considerations, and has for at least 15 years or so. So the ANPR seems to be asking for “suggestions about anything that the FS does.” I wonder how many other agencies have had a rule making that opens up “everything it does.”
In fact, the FS has what I consider to be an excellent document about climate adaptation. And many of the people on these calls talk about MOG. But I’ve been told by internal and external People Who Should Know that it’s really about resilience and not about MOG. Meanwhile ENGOs are working on a MOG policy solution with CEQ, the FS and others.
I’m a general fan of the FS, as you all know, but I would point out a couple of my concerns. They used an abstraction in the webinar- “active management” -regularly without defining it. Fire suppression is active management, prescribed fire, planting trees, timber harvest and so on are all active. Based on the views of the form letters I read in response to the ANPR and the views of people on our webinars, I’d say that most people with concerns did not want commercial timber harvest, although they said “logging”, which is not exactly well defined at the project level. Tree cutting, or tree cutting and removal using heavy equipment, or tree cutting and pile burning, or just commercial timber harvest but maybe not commercial firewood.. So that’s one thing.
My other quibble was with analyzing comments using AI (in this case, natural language processing). I recently had a bad experience with AI so perhaps am a bit grumpy about it. You’ll remember I FOIAd both CEQ and USDA for documents with “fire retardant” in them. USDA gave me the documents they had, as far as I know, including messages from key people at CEQ. CEQ did not give me those messages, but did give me a DOE annual report and a mass of unrelated material. Apparently, that was due to their AI, or perhaps someone did not type in exactly the right search term. It seems to me that using AI is not necessarily increasing transparency nor trust. I’d argue that to build citizen confidence, each AI application during a test period should have the standard human approach run concurrently and both sets of results published and open for comment (aka Lessons Learned). I have noticed that contractors and I didn’t always pick the same way of analyzing comments either, so perhaps there’s not one “human” way. But the results would then be compared in one document that the public could view. I would see this as needed only for rule making; in my experience, projects are not as complex for content analysis. Also the decision makers for projects and even plans tend to be close enough to the disagreements that they have a base understanding of them. I am not so sure that’s true of the politicals involved in rule-making.. if they only listen to their friends, then the public comment summaries are key element of their understanding of opposing views.
I’d bet that “double coverage” would be expected and required, say, in fire suppression applications. To increase trust, accountability is also important. AI, without careful management, could also be an escape valve for accountability, as in “Sorry, folks, the AI did it.” Similar to “it’s not our fault, it’s climate change.”
Anyway, here’s a link to the presentation. I’m curious what strikes you about it.
Shout out to E&E news reporter Yachnin for attending and finding interesting stuff at the WGA Meeting! Governors of different parties agreeing on stuff and trying to solve problems together is well worth some reporting IMHO.
I like the Vilsack idea because it’s not just about NEPA, but would seemingly help make consistent case law around ESA, climate analysis, scientific controversies and so on that seem to be decided more or less randomly by different courts in different cases. And we don’t know if it was Vilsack’s idea or one of his staff, or someone at OGC or at the FS, but still how often do we hear new outside-the-box ideas in this space? Also if the issue is litigation, the tweaks in the so-called Fiscal Responsibility Act and the proposed CEQ NEPA Regs are either not helpful, or in the wrong direction. I’ll post a few more posts on various efforts and studies in the next few weeks, but props to Vilsack for saying the “L” word out loud.
When it comes to speeding up often lethargic legal challenges to environmental reviews, Agricultural Secretary Tom Vilsack is floating a novel idea: Create a specialized court system.
Vilsack raised the concept Tuesday in remarks to the Western Governors’ Association at its annual meeting in Jackson Hole, Wyo., where conversations among state officials often turned to possible reforms of the National Environmental Policy Act.
The Biden administration is weighing how to reshape the nation’s bedrock environmental law to streamline environmental permitting and speed the process of reviews.
“The challenge is no matter what you do, somebody always disagrees with it and you have litigation,” Vilsack said.
“Sometimes it’s litigation because people think you should be doing more, and sometimes people think you should be doing a heck of a lot less.”
