The crowd of Democratic presidential hopefuls has several Western representatives, so it may have come as a surprise that the strongest stance on public lands thus far has come from Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator. In a Medium post last month, the consumer advocate and noted Wall Street critic established her family’s folksy bona fides (“Bruce and I love to hike. We’ve been all over …”), then laid out a proposal with broad implications out West.
“It is wrong to prioritize corporate profits over the health and safety of our local communities,” she wrote. “That’s why on my first day as president, I will sign an executive order that says no more drilling — a total moratorium on all new fossil fuel leases, including for drilling offshore and on public lands.”
For candidates seeking climate-change credibility, public-land policy is a good place to start. The carbon footprint of oil and gas activity on the 640 million acres of federal land the President presides over is equal to 20 percent of U.S. emissions. Alas, other Democratic candidates — Jay Inslee, Cory Booker, and Pete Buttigieg — have fallen in line. Senators Bernie Sanders and Kirsten Gillibrand both co-sponsored a bill, along with Warren, in 2017 that would have stopped any new drilling on public lands, too. But what would ending new fossil-fuel activity look like were such a policy actually enacted?
For one, candidates are calling to halt new leases, not do away with existing ones. Mining and drilling companies hold leases to more than 26 million acres of public land. “That’s Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and New Jersey combined,” said John Ruple, a law professor at the University of Utah who studies public lands. “So even if you get a moratorium on new leases … industry could presumably move forward and develop existing holdings without facing much trouble.”
But such a policy shows potential for significant environmental impact down the road. In a 2018 paper published in the journal Climate Change, researchers at the Stockholm Environmental Institute estimated that ending new leases on federal land would result in a reduction of 280 million tons of carbon emissions by 2030.
However, critics argue that coal and oil not produced in the U.S. would simply be produced elsewhere, thus robbing the U.S. of economic benefit while polluting the world all the same. “So what happens if we stop developing oil and natural gas in America?” Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Western Energy Alliance, wrote in The Hill on May 3. “We take the $350 billion the industry has kept here by displacing foreign oil and send it overseas, along with millions of jobs.” We’re going to keep using the stuff in our cars, furnaces, and power plants, she writes, so we might as well produce it here.
Peter Erickson, senior scientist at SEI and lead author of the report, says that view is off. He boiled it down to simple supply-side economics: “You produce less, price goes up, consumers use less.” And any price hike makes renewable substitutes, which are fast becoming cost-competitive, even more attractive.
A moratorium on all new leases, especially a long-lasting one, would deviate from Western U.S. history. Since the 19th century, federal policies like the General Mining Act and the Mineral Leasing Act have encouraged large companies to head west and monetize the region’s resources — the vast majority of which were, and continue to be, shipped back east or overseas. More recently, President Donald Trump has offered up unprecedented amounts of federal land for oil and gas leases — much of it going for bottom-barrel rates. During Barack Obama’s presidency, domestic crude oil production rose 77 percent; natural gas was up 22 percent.
So at the very least, these candidates are proposing something completely new, but they aren’t nixing all energy production on public lands. In fact, Warren, Inslee, and the like are calling for more emphasis on utility-scale wind, solar, and other renewables on public land.
But managing the federal estate to maximize carbon reduction doesn’t necessarily mean plating the Mojave with solar panels; rather, it could take a more agrarian flavor. Climate experts say removing carbon from the atmosphere — not just switching to clean energy — is necessary to avoid catastrophe, and Western grasslands, according to Montana State associate professor Paul Stoy, represent a significant opportunity to do just that.
“The prairie used to hold a lot of carbon,” Stoy said. “One of the best ways to manage that land is to encourage native perennial grasses with deep root systems to help improve soil fertility, which is sequestering more carbon in the soils.”
What Stoy’s laying out isn’t some return-to-nature scenario, but potentially a whole new market in Western plains and forests. Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage would be systems in which we grow plants, burn them for heat and electricity, and then capture and store the emissions by, perhaps, pumping them underground.
In a paper imagining how such a system would function in the upper Missouri River Basin — the heart of Western coal country — Stoy and his team envisioned scenarios that had little of the region’s current economic drivers: cereal-grain agriculture or fossil fuel development. But Stoy said that doesn’t mean there won’t be new, inventive ways to make a buck out here.
Prioritizing carbon removal could mean new-age miners take emissions from old-school plants and pump the carbon back into the ground — perhaps into federally owned ground, with a mineral lease. Ranchers might have greater access to grazing leases so long as they don’t overgraze, thus promoting the spread of native grasses. Farmers could replace soy with switchgrass, a perennial with biofuel potential.
There’s a catch, though. Stoy said curtailing fossil-fuel production alone likely wouldn’t convince farmers to take up growing grass. Other financial incentives must be put in place; namely, a price on carbon. “As long as there’s a motivation to engage in carbon management, people will do it,” he said. “You don’t have to be on one side of the aisle or the other. If it makes sense, people are creative, and we’re going to do it.”
Deterring climate change will surely require a suite of policies from leaders around the world, but to Erickson, the SEI scientist, halting federal leases is too easy and too tantalizing an opportunity to pass up. “If you’re going to get that much reduction from one policy tool that could largely be taken with executive action,” he said, “it’d be really big.”
