Project 2025: Environmental Impacts Part II (BLM)
Last week, I began this series on exploring the environmental consequences in Project 2025, specifically outlined for the Environmental Protection Agency, in Project 2025: Environmental Impacts Part I. In case you are not yet familiar, Project 2025 is the “conservative” framework for policy, personnel, and training if Trump gets elected this fall. And, as a reminder, it is up to us - the voters - to determine what happens on Election Day, November 4, 2024. It’s not up to the politicians, the pundits, or social media. The future is yet to be written and we the voters get to write it. I encourage everyone to read about Project 2025 and share it with your family, friends, and colleagues to gain awareness about what will happen if Trump is elected.
Chapter 16 in the 900-page policy book called “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” focuses on the Department of the Interior. This chapter is written by William Perry Pendley, the former Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Director under Trump. It’s important to note that Pendley was never confirmed by the Senate and a U.S. District Judge ruled in 2020 that Pendley had unlawfully been the BLM Director for 424 days. He wanted to move to Grand Junction, Colorado himself and set in motion the relocation of dozens of BLM personnel out of Washington, D.C. out to the west, which is a continued focus of his in Project 2025, relocating hundreds of BLM employees at a cost of millions.
There is much ground to cover in Chapter 16 on the Department of the Interior so I will do more posts on this chapter, but want to begin with a focus on the BLM. The most fascinating aspect to me of Pendley’s plans for the BLM boils down to a focus on the management of wild horses and burros over the much larger “elephant in the room” - oil and gas drilling.
Pendley used to go on and on about how wild horses and burros were the biggest threat to BLM lands. What he seemed to either forget, not realize, and/or hide was the fact that while there are about 75,000 wild horses and burros on BLM land there are also over 90,000 producing oil wells. Now, I’ve seen wild horses and wild burros. While wild horses and burros are not immune from causing environmental degradation through things like overgrazing, the environmental impact is incredibly minimal compared to that of an oil well. Imagine the difference between a small overgrazed area of land from a wild horse population and the massive footprint of an oil well including all of the above ground equipment, roads to access that equipment, all of the sub-surface impacts to land and water, and all of the local air pollution.
To reiterate, there are more oil wells on BLM lands than individual wild horses and burros. And what isn’t mentioned at all in Project 2025? Private grazing permits for cattle and sheep on BLM lands. Okay, so let’s go back to that 75,000 wild horses and burros number on BLM lands. Guess how many cattle are on BLM lands? Over 1.5 million due to various estimates. Although the BLM does not track the total number of individual cattle and sheep, the BLM does currently lease over 18,000 grazing permits over 21,000 allotments across 155 million acres. Which is a bigger problem to overgrazing - 75,000 wild horses and burros or over 1,500,000 cattle?
So, let me rephrase this way:
Which has the biggest environmental impact on BLM land?
75,000 grazing wild horses and burros
90,000 oil wells
1,500,000 grazing cattle
I’d guess any elementary school student would NOT pick choice “A”, yet this is what Pendley is focused on. If you’ve visited BLM lands in the West, you can see the problems first hand. Of all of the years I have spent in my professional and personal life on BLM lands in New Mexico, I can attest to seeing the environmental degradation of oil and gas drilling along with overgrazing by cattle firsthand. Rarely have I been fortunate enough to even witness a wild horse or burro. All of this focus on wild horses and burros being the problem is clearly a distraction used to make you look away from the real problems causing environmental impacts on BLM lands.
The scariest part of Chapter 16’s focus on the BLM is the section titled “Restoring American Energy Dominance” which starts with this sentence: “Given the dire adverse national impact of Biden’s war on fossil fuels, no other initiative is as important for the DOI under a conservative President than the restoration of the department’s historic role managing the nation’s vast storehouse of hydrocarbons, much of which is yet to be discovered.” Why is this scary? Well, oil and gas drilling has been at record highs under the Biden administration. There have been big pushes for renewable energy, as well, and there have been laws enacted the last couple of years that will hopefully lead to more regulations to protect the environment in the future, but the fact remains that companies that benefit from fossil fuels have profited more during the last few years than during the Trump administration. So this section seems rooted in a different reality and increased fossil fuel production on top of the current record-high levels will probably have irreversible environmental impacts.
In all, my takeaway from the writings about a future BLM under Project 2025 paints a terrifying picture for BLM lands, one where oil and gas drilling will probably increase completely unchecked and where those in leadership will try to focus us on the wild horses and burros as the problem. Let us not be fooled.
Okay everyone, please take a deep breath and go out and enjoy the beauty we have outside. It’s critical to not let all of this get us down, but rather let’s stay aware, focused on our environmental ethics, and enjoy what connects us to the land and nature.