Preempting his own idea by asserting it is “probably not feasible,” Vilsack then went on to propose a NEPA court system — akin to admiralty courts, which apply maritime laws — that “would essentially be responsible for adjudicating those decisions.”
“I think you’d get greater consistency with people who do this every day,” Vilsack said “You’d have precedent, people would understand what the rules are. You wouldn’t have the forum shopping that takes place in this circumstance.”
Plus you might have some kind of consistent case law for NEPA practitioners to aim for..
Such a court system could potentially serve to balance environmental protections with a need to speed up the often lethargic process, Vilsack said.
“It seems to me that until you deal with the issue of litigation and trying to figure out ways to streamline it in a way that doesn’t interfere with the quality of the analysis and assessment, you’re going to continue to be stuck with taking forever for things to get done,” he said.
The idea appeared to spark the interest of several officials at the meeting, including Utah Gov. Spencer Cox (R), whose response to Vilsack prompted audience laughter. “That makes far too much sense, and there’s no way it could ever happen,” Cox said.
Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon (R) revisited the idea during a Wednesday panel on infrastructure permitting, describing a separate legal system as “provocative.”
“There is a tendency to try to find the best court to bring a particular action in NEPA,” Gordon said.
New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) responded to Gordon, noting that the idea would require both dedicated funding and training, and pointing to failures in the immigration court system.
“If we’re not willing to take on controversial ideas that are provocative, then we aren’t going to solve problems,” Lujan Grisham said. “I think there’s a there, there. I don’t know exactly what it is.”
She later added, “If we have a stalling aspect, we should figure out a way so that it is a fair objective review, so that we get guidance about where to go and not a situation that continues to stall us out all across the country.”
I’m not sure that it would take any more funding or training, we’re already doing all the work but in a less coherent fashion.
NEPA experts are still poring over the 236-page draft document. But several said the changes are an encouraging step toward broader permitting reform, balancing efficiency and environmental risk — while staying consistent with the underlying law and court precedent.
“I don’t see a lot of legal risk” to CEQ, said Max Sarinsky, a senior attorney at New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity.
He described the draft as “meaningful” but “also fairly modest and incremental.”
Well, I’m glad NYU has an Institute for Policy Integrity as opposed to .. I don’t know.. whatever the opposite of integrity is? But it’s OK because foundations are funding them, many of the usual suspects..and even our own tax dollars via EPA. Now everyone knows I like lawyers and economists (especially forest economists and lawyers), but if we want to provide things like energy to people who need them, I think we’ll need more expertise at the table, or in the university, or at the think tank, or in the White House than those who generate analyses and lawsuits. Because generally lawsuits are good at slowing down things that are bad (to some). I’m not sure that they’ve ever speeded up things that are good (to some).
New Mexico is one of our poorer states, so this is good news from a social justice perspective. But if fees from renewables decline by 50% based on the new reg, assuming similar years, it would be $300 mill less? And that difference would grow as new renewables come on line. I wonder where exactly the future missing $300 mill or more would have gone?
Interior Department Announces $18.24 Billion in Fiscal Year 2023 Energy Revenue
WASHINGTON — Today, the Department of the Interior’s Office of Natural Resources Revenue (ONRR) announced the disbursement of $18.24 billion in revenues generated in fiscal year 2023 from energy production on federal and Tribal lands and federal offshore areas. U.S. energy production under President Biden’s leadership has reached an all-time high on both public and private lands throughout the nation.
The disbursements provide funds for states and Tribes to pursue a variety of conservation and natural resource goals, including irrigation and hydropower projects, historic preservation initiatives, conservation of public lands and waters, and investments in maintenance for critical facilities and infrastructure on our public lands.
The Department’s renewable energy programs yielded nearly $600 million in revenue and is making significant progress toward the President’s ambitious clean energy goals. President Biden’s Investing in America agenda is growing the American economy from the middle out and bottom up – from rebuilding our nation’s infrastructure, to driving over $600 billion in private sector manufacturing and clean energy investments in the United States, to creating good paying jobs and building a clean energy economy that will combat the climate crisis and make our communities more resilient.
This year, $1.43 billion was distributed to Tribes and individual Indian mineral owners; $3.46 billion to the Reclamation Fund; $1 billion to the Land and Water Conservation Fund; $150 million to the Historic Preservation Fund; $379 million to federal agencies; and $7.09 billion to the U.S. Treasury.
ONRR disbursed $4.72 billion in fiscal year 2023 funds to 33 states. This revenue was collected from oil, gas, renewable energy, and mineral production on federal lands within the states’ borders and offshore oil and gas tracts in federal waters adjacent to four Gulf of Mexico states’ shores.
The states receiving the highest disbursements based on those activities are:
New Mexico
$2.93 billion
Wyoming
$832.86 million
Louisiana
$177.25 million
Colorado
$153.24 million
North Dakota
$132.66 million
Utah
$123.91 million
Texas
$108.27 million
Mississippi
$52.58 million
Alabama
$52.49 million
California
$49.12 million
Alaska
$44.81 million
Montana
$36.18 million
The revenues disbursed to 33 federally recognized Tribes and approximately 31,000 individual Indian mineral owners represent 100 percent of the revenues received for energy and mineral production activities on Indian lands. Tribes use these revenues to develop infrastructure, provide health care and education, and support other critical community development programs, such as senior centers, public safety projects, and youth initiatives.
Since 1982, the Department has disbursed more than $371.3 billion in mineral leasing revenues. ONRR makes most of these disbursements monthly from the royalties, rents, and bonuses it collects from energy and mineral companies operating on federal lands and waters.
In yesterday’s post, I suggested that climate and energy policy could use Agreement, Alignment, and Accountability.
In the absence of some kind of USG agreement, we might hope that at least the Biden Administration would have some degree of alignment. My observation is that different agencies seem to be influenced by different interest groups, with different views which leads to massive non-alignment.
Sometimes the Admin says that they are big fans of a massive renewable buildout across federal lands. According to this press release:
The Biden-Harris administration is committed to expanding clean energy development to address climate change, enhance America’s energy security and create good-paying union jobs. The projects we are advancing today will add enough clean energy to the grid to power millions of homes,” said Secretary Deb Haaland. “Through historic investments from President Biden’s Investing in America agenda, the Interior Department is helping build modern, resilient climate infrastructure that protects our communities from the worsening impacts of climate change.”
“The BLM’s work to responsibly and quickly develop renewable energy projects is crucial to achieving the Biden-Harris administration’s goal of a carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035,” said BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning. “Investing in clean and reliable renewable energy represents the BLM’s commitment to addressing climate change and supports direction from the President and Congress to permit 25 gigawatts of solar, wind and geothermal production on public lands no later than 2025.”
As we’ve discussed before, the solar industry had concerns about the BLM proposed conservation rule.. but on the other hand BLM reduced the fees by 50% on federal land, so that solar and wind would generate more profit (or cost less to attract investors). So that’s not as clear an alignment as might be possible, but even less aligned appears to be the recent Proposed CEQ NEPA regulations.
Ted Boling, formerly of CEQ, called the NEPA changes in the Fiscal Responsibility Act “a full employment program for environmental litigators.” Since based on Ted’s observation, they have already reached full employment via the changes in the Fiscal Responsibility Act, it’s hard to imagine what would happen if all the changes in the Proposed NEPA regs make it into the final rule. Perhaps law schools could get funding from the Feds to expand their programs..
Now to be fair, perhaps at least the Congressfolks intended to streamline processes. It does seem to me, though, that there is a gap between Congressional staffers and environmental lawyers on the one hand, and NEPA practitioners in agencies, on the other hand, about what are useful interventions that might help make NEPA procedures better. It seems like some of the ideas may sound great to the people writing them, but they have no idea about how things work in the real world of agency NEPA. My impression of these proposed regs was that of CEQ tying knots around agency efforts of all kinds, and making sure that the regs bristle with new legal hooks. Yes, it’s a climate emergency and we need to build things (by 2030).. but maybe not at the risk of reducing the decision-making power of those who currently have their feet on the brakes. So we have lots of funding via new bills, but no one has taken their feet off the brake, in fact they are expanding the braking power. I don’t know what the auto analogy is at this point, but we could waste a great deal of (borrowed) money and get nowhere.
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From the NAFSR comments (National Association of Forest Service Retirees):
The CEQ regulations need to provide consistency, reliability, and simplicity so the Federal agencies, public, and courts understand requirements related to the statute, as well as the flexibility allowed for a wide variety of applications and efficiencies today and into the future. There were some unnecessary NEPA burdens imposed by the previous administration and also by Congress in the Fiscal Responsibility Act. Including the changes in this proposed regulation, the cumulative impacts of all these new requirements may make it impossible for agencies to efficiently and effectively meet requirements to integrate environmental considerations in their planning and decision making. Additionally, political whip-saw changes to the CEQ regulations upset an orderly process for agencies to plan, decide on, and implement programs. The instability of the law and CEQ regulations means agency NEPA procedures, guidance, and training are constantly out of date.
In our view, CEQ should avoid requiring agencies, NEPA contractors, and legal professionals working for project proponents and opponents, as well as judges in the federal courts, to strike out into unexplored legal territory. This is unlikely to either help agencies increase the efficiency of project planning and implementation, or respond quickly and flexibly to climate emergencies as they arise.
The stability of the pre-2023 statute and the pre-2020 CEQ regulations provided a reliable and steady baseline for agencies to operate within. While case law and agency practices raised questions, burdens, and remedies, CEQ guidance and agency innovation have helped agencies navigate these challenges in the past.
(my bold)
And
Stability also involves not making changes that are likely to be litigated. Litigation extends the time until agencies understand and can act on requirements. Two potential outliers compared to what we might call “Classic NEPA based on the 1978 Regulations” are both related to the idea of NEPA as an action-forcing statute, and are likely to be litigated. The first is an effort to walk away from acknowledging NEPA’s history as a procedural statute; the second is requiring mitigation. It’s not clear what problems these changes would be responding to; they are likely to be litigated or clarified by Congress; and they do not add modernization or efficiency. If there are not enough substantive environmental statutes on the books, we think the answer is to encourage Congress to pass more, not to add more requirements to the NEPA process.
One of the least helpful additions is not from CEQ, at all but a new Congressional requirement to review programmatics every five years (for us, think RMPs and forest plan EISs). This seems puzzlingly unnecessary. I’ve never heard anyone complain that agencies don’t review programmatics enough; I’ve only heard from previous CEQ folks that agencies should use them more.
I know many of you have written very thoughtful comment letters on the CEQ Proposed NEPA Regs. Please put your thoughts and links to your comments below.
What about a collaborative process for decarbonization?
This week, I’m going to post a series of NEPA papers for discussion. But I’d like to start out with a fairly wild idea. Last month, I attended a conference put on by The Breakthrough Institute titled “Slouching Toward Industrial Policy.” For the past years (20 or more), the US has been debating how exactly to decarbonize. In the Obama and Biden Administrations, the tendency has been to go for solar and wind and hope for batteries. During the Trump Admin, the focus was on “all of the above” , domestic production of oil and gas and hope for CCS technologies. The IRA was called “the Most Important Climate Action in US History” by Forbes.
And yet, the IRA is something of an “all of the above” as well. So, as I call them, all the technological horses in the horse race are getting extra grain via the bill, from batteries to CCS. And yet, when it comes to permitting or where what stuff will be built, there doesn’t seem to be a plan. Perhaps an analogy is PODs versus “random acts of restoration.” Or when I worked in genetically engineered plants, a company wanted to grow pharmaceuticals in outcrossing food plants. I asked them to begin with the end in mind, in that case, doing an EIS.
Thinking about a more coherent semi-industrial policy, I developed the three A’s which I think are necessary to any such policy. The first is to develop Agreement, the second is Alignment and the third is Accountability. I sometimes wonder whether, like some other environmental issues (say ESA reform), some powerful political figures prefer jabbing the other political party to actually solving the problem. So we’d need an open and transparent mechanism to develop Agreement outside partisan bickering- perhaps some kind of collaborative process writ large? And hey, I know that Congress doesn’t need to do NEPA, but heck, it’s a process that works for the most part. It’s, as some Congressfolk say, a bedrock environmental law that shouldn’t be tampered with. But there’s no reason, in my mind, to restrict NEPA-like processes to small problems, and leave large problems to random political windshifts or flipflops. The structured analysis, transparency (FOIAble) and opportunities for public engagement seem to me especially appropriate to our biggest problems that require big solutions (across the landscape).
What if the US approached decarbonizing by doing an enormous programmatic EIS? As we’ll see later this week, there’s a divergence between what NEPA practitioners generally think of programmatics (not worth the time) versus others like CEQ and some law profs, so maybe CEQ should be in charg? So I think we’d have willing volunteers from the “programmatics are good” commuity. Or like the NW Forest Plan, we could have a FACA committee with representatives from different energy producers, distribution systems and so on, unions, economists, national security folks and so on. Alternatives could be developed with realistic scenarios of future demand, supply chains, and labor needed with the people currently working on such things brought in. Of course, specific locations of new infrastructure (power plants, transmission lines, etc.), and sources of raw materials would need to be included.
Research funds would be focused on trying to answer questions needed by this group of analysts. We could have a moratorium on “bad things could happen in the future based on models” climate research, and fund this kind of work, using whatever mix of disciplines and practitioners would be needed to shed necessary light in the dark corners. And all the information would be publicly peer reviewed.
Sidenote: a foundation funded the Society of Environmental Journalists webinar with Stanford Prof Mark Jacobson. He did a study that showed that 139 countries could go to all wind solar and hydro by 2050. Right now, if reporters wonder about that study, they have nowhere else obvious to go. If this EIS existed, they would. We all would.
Things like permitting difficulties due to local concerns, or even “whoops, our offshore wind economics models turned out wrong” or “gosh, it turns out that those Europeans need our LNG” might show up in scenarios, and uncertainties would be in the open, and in some cases handled by formal sensitivity analysis or other procedures. And of course, there are unknown unknowns, but they exist whether or not the US tries to develop a cohesive and coherent set of policies, or just randomly picks things that sound good to powerful interests of various kinds. I think all of us would learn a lot; and our chosen policies might be more realistic. And think of all the agency NEPA practitioners for decarb projects who could simply tier to that EIS! What’s not to like?
Many thanks again to Kelly Martin for making herself available for a presentation on the Wildfire Commission Report last Friday! And thanks to all who attended and participated.
We had an interesting discussion afterwards, in which members of the group disagreed on some things (e.g. around the use of beneficial wildfire) and agreed on others (developing affordable housing for firefighters). One of my favorite moments was toward the end of the video, when Kelly talks about her passions for this work, and why she continues working on these issues in retirement. I’m sure she articulated how many of us feel and can’t express nearly as well.
I’m hoping the video will work for those who couldn’t attend. It’s posted here. Please comment below if it doesn’t work for you.
On today’s show, I welcome Kelly Martin to discuss the new Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission’s report to Congress, everything happening with the workforce, legislation, and beneficial fire.
The Presidential Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission was established in 2022. Kelly was one of 500 applicants who applied to voluntarily serve on this 50-member Commission. She was selected to fill the primary seat representing Wildland Firefighters.
Kelly’s 35-year federal career as a wildland firefighter provided invaluable technical and subject matter expertise to the Commission, ultimately obtaining unanimous consensus on comprehensive workforce reforms (see recommendations 84-103 in the Commission report).
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Comment Moderation- New Tab
I don’t get to read everyone’s comments, but I have noted a couple of requests for moderation. So I made another tab above labelled “Moderation Requests and Discussion” so I can find them. Please put all such comments there or a link to the moderation comments you’ve already made. I do want to respond but I want to be more or less consistent, and I want to be able to find them all. Thank you!
From Clearpath https://clearpath.org/tech-101/pore-space-101-carbon-capture-cant-rock-and-roll-without-storage/
This is where all this gets really interesting to me, as it is jostling between different environmental interests- climate vs. traditional preservation types. So in what used to be our federal lands space, we will have environmental lawyers and political operatives duking it out, with federal employees doing the NEPA work, the companies rolling the dice, and the public likely relegated to the bleachers. And without all the partisan rancor featured in other discussions… at least so far.
The proposal published in the Federal Register would exempt carbon capture and storage (CCS) from an existing agency requirement prohibiting permanent or “perpetual” use of such lands.
Because CCS projects would store carbon dioxide in pore space underground for more than 1,000 years after the gas is injected, it would be tantamount to an “an exclusive and perpetual use and occupancy” not allowed under current rules, according to the Forest Service, which is part of the Department of Agriculture.
By exempting CCS from the prohibition on permanent projects, the Forest Service can review proposals and applications and “authorize proposed carbon capture and storage on NFS lands if, where, and as deemed appropriate,” the proposed rule said.
National forests and grasslands could support greater deployment of carbon capture projects, as they offer billions of tons of CO2 storage potential and blocks of land under government ownership, rather than involving multiple owners.
Some environmental and advocacy groups, however, rejected the prospect of allowing CCS projects on Forest Service lands, saying the plan would create pollution, prolong the fossil fuel industry and put delicate ecosystems at risk.
“This serious rule change invites polluters to apply for dangerous CO2-dumping permits in our national forests,” said Victoria Bogdan Tejeda, a staff attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law program, in an email. “Our forests should be protected for people and wildlife, not handed over to companies for pollution-dumping pipelines that could asphyxiate and kill people if they rupture.”
In response, Scott Owen, a Forest Service spokesperson, said that at this time, the agency “does not have any carbon capture project proposals under consideration.”
Owen said the proposal only changes the initial screening criteria allowing the Forest Service to consider proposals for carbon capture and storage projects.
“All proposals must still pass secondary screening to be accepted as a formal application,” Owen said in a statement. “Carbon capture proposals are still subject to [National Environmental Policy Act] compliance and approval by the authorized officer on the Forest.”
Each forest has an authorized officer that would review individual carbon capture proposals for NEPA compliance prior to approval, Owen added.
The proposed rule also puts forward a definition for CCS where CO2 would not be classified as hazardous waste.
Tara Righetti, a law professor at the University of Wyoming, said in an email that CCS applications for review could be approved “if they met all other criteria required for special use authorizations, including environmental analysis and consistency with the land management plans.”
“When finalized, this rule will mark an important step towards utilization of forest system lands for CCS,” Righetti added.
Xan Fishman, director of energy policy and carbon management at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a think tank, called the rule a positive step forward.
“Fighting climate change is going to be a massive, massive endeavor and it’s going to require a bunch of solutions,” Fishman said in an interview.
Those solutions will involve point source capture, where CO2 emissions are trapped before they go into the atmosphere, and carbon removal, where legacy CO2 is pulled out of the air, he said.
“Opening up every reasonable avenue” to store CO2 is “smart,” Fishman said. “Here’s a way we can store it underground and it doesn’t mess with the rest of the forest for other uses.”
The comment period for the proposed rule ends Jan. 2.
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Remember in our discussions of the Rock Springs RMP last week, the Wyofile story talked about how rights of way potentially needed for CCS might be blocked off by the conservation alternative. Anyway, as the E&E story says:
Some environmental and advocacy groups, however, rejected the prospect of allowing CCS projects on Forest Service lands, saying the plan would create pollution, prolong the fossil fuel industry and put delicate ecosystems at risk.
It could be argued that current wind and solar projects prolong the fossil fuel industry, because they require natural gas backup at least until there are scalable batteries, with minerals and supply chain issues not yet worked out; certainly they create pollution and put delicate ecosystems at risk. To be fair, I think CBD is fairly consistent on not wanting wind and solar, transmission lines, nuclear, nor mines for strategic minerals. If I’m not understanding their views I hope someone will correct me.
I get that certain ENGO’s (and CAP and some media) seem to hate the fossil fuel industry, but it’s hard to see that fossil fuels are going anywhere soon. Center for Western Priorities (run by D operatives) almost has a story about the oil and gas industry being bad in almost every newsletter. Scratch the environmental veneer and there seems to be the waferboard of partisan self-interest.
Electricity generation from renewables and nuclear could provide as much as two-thirds of global electricity generation by 2050, according to the EIA.
Solar and wind show the highest levels of electricity generation growth. Meanwhile, coal and natural gas is expected to make up between 27% and 38% of power generation capacity by 2050, down from about half in 2022, EIA Administrator Joseph DeCarolis said on Wednesday during an event to present the outlook.
I found this from the Clean Air Task Force, but am trusting them on the details. The basic point is that we need CCS to keep global warming to below 1.5 degrees C with no or limited overshoot, according to the IPCC.
Carbon capture and storage (including DACCS and BECCS) is central to IPCC mitigation pathways
WGIII made clear that carbon capture and storage is a critical decarbonization strategy in most mitigation pathways. Among the 97 assessed pathways that keep global warming to below 1.5ºC with ‘no or limited overshoot’ (meaning a reduced chance of exceeding 1.5ºC in the near term), there is a broad range of possible deployment levels for the technology, with a median average of 665 gigatonnes (Gt) of carbon dioxide cumulatively captured and stored between now and 2100.
WGIII also identifies seven specific pathways, termed ‘Illustrative Mitigation Pathways’ (IMPs) that best summarize and highlight different decarbonization strategies – four that achieve 1.5ºC and three that keep temperatures ‘likely below 2ºC. Only one of the seven IMPs includes no carbon capture. However, this scenario requires global energy demand to nearly halve in the next 30 years, which is socio-politically unrealistic given the existing energy poverty around the world and that energy demand must increase as much of the world industrializes and urbanizes. Even the IMP based on particularly high uptake of renewable energy still requires more than 3 Gt ofcarbon dioxide to be captured and stored annually by 2050 (Figure 3.15 in the full report).
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DACCS is direct air capture and storage, and BECCS is bioenergy with carbon capture and storage.
So I guess we gotta do it, according to the IPCC. But not on federal land, says CBD. And so it goes.. Next post: EIS for thee, but not for me.
This map depicts rights-of-way exclusion areas as proposed in the Bureau of Land Management’s preferred “conservation” Alternative B of the Rock Springs Resource Management Plan draft environmental impact statement. (Wyoming Bureau of Land Management)This map depicts rights-of-way exclusion areas in the Bureau of Land Management’s current management plan. (Wyoming Bureau of Land Management)
We have been discussing the Rock Springs RMP. First, the Cowboy Daily had an article about a retiree’s views on the process. Then we had the NY Times story. I’m always wondering about whom the Biden Admin is serving when it comes to making decisions on renewable energy vs. “protection.” Fortunately for all of us who don’t want to read draft EIS’s (without getting paid), a reporter from Wyofile looked into specifically my question.
This map depicts rights-of-way exclusion areas as proposed in the Bureau of Land Management’s preferred “conservation” Alternative B of the Rock Springs Resource Management Plan draft environmental impact statement. (Wyoming Bureau of Land Management)
Undeveloped areas will be largely off-limits to industrial-scale energy projects — be they fossil fuels, trona, hard minerals, wind, solar or a combination — under the Bureau of Land Management’s preferred “conservation” scenario for managing 3.5 million acres of federal land in southwest Wyoming, some observers say.
That’s primarily because the BLM’s conservation priority spelled out in “Alternative B” — one of four management scenarios in the Rock Springs draft environmental impact statement guiding its resource management plan — would vastly expand “exclusion areas” for rights-of-way, hampering greenfield development for projects that require new roads, pipelines and electric transmission lines.
Nearly 2.5 million acres — 71% of the planning area — would be excluded from consideration for new rights-of-way.
That’s a 481% increase in acreage off-limits to things like maintained roads, power lines and pipelines. BLM officials say it’s also a means to inhibit permanent industrial facilities in other areas — a state-owned land section, for example — because they typically require infrastructure like power lines and pipelines.
“Conservation, that’s what’s driving that particular alternative,” Wyoming BLM spokesman Brad Purdy told WyoFile. “So there would be less development overall.
“Rights-of-way,” Purdy continued, “that’s how we [permit] solar. It’s how we do roads, how we do power lines. I think all of those types of things would be impacted.”
The proposed rights-of-way exclusion areas take into account conservation values weighed against “marginal” energy yield opportunities in yet-to-be-developed areas, according to the BLM. Legislative leaders, however, say it’s another example of the agency’s failure to find a balance that doesn’t harm Wyoming’s “bedrock industries.”
My bold. But if they are marginal energy opportunities, why do they need to be taken off the table?
So here is what the Wyoming Outdoor Council folks think.
A close examination of where the 2.5 million acres of rights-of-way exclusion areas are drawn suggests a recognition of marginal development opportunities, particularly for wind, solar and geothermal energy, according to Wyoming Outdoor Council Energy and Climate Policy Director John Burrows.
There are simply higher-value wind resources in other areas of the state, Burrows said, while the preferred alternative still allows for adequate growth in both wind and solar development where industrial infrastructure already exists — primarily along the Interstate 80 corridor. The proposed exclusion areas, he noted, mostly encompass large areas of the northern and southern portions of the management area, where there’s little to no existing industrial infrastructure.
“The BLM’s preferred alternative keeps just under 1 million acres of land open and available to wind and solar leasing,” Burrows said. “In our assessment, this is more than adequate to give future opportunities for responsibly sited renewable development while also protecting the truly outstanding wildlife habitat, wide-open spaces, cultural resources and other values across the planning area.”
Is it possible that maybe the Wyoming Outdoor Council is not on the same page as DOE might be on the need and preferable locations for renewable development (and transmission lines)?
Industrial-sized carbon management projects such as the Sweetwater Carbon Storage Hub, which would pump and store carbon dioxide deep underground, and Project Bison, which would pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in what’s referred to as “direct air capture,” are located just outside the BLM’s Rock Springs Field Office management area. However, those projects require pipelines, power lines and other infrastructure that may need rights-of-way approval from the BLM in the Rock Springs management area.
For example, the Sweetwater Carbon Storage Hub partnership will rely on constructing facilities to collect carbon dioxide from multiple existing trona mining facilities near Green River and pipe it to injection sites near Granger.
Trona, oil and natural gas
The BLM’s preferred conservation alternative would also further restrict potential expansions of trona mining and, especially, oil and natural gas development due to the proposed growth of rights-of-way exclusion areas and myriad wildlife habitat projections.
It would “increase the level of impacts to trona development and could result in further reduction of trona extracted via mining activities,” according to the draft EIS. It would also result in a 73% drop in projected federal oil and gas drilling over the next 20 years “due to an increase in areas that are closed to fluid mineral leasing and managed with [no surface occupancy] stipulations.”
It seems like different departments within the USG are funding climate actions, technologies and subsidies, while others are blithely cutting off possibilities for the future use of those technologies and increasing the difficulty of siting. If we are in a “climate emergency” wouldn’t we want to map the potential build-out of renewable and transmission needed first, and then “protect” what’s left? And certainly mining our the minerals we use, and not importing them (from countries of questionable friendliness) has some value, even if they do not fit the definition of “strategic.” Because they provide jobs and tax dollars, and if our environmental regulations are not as tight as other countries’ are, they can be fixed. The point of view of “get it somewhere else” applied to the US seems to me to be economically and national security-wise a really bad idea. And I thought Covid had made us rethink supply chains? At the same time, according to this Admin, made in the US is a good thing, while minerals produced in the US are not, except for some. It’s all very puzzling.
Anyway, thanks to Dustin Bleizeffer of Wyofile for looking into this.
